196 A Physicist on Evolution. 



of life ? Is there not a temptation to close to some extent with 

 Lucretius, when he affirms that " Nature is seen to do all things 

 sj^ntaneously of herself -without the meddling of the gods " ? or 

 with Bruno, when he declares that matter is not " that mere empty 

 caimcUy which philosophers have pictured her to be, hut the uni- 

 versal mother who brings forth all things as the fruit of her own 

 womb " ? The questions here raised are inevitable. They are 

 approaching us with accelerated speed, and it is not a matter of 

 indifference whether they are introduced with reverence or irreve- 

 rence. Abandoning all disguise, the confession that I feel bound 

 to make before you is that I prolong the vision backward across 

 the boundary of the experimental evidence, and discern in that 

 matter, which we in our ignorance, and notwithstanding our 

 professed reverence for its Creator, have hitherto covered with 

 opprobrium, the promise and potency of every form and quality 

 of life. 



The " materialism " here enunciated may be different from what 

 you suppose, and I therefore crave your gracious patience to the 

 end. " The question of an external world," says Mr. J. S, Mill, 

 " is the great battle-ground of metaphysics." * Mr. Mill himself 

 reduces external phenomena to " possibilities of sensation." Kant, 

 as we have seen, made time and space " forms " of our own in- 

 tuitions. Fichte, having first by the inexorable logic of his under- 

 standing proved himself to be a mere link in that chain of eternal 

 causation which holds so rigidly in nature, violently broke the chain 

 by making natui'e, and all that it inherits, an apparition of his own 

 mind.t And it is by no means easy to combat such notions. For 

 when I say I see you, and that I have not the least doubt about it, 

 the reply is, that what I am really conscious of is an affection of my 

 own retina. And if I urge that I can check my sight of you by 

 touching you, the retort would be that I am equally transgressing 

 the limits of fact ; for what I am really conscious of is, not that you 

 are there, but that the nerves of my hand have undergone a change. 

 All we hear, and see, and touch, and taste, and smell, are, it would 

 be urged, mere variations of our own condition, beyond which, even 

 to the extent of a hair's breadth, we cannot go. That anything 

 answering to our impressions exists outside of ourselves is not a 

 fad, but an inference, to which all validity would be denied by an 

 idealist like Berkeley, or by a sceptic like Hume. Mr. Spencer 

 takes another line. "With him, as with the uneducated man, there 

 is no doubt or question as to the existence of an external world. 

 But he differs from the uneducated, who think that the world really 

 is what consciousness represents it to be. Our states of conscious- 

 ness are mere symbols of an outside entity which produces them 

 and determines the order of their succession, but the real nature of 

 * ' Examination of Hamilton,' p. 154. t ' Bestimmung rles Menschen.' 



