MATERIALISM AND MORALITY. 491 



truth, all schools of materialists are confronted with the initial diffi- 

 culties of the unity of consciousness, of the individuality and per- 

 manency of the Ego. These facts, however complex and obscure — 

 and I fully recognize their complexity and obscurity — are the stum- 

 bling-block of every school of materialists, just as they are the ada- 

 mantine foundation of all spiritual philosophy. And the writer who 

 tries to explain them away, who asks me to believe, upon his ipse 

 dixit, that consciousness is a mere fortuitous result of mechanism, that 

 thought is a mere cerebral secretion, that the Ego is a mere sensation, 

 is a dogmatist who makes far greater demands upon my faith than 

 any Catholic theologian or Jewish rabbi. I know not any article of 

 any creed, which so largely taxes my credulity, as does the proposi- 

 tion that there can be consciousness without personality, memoiy 

 without identity, duty without liberty. 



No sort of compromise, no kind of modus vivendi, appears to me to 

 be possible between these two schools of Spiritualism and Materialism. 

 I admit, indeed, that we may learn much from many teachers whose 

 theories I judge most false. Let us gladly accept their facts. Let us 

 also narrowly scrutinize their arguments. The writers whom I have 

 in view, however admirable in other respects, are assuredly great 

 corrupters of words. Too often they exhibit the smallest power of 

 distinguishing between a nude hypothesis and a proved conclusion. 

 They omit necessary links in their reasoning, as when, for example, they 

 pass at a bound over the unbridged gulf between automatic conscious- 

 ness and deliberate volition. They tell us, perhaps not quite accurately,* 

 that the brain is the origin of thought, and then they proceed to argue 

 as though they had demonstrated that it is the cause of thought, and 

 that intellect is a mei'e cerebral phenomenon. They talk glibly of 

 causation, as if they knew all about it, overlooking their entire ina- 

 bility to analyze the causal nexus. And what shall we say of the 

 way in which they habitually employ the term law ? It really means 

 in physics no more than " an observed uniformity of sequence or co- 

 existence." But they give it a sort of personification, and speak of it 

 as a cause. They confound it with necessity, forgetting that there is 

 all the difference in the world between invariable regularity and 

 necessary regularity. I confess — I trust I may be pardoned for so 

 far yielding to a professional instinct — that I often put down the 

 pompous pages of some of the most famous of them and say to my- 

 self : " If only I could have you under cross-examination for half an 

 hour ! How easy it would be to turn you inside out to show what a 

 mass of arbitrary assumption, of confused ratiocination, of audacious 

 sophism, all this brilliant rhetoric is ! " 



But let us remember that philosophy is the science of principles, 



* I should prefer saying that the brain is the organ, not of thought, but of the pJian- 

 tasmafa which furnish thought with materials : it is the organ of imagination in the 

 highest sense. 



