Address to the British Association 219 



It seems to me that the spirit which would deny such 

 reahties is the same spirit which would deny our real know- 

 ledge of an external world at all, and represent any material 

 object as 'a state of consciousness,' and at the very same 

 time represent * a state of consciousness ' as the accompani- 

 ment of a peculiar state of a material object — the body.^ 

 This mode of representation may be shortly, but not unjustly, 

 described as a process of intellectual 'thimble-rigging,' by 

 which the unwary spectator is apt to be cheated out of his 

 most valuable mental possession — his rational certainty. 



The same spirit asserts that our psychical powers never 

 themselves enter into the circuit of physical causation, and 

 yet few things would seem more certain to a plain man than 

 that (supposing him to have received a message saying his 

 house is on fire) it is his knowledge of what has been com- 

 municated which sets him in motion. To deny this is to 

 deny the evident teaching of our consciousness. It is to 

 deny what is necessarily the more certain in favour of what 

 is less so. If I do not know this I know nothing, and dis- 

 cussion is useless. As a distinguished writer has said: 

 ' That we are conscious, and that our actions are determined 

 by sensations, emotions, and ideas, are facts which may or 

 may not be explained by reference to material conditions, 

 but which no material explanation can render more certain.' 

 The advocate of * Natural Selection ' may also be asked, How 

 did knowledge ever come to be, if it is in no way useful, if it 



^ Those who deny that we have a real power of perceiving objects 

 refute themselves when they speak of * purely physical changes,' or of any- 

 thing • physical ' of which feelings are but the ' accompaniment ' or * sub- 

 jects.' For according to them 'matter' is but a term for certain 'states of 

 consciousness,' while they represent each state of consciousness as a function 

 of matter. According to this, let a represent a ' state of consciousness, and 

 b a physical state. ' Then a sensation and its physical accompaniment may 

 be represented by the symbol a + b. But a physical state is itself but a 

 state of consciousness with its objective correlate, and is, therefore, a + b. 

 We thus get an equation infinitely more erroneous than b = a + b, because 

 the b of the a + b is itself ever again and again a + b. 



