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is a God authorize us to say that we so far know that God, - the adequate cause of the effects we perceive, the source of that power we feel in ourselves and see exhibited on the earth, the fountain of that benevolence from which our affections flow as petty rills, the authority from which the moral power in us derives its authority.

Having examined the theory, I believe fairly and logically, we may now look for a moment at its consequences, speculative, moral, and practical. What have we left according to this new philosophy? We have a series of feelings aware of itself and permanent, or rather prolonged; and we have an association of sensations, and perceived resemblances and possibilities of sensations. Truth can be nothing more than an accordance of our ideas with sensations and laws of the association of sensations; which sensations come we know not whence, and are associated by resemblances existing we know not how; or more frequently by contiguity, with no relation of reason, with no connection in the nature of things, and being very possibly altogether fortuitous or absolutely fatalistic. The sensations and associations of sensation generate ideas and beliefs which do not, however, either in themselves or their mode of formation, generate any reality. This is the consequence on Mr. Mill's theory; and on Mr. Spencer's it is development out of a thing unknown, according to an absolute fatalism. And is this the sum of what has been gained by the highest science of the nineteenth century? Can this satisfy the

wants of the soul seeking truth, yearning for reality, seeking for light as plants do in the dark cellar, and striving towards it, being sure that it exists and is to be found? Does it not undermine every belief in goodness, in affection, in beauty, and in truth, to which men have ever clung? Does it not leave the soul as the moon is supposed to be left, and as some think the earth will be ultimately left, with its rocks, its extinct volcanoes, but without atmosphere, without water, without life? Diodorus the Slow, after writing his profound treatise on the Awful Nothing, died in despair; and, deprived of all their deepest instincts and highest hopes, I feel as if there was nothing left for those who accept this theory of nescience but to do the same.

This, then, is the gulf to which we have come. It is as well that young men entering on the path should know what is the swamp in which it terminates. Some who have gone so far will draw back. But they will not fall back upon the icy crystals constructed by Channing, or the melted snow of Parker and Emerson. Yet they cannot stand where they now do. If they do not draw back, they must go forward; and they will find that, beneath this deep, there is a lower deep still. This deep is Materialism, which I mean to examine in my next Lecture.

MATERIALISM. CIRCUMSTANCES FAVORING IT.

- PARTS OF

THE BODY MOST INTIMATELY CONNECTED WITH MENTAL ACTION. - GROSSER AND MORE REFINED FORMS OF MABÜCHNER, MAUDESLEY, BAIN, HUXLEY,

TERIALISM.

TYNDALL, SPENCER.

OBJECTIONS TO MATERIALISM.

MIND NOT ONE OF THE CORRELATED PHYSICAL FORCES.

IN my last Lecture I gave a sketch of the progress of Free Thought in this country, and showed that it is tending to sink towards Positivism. But this negative philosophy cannot last any great length of time. Persons cannot live long, for they cannot breathe, in a vacuum. A terrible wind will rush in to fill up the void when it begins to be felt. If men's heads do not discover the fallacy, their hearts will turn away from the emptiness. But, meanwhile, the movement has its course to run; and, as it does so, it will freeze, by its coldness, much blood at the heart, which would otherwise be felt vitally in every member of the frame and go forth in practical activity; nay, as it is dragged along, it may crush much life under its Juggernaut wheels. Before it closes its course it must assume another form: it will become a prevailing Materialism.

A number of concurring circumstances favor this tendency. Thus our young thinkers have come

to see the utter futility of the whole a priori philosophy of the age now passing away, and are prepared for a reaction, in which the ebb will be as strong as the previous tide. It has ever been the great error and sin of the speculative rational philosophy that it has been expending its strength in building up in one age ingenious theories which the next age proceeds to take down. This has produced the sentiment first expressed by Lessing, and so extensively adopted in the present day : "It is not truth which makes man worthy, but the striving after truth. If God in his right hand held every truth, and in his left hand the one inward impulse after truth, although with the condition that I should err for ever, and bade me choose, I would humbly incline to his left, saying, O Father, give me that: pure Faith is for thee alone." There is a wide-spread idea, favored very much by the way in which the department has been taught, that philosophy is at best a mere gymnastic, exercising the faculties, but not capable of revealing truth; and people say that whatever may have been the need and the use of such Indian clubs and parallel bars in the Middle Ages, we do not require them now, when we have such pleasant open-air exercise in the natural sciences, which do reveal truth. Will men continue to search after truth when it has been discovered, and is allowed, that truth cannot be found? The father, in the fable, got his sons to dig in the field in the hope of finding a treasure: but they would not have done this, had they thought

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there was no treasure; and I am sure they would not have been led by like motives to dig a second field. Such dialectic activity wastes the energy, without increasing the strength. He who thus fights is like one beating the air; and his exertion ends not in bracing and exhilaration, but in weariness and restlessness. The bird which has been buffeting the wind on the wild waste of the ocean will alight on the first bare rock or mast-top it falls in with. Persons who have been cheated by those who promised to give them every thing, but really gave them nothing, will be ready to trust the first man who bestows on them ever so small a boon. So there are youths in our day, who, feeling as if metaphysics could give them nothing, are occupying themselves exclusively with the baldest physics.

set

Then, there is the exclusive study of the material sciences in so many of our educational institutions. I say exclusive, not extensive; for I rejoice in the extensive study of natural science, and believe that every settled branch of knowledge should have a place in every academic institution. But if we would not produce a one-sided — that is, a malformed of minds, we must have other studies mingled with them. In this country, a Bachelor's Degree, which used to mean that the youth was a scholar with varied accomplishments in literature, and in mental as well as natural science, can now be had with little or no knowledge of mind or its laws.. I rejoice in the establishment of medical schools, and the multiplication of scientific schools; but steps should