said that men are responsible for their actions, because they can exercise control over the first springs of thought and will by the direction of the attention. But this is only to temporize with the mechanical tyrant of thought. At whatsoever point exerted, and whether weak or strong, the power of the spirit to control and modify events is the same power. If it is recognized as existing at all, in any nook or corner of human life, a principle is affirmed that cannot be tolerated by the law of energy, as an exhaustive expression of the powers that be. It is impossible, therefore, for us to live our lives as responsible beings, or to treat others as if they were responsible for their choices and actions, without living the affirmation of the proposition that mind is, to some extent, an independent cause of events.

Nor is it alone within the realm of morals that the denial of mind as an independent cause can be brought to the test of life. For, as we have already shown, to interpret the whole world from the standpoint of the law of the persistence of force makes it necessary to exclude from reality not only the power of moral choice, but equally the power of effecting any modification in events through what we call purposive action. All that element in life which this word purposive expresses is, from the mechanical standpoint, pure illusion.

This position is not, as a rule, unreservedly stated by the physical realists; but Professor Huxley has no reserves in this matter. He distinctly declares that consciousness has absolutely no power of modifying the course of events. "The consciousness of brutes," he says, 66 would appear to be related to the mechanism of their body, simply as a collateral product of its working, and to be as completely without any power of modifying that working as the steam-whistle which accompanies the work of a locomotive engine is without influence upon its machinery. Their volition, if they have any, is an emotion indicative of physical changes, not a cause of such changes." What is true of brutes, Professor Huxley continues, is equally true of men. We are "conscious automata "parts of the great series of causes and effects which, in unbroken continuity, composes that which is, and has been, and shall be, the sum of existence." 1 In another connection we find the following: "Any one who is acquainted with the history of science will admit that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now more than ever means, the extension of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant

1 Science and Culture, pp. 243 and 246.

gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity."

"1

I have quoted this last passage in addition to the first one, because it is more sweeping and absolute in its statement. There can be no controversy about this. Every form of what we call mental efficiency is denied. Intelligence enables us to be spectators of what is passing in the machines we call ourselves; but it gives us no power whatever of influencing the course of events.

It is needless to say that every one of us is daily living the affirmation of that which this view of things denies. All that part of our life which transcends that of the baser tribes is the direct outcome of the belief that we can shape events to our necessities and desires. We are civilized beings because we have this belief. But this is not all. Because of our consciousness and intelligence we are able to conceive the possibility of living the opposite, and of putting it to the test of experience. Just as we may question the reality of the external world by trying to live the refutation of it in some specific case, receiving the answer in the diminution of life and well-being, according to the measure of the experiment; so also may we test the reality of our power to intelligently influence events by becoming for a time mere spectators of them. The same experiment will do for both cases.

We will have two philosophers, the one an idealist, the other a physical realist. They are walking upon the railway track, absorbed in discussion, when suddenly they perceive an express train bearing down upon them. I challenge you, exclaims the realist, to demonstrate the unreality of the things of the external world by not leaving this track. And I challenge you, returns the idealist, to demonstrate the truth of your belief that we have no power of intelligently influencing events by becoming a mere spectator of them and remaining where you are. For humanity's sake we will have it that our philosophers, though deeply attached, each to his own skepticism, is yet more fond of life, and therefore that they withdraw in time to demonstrate the necessity of living the affirmative of that which they theoretically deny.

But some one will say: "This is not philosophy at all, it is mere Philistinism. You have not untied the knot, you have cut it. You have not solved our difficulty by reason, you have simply refused to reason. After many words, you have brought us back to the place whence we set out; and as an answer to the question What is reality?' you offer us two contradictory state1 The Fortnightly Review, February, 1869.

ments which we must accept on peril of our lives." Now I cannot complain that this criticism is unjust, in view of what has hitherto been developed. It is very true that the test of reality offered is not a philosophical but a practical one. It is not addressed to reason. It is rather the knock-down argument of facts, — an argument with which science, at least, cannot quarrel. We have not yet begun to philosophize. We have been seeking a foundation for philosophy in a substratum of reality; and we have found it, where alone it can be found, in experience. But now we are ready to enter upon the justification of our acceptance of these two propositions from a rational point of view.

