SCIENCE AND MORALS : A REPLY. 499 



article of the faith materialistic ; and whosoever does net hold it is 

 condemned by the more zealous of the persuasion (as I have some 

 reason to know) to the Inferno appointed for fools or hypocrites. But 

 all this I heartily disbelieve ; and, at the risk of being charged with 

 wearisome repetition of an old story I will briefly give my reasons for 

 persisting in my infidelity. In the first place, as I have already hinted, 

 it seems to me pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe, 

 to wit, consciousness, which, in the hardness of my heart or head, I 

 can not see to be matter or force, or any conceivable modification of 

 either, however intimately the manifestations of the phenomena of 

 consciousness may be connected with the phenomena known as matter 

 and force. In the second place, the arguments used by Descartes and 

 Berkeley to show that our certain knowledge does not extend beyond 

 our states of consciousness, appear to me to be as irrefragable now as 

 they did when I first became acquainted with them some half-century 

 ago. All the materialistic writers I know of who have tried to bite 

 that file have simply broken their teeth. But, if this is true, our one 

 certainty is the existence of the mental world, and that of Kraft unci 

 Stoffi&Ws into the rank of, at best, a highly probable hypothesis. 



Thirdly, when I was a mere boy, with a perverse tendency to think 

 when I ought to have been playing, my mind was greatly exercised 

 by this formidable problem, What would become of things if they lost 

 their qualities ? As the qualities had no objective existence and the 

 thing without qualities was nothing, the solid world seemed whittled 

 away — to my great horror. As I grew older, and learned to use the 

 terms matter and force, the boyish problem was revived, mutato no- 

 mine. On the one hand, the notion of matter without force seemed 

 to resolve the world into a set of geometrical ghosts, too dead even to 

 jabber. On the other hand, Boscovich's hypothesis, by which matter 

 was resolved into centers of force, was very attractive. But when one 

 tried to think it out, what in the world became of force considered as 

 an objective entity ? Force, even the most materialistic of philoso- 

 phers will agree with the most idealistic, is nothing but a name for 

 the cause of motion. And if, with Boscovich, I resolved things into 

 centers of force, then matter vanished altogether and left immaterial 

 entities in its place. One might as well frankly accept idealism and 

 have done with it. 



I must make a confession, even if it be humiliating. I have never 

 been able to form the slightest conception of those " forces" which the 

 materialists talk about, as if they had samples of them many years in 

 bottle. They tell me that matter consists of atoms, which are sepa- 

 rated by mere space devoid of contents ; and that, through this void, 

 radiate the attractive and repulsive forces whereby the atoms affect 

 one another. If anybody can clearly conceive the nature of these 

 things which not only exist in nothingness, but pull and push there 

 with great vigor, I envy him for the possession of an intellect of larger 



