SCIENCE AND MORALS: A REPLY. 503 



thinking in every department of human knowledge, in the course of 

 the last two centuries, will be disposed to deny that immense provinces 

 have been added to the realm of science ; or to doubt, that the next 

 two centuries will be witnesses of a vastly greater annexation. More 

 particularly in the region of the physiology of the nervous system, is 

 it justifiable to conclude from the progress that has been made in ana- 

 lyzing the relations between material and psychical phenomena, that 

 vast further advances will be made ; and that, sooner or later, all the 

 so-called spontaneous operations of the mind will have, not only their 

 relations to one another, but their relations to physical phenomena, 

 connected in natural series of causes and effects, strictly defined. In 

 other words, while, at present, we know only the nearer moiety of the 

 chain of causes and effects, by which the phenomena we call material 

 give rise to those which we call mental ; hereafter, we shall get to the 

 further end of the series. 



In my innocence, I have been in the habit of supposing that this is 

 merely a statement of facts, and that the good Bishop Berkeley, if he 

 were alive, would find such facts fit into his system without the least 

 difficulty. That Mr. Lilly should play into the hands of his foes, by 

 declaring that unmistakable facts make for them, is an exemplification 

 of ways that are dark, quite unintelligible to me. Surely Mr. Lilly 

 does not hold that the disbelief in spontaneity — which term, if it has 

 any meaning at all, means uncaused action — is a mark of the beast 

 materialism ? If so, he must be prepared to tackle many of the Carte- 

 sians (if not Descartes himself), Spinoza and Leibnitz among the phi- 

 losophers, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Calvin and his followers, among 

 theologians, as materialists — and that surely is a sufficient reductio ad 

 absurdum of such a classification. 



The truth is, that in his zeal to paint "materialism," in large let- 

 ters, on everything he dislikes, Mr. Lilly forgets a very important fact, 

 which, however, must be patent to every one who has paid attention 

 to the history of human thought ; and that fact is, that every one of 

 the speculative difficulties which beset Kant's three problems, the ex- 

 istence of a Deity, the freedom of the will, and immortality, existed 

 ages before anything that can be called physical science, and would 

 continue to exist if modern physical science were swept away. All 

 that physical science has done has been to make, as it were, visible and 

 tangible some difficulties that formerly were more hard of apprehen- 

 sion. Moreover these difficulties exist just as much on the hypothesis 

 of idealism as on that of materialism. 



The student of Nature who starts from the axiom of the univer- 

 sality of the law of causation can not refuse to admit an eternal exist- 

 ence ; if he admits the conservation of energy, he can not deny the 

 possibility of an eternal energy ; if he admits the existence of imma- 

 terial phenomena in the form of consciousness, he must admit the pos- 

 sibility, at any rate, of an eternal series of such phenomena ; and, if 



