PROOF OF THE EXISTENCE OF MIND AND OF ITS POSSESSING THE CAPACITY OF KNOWLEDGE. - DOCTRINES OF NESCIENCE AND RELATIVITY.

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`HROUGHOUT the previous discussions I have been constantly obliged to employ or to refer to philosophic principles. In the full exposition of the argument, it will be necessary to consider these, as well as the physical facts, that the defence may be complete throughout. But this implies that we take a look at the soul of man. Not that we are to examine the mind in its entirety; not that we are to dissect it metaphysically: we are to view it simply in its relation to God and to religion. Some of the discussions on which I am to enter may seem a little too recondite; but all of them bear upon the prevailing errors of the day. I profess to keep a sharp outlook on the current of opinion all over the world, especially among young men. I am ever asking the watchman, "What of the night?" and, in these Lectures, I take up the topics of the day; but it would be better not to discuss them at all than not discuss them thoroughly. In coming Lectures, I will start from the positions

reached in this to examine Positivism and Materialism, — the doctrines likely to flourish for a season among the young men who catch the spirit of the age in its latest fashion.

Those whom I am opposing constitute a school with a diversity of teachers. Though, as a whole, they are men of narrow sympathies and an exclusive temper, and can discern only a small segment of the wide and profound meaning of the universe, are, in fact, not catholic nor cosmopolitan, but intensely sectarian in their spirit, yet they cultivate with zeal and ability a number of branches of knowledge. Their physiology is associated with a psychology and a philosophy, and, I may add, a method of history. They have men of eminence in each of these departments; and each in his way joins with others in their way in furthering a common cause and fostering a common belief, or rather unbelief. They have some of the literary and scientific institutions of Great Britain very much in their own hands, and are seeking to find a place in others. They are laboring to lay hold of young men connected with the press, and have been specially successful with two classes: with those who would like to be thought philosophers, but who have no time nor taste for the study of a deeper philosophy; and with those who, in a feeling of disappointment, have been obliged to turn aside from their intended professions in life most commonly the church to engage in literary pursuits. They have a body of adherents eager to propagate

AIM OF THE POSITIVE SCHOOL.

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their system, and ever ready to make an assault on all who would inculcate a philosophy of a higher and more spiritual character.

There is a unity in their system and in their ends. They aim at accounting for the whole of nature by development out of they know not what. They derive man from the brutes, and make him merely an upper brute. They do not deny the existence of the soul; but they identify it with the body. All the higher ideas of man they manufacture, by means of association of ideas, out of impressions got by the senses and an inward sentient experience, and by development from the lower races of humanity and the ancestral animals through millions of ages. History is a mere evolution of natural causes, working without any discoverable meaning or end. The lower animals and the plants come out of the protoplasm, and the protoplasm out of the star dust, and the star dust out of they know not what, out of what never can be known, and about which, therefore, it is unphilosophical to inquire. They all agree that of the nature and reality of things we know nothing, and can know nothing. All that we know is represented as Relative; that is, we can know any one thing. merely in relation to some other one thing, itself unknown. They are determinedly agreed that we can discover no indications of first or final causes; that the supernatural, if there be a supernatural, must lie in a region beyond human ken; and that religion has no title to excite a fear or kindle a

hope. A young friend of mine, who had to sit from day to day, through a college session, under a distinguished professor belonging to this school, told me that, at the close of every lecture, he had to debate with himself the question: "Have or have I not a soul?" "Am I a reality?" or, "Is there any reality?" As having to withstand the assaults of these men who profess to go down so deep, we must see that our foundations are well laid.

I. AND SO THE QUESTION IS STARTED, WHAT PROOF HAVE WE OF THE EXISTENCE OF MIND? It is necessary to take up such an elementary question as this in our day, to meet the advancing materialism which is springing out of the decay (as they suppose) of all old creeds, philosophical and theological. A materialism, refined, æsthetical, but sensualistic, has been the reigning philosophy (if philosophy it can be called) in France, under that repression of free thought, ever bursting out in secret license, which characterized the régime of Louis Napoleon. It has considerable power among physicists in Germany; being the hollow, in this age, on the back of the height which thinkers occupied in the last age (it is, in fact, the bog into which the will-a-wisp Hegelianism has conducted not a few of those who followed it), - my hope is that it will be so far counteracted by the glorious outburst of patriotism which the present war has called forth, and which has been fond of recognizing a providence. It is the issue whether they see it or no, whether they mean it or no

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WE KNOW SELF IMMEDIATELY.

ΙΟΙ

which Mill's association theory, and Bain's identification of all our thoughts and feelings with the body, and Mr. Herbert Spencer's development of all things out of an unknowable nothing, and Huxley's physical basis of life and mind in molecular action, are severally and conjointly conducting the young thinkers of Great Britain. The sun rises. some hours later in America than in Europe; and doctrines which have sprung up in Deutschland, and come across to England, like a fog from the German Ocean, take some little time to cross the Atlantic; but already we see proof that we are on the eve of a conflict with a physico-philosophy, which would account for all mental action and ideas by molecular motion, or some form of material agency. To meet it, we lay down a few simple positions.

1. Man has means of knowing the existence of mind as immediate as the means of knowing the existence of matter. It is necessary to make this remark, because it is often said that man can know directly only his own bodily frame and the objects falling under his senses, and can arrive at the knowledge of mind - if, indeed, there be a mind, and if he can come to be certain of its existence only by a circuitous process. It is supposed that he comes first to know the existence of his material organism; and that, proceeding upon this, he concludes that there is or may be a spiritual principle, as it were lying deeper in than the visible and tangible frame. According to this view, our knowl