something as a condition of the course of events”; and that this "can be verified experimentally as often as we like to try." This machine which is not mechanical; this automaton with a will of its own; this creature whose actions are at once automatic and autonomic; this "automaton endowed with free-will," is a novel invention quite worthy of Mr. Huxley's ingenuity. But whence did it derive the faculties with which he says it is endowed?

It is "conscious," he tells us. And its "volition counts for something." What then is Volition? and whence? And what is Con

sciousness?

"Can you satisfy the human understanding in its demand for logical continuity between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness?" It is Professor Tyndall who asks this question, and his answer to it is this:

"This is a rock on which materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of life." 2

And with the candid and elegant Lucretian, Professor Huxley-notwithstanding his materialistic declaration of faith in molecular machinery

1 "Lay Sermons,” p. 145.

2 Belfast Address.

-agrees. "What consciousness is," he says, "we know not; and how it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue, is just as unaccountable as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp in the story." 1

"Afferent nerves lie here, and carry to; efferent nerves lie there, and carry from; but in none of them-neither in fibre of nerve nor in fibre of brain, will you find any hint of consciousness. How any material impressions should awake thought; but, still more, how, in independence of all impressions, thought should be all the while there, alive and active, A WORLD BY ITSELF that is the mystery. And that no scalpel, no microscope, will ever explain. Mechanical balances the most delicate, chemical tests the most sensitive, are all powerless there. And why? Simply because consciousness and they are incommensurable, of another nature, of another world from the first, sundered from each other, as I have said, by the whole diameter of being." 2

"2

"It is quite true that the tympanum of the ear vibrates under sound, and that the surface of

1 Huxley's "Physiology," p. 193.

2 Stirling's "Materialism" ut sup., p. 7.

the water in a ditch vibrates too; but the ditch hears nothing for all that; and my hearing is still to me as blessed a mystery as ever, and the interval between the ditch and me, quite as great. If the trembling sound in my ears was once of the marriage-bell which began my happiness, and is now of the passing-bell which ends it, the difference between those two sounds to me cannot be counted by the number of concussions. There have been some curious speculations lately as to the conveyance of mental consciousness by 'brain-waves.' What does it matter how it is conveyed? The consciousness itself is not a wave. It may be accompanied here or there by any quantity of quivers and shakes, up or down, of anything you can find in the universe that is shakeablewhat is that to me? My friend is dead, and my -according to modern views-vibratory sorrow is not one whit less, or less mysterious, to me, than my old quiet one.'

Whence came then this emergence of Personal Consciousness among the world of living creatures? From what source have we derived that sense of individual personality which constitutes "an altogether new and original fact, one which cannot be conceived as developed or

1 Ruskin: Athena,” p. 70.

developable out of any pre-existing phenomena or conditions"? That consciousness of an I Myself, of Personality, which asserts an antithesis between the Man, and all that the Man makes his own-whence came it, if not from that Eternal Consciousness, that Divine Personality Who, when He made us, made us in His Own image?

20. Science, in the modern doctrine of the Conservation of Energy, and the Convertibility of Forces, insists, with increasing emphasis, that all kinds of Force are but forms or manifestations of some one Central Force issuing from some one Fountain-head of Power. Sir John Herschel has not hesitated to say, that "it is but reasonable to regard the Force of Gravitation as the direct or indirect result of a Consciousness or a Will existing somewhere." 1 But if for the phenomena of the material world you must have an external Will, how much more for those which characterize the World of Mind! "A will that hangs by the Central Will" is intelligible: but, refuse to recognise that Central Will, and then how can you account for that "lord paramount," the Human Will?

"Two things," said Immanuel Kant, "are awful to me the starry firmament, and the 1 "Outlines of Astronomy." Fifth Edition, p. 291.

sense of Responsibility in Man." And again : "Duty! wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation, flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked 'law in the soul,' and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if not always obedience; before whom all appetites are dumb, however secretly they rebel; WHENCE THY ORIGINAL ?”

Enough. Nature is a hierarchy, and the head is Man. 66 Mind, language, civilization, worship-the will to determine, the tongue to speak, the hand to do-these, in their boundless purport, are all awanting till the Creator plants upon the scene the solitary owner of the Perfect Brain. Named in one word, all these are wisdom; and Man, 'thinker of God's thoughts after Him,' is, among uncounted myriads of lower existences, on this earth the Only

"This universe is not an accidental cavity, in which an accidental dust has been accidentally swept into heaps for the accidental evolution of the majestic spectacle of organic and inorganic life. That majestic spectacle is a spectacle as plainly for the eye of reason as any

1 "The Three Barriers,” p. 96.