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tion that whatever hypothesis gives our reason the widest power of representing actual fact, gives us that power just because it is the reflected image of actual fact. For instance, why do scientific men daily attach more and more credit to the wave-theory of light, and less and less (we believe) to the atom-theory of matter? Simply because the former not only enables them to represent all that is hitherto known, but daily increases their power of representing to themselves hitherto unknown relations of light and colour. It is a working hypothesis, opening up ever new explanations of relations hitherto more or less outlying and unattached. The latter (the atom-theory) has, on the other hand, never represented any thing but the combining proportions of chemical substances, and is a mere arbitrary form of that. It is a dead addition to the law of combining proportions,needless to it, suggesting nothing beyond it. All science, then, aims at enabling us to represent fact more and more completely to our own minds. It takes accurate representative power as its best test of reality. Hence any attempt to merge the distinctive characteristic of a higher science in a lower-of chemical changes in mechanical-of physiological in chemical—above all, of mental changes in physiological-is a neglect of the radical assumption of all science, because it is an attempt to deduce representations--or rather misrepresentations-of one kind of phenomena from conceptions of another kind which do not contain it, and must have it implicitly and illicitly smuggled into them before it can be extracted out of them. Hence, instead of increasing our power of representing the universe to ourselves without the detailed examination of particulars, such a procedure leads to misconstructions of fact on the basis of an imported theory, and generally ends in forcibly perverting the least-known science to the type of the better known.

These remarks apply almost necessarily to any view of science that excludes the conception of a primary mind in the universe; unless indeed it be bold enough--which it never is-to assert that at every stage in the evolution of the universe new phenomena throng into existence, self-created, which had no previous equivalent, no spring or source of being at all,—which admit, in short, of no analysis into any antecedent phenomena. If this be admitted, then Science is a body of thought, which, starting from concrete reality, utterly loses a thread at every step back into the past, till it unravels into the " Absolute Nothing." Mental phenomena fall off first into the "Absolute Nothing," as they rose last out of it; then vital phenomena drop away, then organic, then chemical, then mechanical, lastly geometrical; and Science has rendered her account by gradually wiping out her score. This system, which deifies the creative power of Zero, is the

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boldest but also absurdest form of Atheism. In it Science boasts to be identical with Nescience. No one ever seriously held it, though of course it has been maintained.

But, Nihilism apart, science can only be atheistic through the confusion of the two kinds of unity we have mentioned—i. e. through that extreme analysis which admits no radical differences of kind in the phenomena of the universe at all, and proposes therefore to deduce all the complex combinations from the more simple, and these again, ultimately, from some highly abstract and simple formula or unit of existence-the nutshell of the universe -by pure analysis of that unit into its constituent elements. This danger might be escaped, if such speculators chose to maintain that Reason is absolutely incapable of uniting the particular sciences into a single whole, and can neither analyse one into the other nor find any living tie or knot by which to combine them, but must be content to bring their common analogies to light, and keep their distinctive phenomena apart. But this is exactly what Atheism almost always will not do. Indeed, could Atheism take this course, it could scarcely long survive as Atheism. To admit the reality and irreducible nature of mental phenomena-to admit that they can not anyhow be analysed into physical--is either to put a period to all inquiry as to cause, or to open a broad way into Theism; and the less men believe in an Infinite Being, the more thirsty usually is their curiosity about the supposed genesis of our mental nature.

The result is, that the problem of all atheistic philosophers has been, not to find the real ultimate link between the different classes of natural force and life, but to soften away as much as possible the one into the other, so as to make the transition imperceptible, and so introduce a thoroughly new creative force as if it were but an expansion of that beneath it. It is a mere selfdeception of philosophy, to accept the graduality of the stages by which life ascends from the gravitating force of inorganic matter to the highest pinnacle of human reason as any sort of evidence that the universe was all implicitly involved in its earliest stage. This is the fallacy of petitio principii,-assuming, contrary to all evidence, that all forces and all organisms, and all life and all reason, lie shut up implicitly (i. e. without any manifestation or possible symptom of existence) in that which seems possessed of no force and no organism, and no life and no reason. If this assumption be not made, then, as we know only of one great power totally escaping sensible analysis and yet able to effect sensible changes the power of mind,-the natural assumption is, that the actual and sensible additions to existence come out of that power. What is gained by showing the graduality of the transition from one creative process to another? Because only a small addition

has been made to the living resources of the world-is it any the more possible to identify it with that which it is not? Because the boundary between vegetable and animal life is but little distinct, can we any the more ignore the fact that some fresh power has been given to the world when a locomotive capacity gradually creeps into it? Because the creeping is so gradual, is it any the more possible to identify it with no-creeping? Because the automatic action in the infant very slowly opens into consciousness, is consciousness at all the more capable of identification with automatic action? Because instinct is the unconscious instrument of adapting means to ends, and intelligence the conscious and voluntary adapter of means to ends, shall we talk of the germinal intelligence in the processes of the bee? As correctly, or more correctly (for the act may become semi-conscious and semi-voluntary), might we talk of the intelligent cough by which a man adapts (without consciousness) the action of his lungs to the removal of an obstruction in the windpipe. This attempt to analyse away the positive additions of creative power, by merely noting how gradually they steal into the universe, appears to us to show most strikingly how the absence of theistic faith tends to expel reality from science, and to make philosophy the universal solvent of fact, instead of the spirit which investigates the order, correspondence, and the ultimate connections of all fact in the concrete and complex unity of the highest life. The positive school, just because they start from no personality, no actual union of distinct living attributes in their original unity, are obliged to expel all personality, all originating activity, from their final result. What they see is in fact only a development of an abstract Creative Function into minor organs, which, when taken separately, are called creatures. Thus, by far the most able recent writer of this school, Mr. Herbert Spencer, looks for his definition of "life" from a survey of all the phenomena, vegetable, physiological, and psychical, of which it is ordinarily predicated. He defines it thus: "Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations to external relations;" or more at length, but less simply: "Life is the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.' Now if Mr. Spencer only meant by this to indicate, that which all forms of what is ordinarily termed life have in common, we should be grateful for this contribution to the analysis of a most complex conception. But he slides in immediately what we may call the axiom of the positivist school, that all differences among phenomena are differences of degreedifferences in the stage of expansion-not differences of kind; and so proceeds to deduce that the highest mental life has nothing

