should have produced this order and beauty. without a Divine Marshal."

Gassendi, a dignitary of the Roman Catholic Church, a contemporary and friend yet opponent of Descartes, laboured to present the life and the doctrines of Epicurus in the most favourable light. He endeavoured to prove that all physical phenomena might be accounted for by the vacuum and atoms, and referred to mathematical and mechanical laws. He rejected, however, all Epicurean tenets which seemed to him inconsistent with Christian truth. He maintained God to be the Creator of the atoms, the first cause and ultimate explanation of all things. Some of his contemporaries insinuated doubts as to the sincerity of his religious professions, and some of the historians. of philosophy have repeated them, but they are wholly unsupported by evidence, and quite inconsistent with our general knowledge of the high personal character of the man.

Among his friends was the famous Thomas Hobbes. He was, perhaps, more of a materialist not only than any man of his generation, but than any writer to be met with in literature until we come down to the middle of the eighteenth century. He held that we can only reason where we can add and subtract, combine and divide. But where is that? Only where there is what will compound and divide, only where there are

bodies and bodily properties, since there is no place for composition or division, no capacity of more or less, in spirit. The consequence is plain, -there can be no science, no philosophy of spirit. Spirit even as finite is beyond comprehension, beyond the range of experiment and sense, and therefore beyond reasoning and beyond science; and still more is it so with Spirit as infinite, eternal, ingenerable, incomprehensible, that is with the doctrine of God or Theology. We have here a narrow notion of the nature of reasoning, and then a notion of its object made equally narrow to suit it. The reduction of reasoning to the processes of addition and subtraction, and the denial that philosophy can be conversant about anything but body and bodily properties, depend on each other, but are both errors. Philosophy as universal science has a right to extend wherever truth is attainable by reason. Is spiritual truth attainable through reason? Hobbes answered that it was not— that only truth about bodies was attainable. This, however, he forgot to prove. In consequence of assuming it, he represented man as capable of religion only through inspiration, tradition, authority, apart from and independent of reason, which knows not and cannot know God truly. Religion is thus a thing which cannot be proved true; which must be accepted on some other ground than that of truth.

Philosophy, then, according to Hobbes, is con

versant only with bodies and their properties. It is the sum of human knowledge so far as reasoned about bodies. He refers all thought to sensation, and all sensation to matter and motion, sense being simply motion in the organs and interior parts of man's body, caused by external objects pressing either immediately or mediately the organ proper to each sense. The pressure, he holds, when continued by the mediation of the nerves, and other strings and membranes of the body to the brain, causes there a resistance or counterpressure which, because outward, seems to be some matter without, and consists as to the eye in a light or colour, to the ear in a sound, to the nostril in an odour, to the tongue and palate in a savour, and to the rest of the body in heat, cold, hardness, softness, and such other qualities as we discern by feeling; and when the action of an object is continued from the eyes, ears, and other organs to the heart, the real effect there is nothing but motion or endeavour, and the appearance or sense of that motion is delight or trouble of mind, pleasure or pain. He thus resolves mind into matter, thought and feeling into mechanical action.

And yet Hobbes was not the sort of man to make a mere materialist. The materialist must not think. If he think he will ask himself what matter is, and that is enough to break the sway of matter. Now Hobbes was a thinker.

He

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accordingly put to himself the question, What is matter? The result was, that he found matter in the materialist sense virtually to vanish. He found that we know nothing of matter in itself; that what we know is what he calls "the seeming," "the apparition," "the phenomenon;" that colour is just what is seen, sound just what is heard, but not inherent qualities of objects independent of seeing and hearing; that the matter which he supposed to cause by its motions in our senses these and other perceptions of the material world, we cannot see, hear, or apprehend by any sense. No human sense has ever laid hold of it, or can describe a single quality it possesses. It is something utterly mysterious and unknown. Hobbes confessed all this. What right, then, had he to say that this mysterious matter was the substance and explanation of the world? None at all. Nay, had he been consistent he would have refused wholly to admit its existence. He would have said it was useless and unprovable. He would have been an idealist.

Besides, while Hobbes excluded religion from the sphere of what can be proved, he accepted it as matter of faith. He severed it from reason to rest it on authority. And in thus denying theology to be rational knowledge he did no more than Descartes and little more than Bacon, whose principles did not so logically lead to this issue as

his. These three thinkers all referred theology and philosophy to entirely distinct sources. They represented the one as having nothing to do with the other; as having each an authority of its own ; as having each a province in which for the other to enter is an act of usurpation. They drew the sharpest separation between reason and faith, philosophy and religion. They sought to save the one from the possibility of antagonism with the other, by describing them as quite unconnected in their principles, processes, and character. This was a reaction from the scholastic dogmatism which had ignored their real distinctions and endeavoured to make all science theological and all theology strict science. Hobbes professed himself to be an orthodox English Churchman. We have certainly no warrant to charge him with atheism.

The materialism even of Hobbes was thus incomplete. But no system of materialism more complete than his appeared in Great Britian until very recent times. When we remember the moral condition of the nation from the restoration of the Stuart dynasty in 1660 to the close of the eighteenth century, how low the general tone of spiritual life was throughout the whole period, how corrupt and profligate at certain dates, we can feel no surprise that numerous works were published in advocacy of materialistic tenets. The remarkable fact is one which our historians of

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