TiffK BELFAST ADDRK88. 48? 
been adduced; and that were some of us who have pon- 
dered this question to follow a very common example, and 
accept testimony because it falls in with our belief, we also 
should eagerly close with the evidence referred to. But 
there is in the true man of science a desire stronger than 
the wish to have his beliefs upheld; namely, the desire to 
have them true. And this stronger wish causes him to 
reject the most plausible support, if he has reason to 
suspect that it is vitiated by error. Those to whom I 
refer as having studied this question, believing the evidence 
offered in favor of " spontaneous generation " to be thus 
vitiated, cannot accept it. They know full well that the 
chemist now prepares from inorganic matter a vast array 
of substances, which were some time ago regarded as the 
sole products of vitality. They are intimately acquainted 
with the structural power of matter, as evidenced in the 
phenomena of crystallization. They can justify scien- 
tifically their belief in its potency, under the proper con- 
ditions, to produce organisms. But, in reply to your 
question, they will frankly admit their inability to point 
to any satisfactory experimental proof that life can be 
developed, save from demonstrable antecedent life. As 
already indicated, they draw the line from the highest 
organisms through lower ones down to the lowest; and it 
is the prolongation of this line by the intellect, beyond the 
range of the senses, that leads them to the conclusion 
which Bruno so boldly enunciated.* 
The " materialism " here professed may be vastly 
different from what you suppose, and I therefore crave 
your gracious patience to the end". " The question of an 
external world," says J. S. Mill, " is the great battle-ground 
of metaphysics. "f Mr. Mill himself reduces external 
phenomena to " possibilities of sensation." Kant, as we 
have seen, made time and space "forms" of~~bur own 
intuitions. Fichte, having first by the inexorable logic of 
his understanding 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 nature, and 
all that it inherits, an apparition of the mind. J And it is 
* Bruno was a " Pantheist," not an " Atheist " or a " Materialist." 
f " Examination of Hamilton," p. 154. 
$" Bestiinrnung des Menschen." 
