vil] ON THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE. 141 



assembled wisdom and learning of Edinburgh should 

 have uttered no sign of dissent, when Comte was 

 declared to be the founder of these doctrines. No one 

 will accuse Scotchmen of habitually forgetting their 

 great countrymen ; but it was enough to make David 

 Hume turn in his grave, that here, almost within ear- 

 shot of his house, an instructed audience should have 

 listened, without a murmur, while his most characteristic 

 doctrines were attributed to a French writer of fifty 

 years later date, in whose dreary and verbose pages we 

 miss alike the vigour of thought and the exquisite clear- 

 ness of stylo of the man whom I make bold to term the 

 most acute thinker of the eighteenth century — even 

 though that century produced Kant. 



But I did not come to Scotland to vindicate the 

 honour of one of the greatest men she has ever produced. 

 My business is to point out to you that the only way of 

 escape out of the crass materialism in which we just 

 now landed, is the adoption and strict working-out of 

 the very principles which the Archbishop holds up to 

 reprobation. 



Let us suppose that knowledge is absolute, and not 

 relative, and therefore, that our conception of matter 

 represents that which it really is. Let us suppose, 

 further, that we do know more of cause and effect than 

 a certain definite order of succession among facts, and 

 that we have a knowledge of the necessity of that succes- 

 sion — and hence, of necessary laws — and I, for my part, 

 do not see what escape there is from utter materialism 

 and necessarianism. For it is obvious that our know- 

 ledge of what we call the material world is, to becin 

 with, at least as certain and definite as that of the 

 spiritual world, and that our acquaintance with law is of 

 as old a date as our knowledge of spontaneity. Further, 

 I take it to be demonstrable that it is utterly impossible 



