SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION. 569 



tlier developed. Before proceeding to interpret the detailed 

 phenomena of Life, and Mind, and Society, in terms of 

 Matter, Motion, and Force, the reader must be reminded in 

 what sense the interpretations are to be accepted. 



It is true that their purely relative character has been re- 

 peatedly insisted upon ; but the liability to misinterpretation 

 is so great, that notwithstanding all evidence to the contrary, 

 there will probably have arisen in not a few minds, the con- 

 viction that the solutions which have been given, along with 

 those to be derived from them, are essentially materialistic. 

 Having, throughout life, constantly heard the charge of 

 materialism made against those who ascribed the more in- 

 volved phenomena to agencies like those which produce the 

 simplest phenomena, most persons have acquired repug- 

 nance to such modes of interpretation ; and the universal ap- 

 plication of them, even though it is premised that the solu- 

 tions they give can be but relative, will probably rouse more 

 or less of the habitual feeling. Such an attitude of mind, 

 however, is significant, not so much of a reverence for the 

 Unknown Cause, as of an irreverence for those familiar 

 forms in which the Unknown Cause is manifested to us. 

 Men who have not risen above that vulgar conception which 

 unites with Matter the contemptuous epithets " gross " 

 and " brute," may naturally feel dismay at the proposal to 

 reduce the phenomena of Life, of Mind, and of Society, to a 

 level with those which they think so degraded. But who- 

 ever remembers that the forms of existence which the un- 

 cultivated speak of with so much scorn, are shown by the 

 man of science to be the more marvellous in their attributes 

 the more they are investigated, and are also proved to be 

 in their ultimate natures absolutely incomprehensible — 

 as absolutely incomprehensible as sensation, or the conscious 

 something which perceives it — whoever clearly recog- 

 nizes this truth, will see that the course proposed does not 

 imply a degradation of the so-called higher, but an eleva- 

 tion of the so-called lower. Perceiving as he will, that 

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