To begin with, then, we deny altogether the affirmation that the two aspects of reality in question are the proved contradictions of each other. At the beginning of this article we showed why Mr. Spencer's test of reality was impracticable; and now I ask the reader to look a little further and see that the error that lurks in the "universal postulate" is also the underlying error of all the negations of physical realism. It was shown that it is impossible to have exhaustive, absolute truth except when we are dealing with pure abstractions; and therefore that it is only within the realm of the formal sciences, like mathematics and logic, that we can have absolute agreements and contradictions. When we are dealing with concrete things and their relations to each other we are never in possession of anything more than partial truths. We have not fathomed, and cannot fathom, all the possibilities of anything. It is, therefore, continually happening to us that the discovery of new relations changes for us the homogeneous into the heterogeneous, and the harmonious into the discordant. the same means, also, our discords are transformed into harmonies, order is substituted for confusion, and agreements appear in the place of contradictions.

By

We can never say that one concrete fact of experience necessarily excludes another. For although we cannot harmonize them, it is always possible that new facts coming in between these two which are contrasted may show that what appear to be contradictory phenomena are in truth the complementary parts or functions of a many-sided reality, not fully known to us. As Lotze very truly says: "The word thing indicates, so far as known to us, nothing other than the performances which we expect from what we call things as evidence of their reality." But the performances of things are as manifold and as varied as their relations. Hence

1 Microcosmus, vol. ii. p. 579.

we may confidently affirm that the thing of our imaginations is never the absolutely real thing, though some of the relations which it sustains to us and to other things are truly known and stand as realities.

So also when we come to classify these relations, linking them together in orderly combinations which we call laws, the result, no matter how broad in extent, cannot be an exhaustive statement of reality, but only of certain aspects of it reduced to order. As Judge Stallo puts it: "A particular operation of thought never involves the entire complement of the known or knowable properties of a given object, but only such of them as belong to a definite class of relations. In mechanics, for instance, a body is considered simply as a mass of determinate weight and volume (and in some cases figure), without reference to its other physical or chemical properties. In like manner each of the other departments of knowledge effects a classification of objects upon its own peculiar principles, thereby giving rise to different series of concepts in which each concept represents that attribute or group of attributes that aspect of the object — which it is necessary, in view of the question in hand, to bring into view." 1

From these considerations, Stallo argues, it is apparent that each of our concepts of a given object is a term or link in a special series or chain of abstractions; and further, that these chains or series, which are innumerable, not only vary in kind, but are also divergent in direction, so that the scope and the import of any particular concept must always be dependent on the number and the nature of the relations with reference to which the classification of objects has been effected. From this, also, it is clear that all our thoughts of things are fragmentary and symbolical representations of realities whose thorough comprehension, in any single mental act or series of acts, is impossible.

These are general truths; but the application of them to our problem is not difficult. We have two controversies with physical realism. First, on account of the assumption that the mechanical realities of the world are the contradiction of its spiritual realities; and, second, on account of the claim that one of these realities as genuine is able to suppress the other as spurious. The above general truths show us that both of these assumptions are errors, and that they have their root in one and the same misconception; that is, the false idea that the human mind occupies such a central position with regard to the known elements of 1 Concepts of Modern Physics, p. 134.

VOL. XII. NO. 67.

6

the universe that it is possible for it to gather them up in a single series, or, in other words, organize them into one harmonious and logical whole.

It is not difficult to see that the group of relations which yields the mechanical conception radiates from an entirely different centre from that which gives us the conception of the power of the human spirit to modify the mechanical order. The former regards things in their relation to an abstract principle which we call force. The latter regards things in their relation to an abstract principle which we call spirit. They cannot agree with each other, they cannot contradict each other. One cannot be the proof of the other, but no more can it be its disproof. They are on different planes; and how many or how deep may be the strata of reality lying between these two we cannot guess. The unmistakable and all-important fact is that they coexist in experience. And the circumstance that they cannot be brought into one, that we cannot understand how they are complementary, that they even appear to be contradictory, is not a matter for wonder to us. It is just what we ought to expect.

It is what we ought to expect in view of that conception, accepted equally by theology and science, that the universe is an organic whole, dependent upon a central controlling principle or being. If it is assumed that, as viewed from this central position, the cosmos presents the appearance of absolute order and perfect harmony, it follows, necessarily, that when viewed from an extremely one-sided position, treated as the centre, a position like that occupied by the latest product of evolution, man, the appearance of things must be the reverse of harmonious.

But, it may be objected, this proves, or rather assumes, too much. If we are so far removed, by reason of our position, from the possibility of grasping the harmony of the universe, how is it that we have been able to reduce so large a number of its elements to harmony? Instead of finding two great divisions of thought opposed to each other, we ought to detect innumerable discrepancies and impossibilities. This certainly seems a reasonable consideration, but it does not weaken our position. Our answer to it is, that what we ought to find is just what we do find. Our experience, and even our science, is full of just such contrarieties as that which makes mental causation appear to be the antithesis of physical causation; and our basis for reality is not, in truth, twofold, but manifold.

In any comprehensive structure of thought which we build for