AGNOSTICISM IN HUXLEY'S HUME. 481 



cover is taken from Locke and improved, and is very large and com- 

 prehensive. He makes them to be eight in number : Resemblance, 

 identity, space and time, quantity, quality, contrariety, cause and 

 effect. He exerts all his ingenuity, I believe fruitlessly, to show that 

 these can not extend our knowledge beyond impressions and ideas, 

 which are mere reproduction of impressions. They are relations of 

 impressions and ideas, and not of things. We meet this skepticism on 

 the part of Hume and agnosticism on the part of Huxley by main- 

 taining that what we perceive originally are things, and what we per- 

 ceive by the faculty that discovers relations are relations of things. 

 When we classify plants by their resemblances, we classify the plants 

 and not impressions. When we decide that a thing which begins to 

 be must have a cause, we have a reality : first, in the thing that begins 

 to be ; which implies, secondly, a reality in the cause which we regard 

 as producing it. It is thus that we argue that the present configuration 

 of the earth, being an objective reality, is the result of agencies which 

 acted thousands or millions of years ago. It is thus we argue that the 

 adaptations we see in the eye must have had a cause in an adapting, 

 that is, a designing power. Professor Huxley's account of the relations 

 which the mind can discover is much more meager than that of Hume. 

 Apparently, following Professor Bain, he makes them consist in coexist- 

 ence, succession, and similarity. He thus gets rid dexterously of the 

 relations of quantity on which mathematics, with all their certainty, 

 so obnoxious to the skeptic, depends ; and of identity, which certifies 

 to the soul's continued and permanent existence ; and of causation, 

 which leads us from harmonies and adaptations, from order and design 

 in nature, to rise to a producing power in a designing Mind. The three 

 which he acknowledges similarity, coexistence, and succession are all 

 regarded as relations among impressions and ideas, and tell us nothing 

 as to realities. 



This is the intellectual furniture of the mind, according to Huxley. 

 Observe what it is : Impressions, Ideas, and Relations among these. 

 He calls these the " Contents of the Mind." It is the most miserably 

 defective account of the mental powers I have met with anywhere ; 

 more so than that given even by Condillac and the sensational school 

 of France, who gave to the mind a power of transforming its sensations 

 into a considerable number and variety of elevated ideas. 



4. Having thus allotted to the mind so small a content, he finds it 

 the more easy to refer the whole to cerebral and nervous action. " The 

 upshot of all this is, that the collection of perceptions which constitutes 

 the mind is really a system of effects, the causes of which are to be 

 sought in antecedent changes of the matter of the brain, just as ' the 

 collection of motions ' which we call flying is a system of effects, the 

 causes of which are to be sought in the modes of motion of the mus- 

 cles of the wings. . . . What we call the operations of the mind are 

 functions of the brain, and the materials of consciousness are products 



VOL. XV. 31 