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more in it than is indicated in this definition. He first overlooks, ignores, rejects, the special characteristics of personal life -which would be legitimate in forming an abstract idea-and then, forgetting that it is abstract, and that all the differentia of the highest kind of life has been neglected, he clips down that highest kind of life to the limits of his definition. There is positively nothing in his conception of the higher life to indicate a real difference of kind between man and a vegetable. He must therefore, of course, reject originating power-free-will in man. He does so; and thus defends his position:

"Respecting this matter, I will only further say, that free-will, did it exist, would be entirely at variance with that beneficent necessity displayed in the progressive evolution of the correspondence between the organism and its environment. That gradual advance in the moulding of inner relations to outer relations, which has been delineated in the foregoing pages-that ever-extending adaptation of the cohesions of psychical states to the connections between the answering phenomena, which we have seen to result from the accumulation of experiences, would be arrested, did there exist any thing which otherwise determined their cohesions. As it is, we see that the correspondence between the internal changes and the external coexistences and sequences must become more and more complete. The continuous adjustment of the vital activities to the activities in the environment, must become more accurate and exhaustive. The life must become higher and the happiness greater-must do so because the inner relations are determined by the outer relations. But were the inner relations to any extent determined by some other agency, the harmony at any moment subsisting, and the advance to a higher harmony, would alike be interrupted to a proportionate extent; there would be an arrest of that grand progression which is now bearing humanity onwards to perfection."

-which only means that Mr. Spencer thinks free-will à priori unlikely, simply because it is not a self-adjusting apparatus, but a self-adjusting spirit; because it is not determined absolutely by the external world, but determines itself after free intelligent judgment on both worlds, internal and external. "The psychical states," as Mr. Spencer denominates a man, "cannot determine their own cohesions." We do not know a more remarkable instance of the confusion between the unity of the sciences and the identity of the sciences (a confusion which always results from ignoring the personal origin of the universe) than is given by this development of voluntary life out of the idea of vegetable life. In the vegetable, he says, the self-preservative correspondence between internal and external changes is simple, limited to a narrow region of space, and almost limited to the present moment in time. In the animal, with the gradual growth of a nervous system, the correspondence becomes much

more full-extends over a wider region in space (as when the bee is driven far and wide for its honey), and reaches over a longer time (as in the instincts which provide against the future emergencies of seasonal change). In the intellect of man it reaches its acme by the ripening of forecasting instincts into a widely-ranging consciousness. The "afferent" nerves bring reports to the brain, the common-hall through which, now, almost all sensations pass, and where they establish a mutual understanding, so as to have their reports compared, connected, and enlarged. Here, too, ensues the conflict as to which of the "afferent" nerves shall get the command of the "efferent" nerves which convey motory impulses from the brain. This conflict is what we mean by voluntary choice. The psychical states, which are too weak to win, and are merely candidates for an "efferent" nerve, are our passive memories, emotions, and the like. The victorious candidates are our volitions. And this is the rationale of our moral nature !-physiology excluding from mental life all that does not suit the scientific analogies in her own domain! Have we not some reason for saying that this is a confusion of the sciences, not a unity of the sciences? Is it not clear that this positive method puts into the higher science as little more than it gets from the lower science as it can possibly help? that it strives to varnish over their distinctions, instead of to combine them? How could even the semi-intelligent life of the higher animals be described merely as a cohesion of psychical states, if the notion did not come up from the vegetable world beneath? The unity that was not in the source cannot be in the result. A cohesion of simultaneous and serial changes is all that is seen in the vegetable, and therefore a cohesion of simultaneous and serial changes is all that can be found in the man! And here per-\ haps is to be found the most conspicuous practical confutation of both the atheistic systems of science-that of the positivists, which maintains that to discover the absolute serial order of events is attainable, and is alone attainable; and that of the common materialism, which refers every thing to the slow evolution of definite and eternal force;-that they both founder helplessly on the fact of human responsibility and freedom. They could not logically include the recognition of this fact; and if not sooner, yet here at least, they come into collision with the certain selfknowledge of man. Nature cannot give what nature has not got. If all the lower laws of force and life are absolutely fixed, definite, inviolable, then they cannot revoke their own constitution when they issue out of physiology into mental life. If it is the essence of all things to follow fixed laws, if there is nothing but unchangeable force moulding the universe by its gradually accumulating strength-then the conscience of man is a delusion,

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