354 LIFE OF TROFESSOR HUXLEY riiAr. Xiv 



being holds the opinions he speaks of as ' Naturalism.' 

 He is a good debater. He knows the value of a word. 

 The word ' Naturalism ' has a bad sound and unpleasant 

 associations. It would tell against ns in the House of 

 Commons, and so it will with his readers. ' Naturalism ' 

 contrasts with ' supernaturalism.' He has not only at- 

 tacked us for what we don't hold, but he has been good 

 enough to draw out a catechism for ' us wicked people,' 

 to teach us what we must hold." 



It was rather difficult to get him to particulars, but 

 we did so by degrees. He said, " Balfour uses the word 

 ■phenomena as applying simj^ly to the outer world and not 

 to the inner world. The only people his attack would hold 

 good of would be the Comtists, who deny that psychology 

 is a science. They may be left out of account. They 

 advocate the crudest eighteenth-century materialism. All 

 the empiricists, from Locke onwards, make the observation 

 of the phenomena of the mind itself quite separate from 

 the study of mere sensation. No man in his senses 

 supposes that the sense of beauty, or the religious feelings 

 (this with a courteous bow to a priest who was present), 

 or the sense of moral obligation, are to be accounted for 

 in terms of sensation, or come to us through sensation." 

 I said that, as I understood it, I did not think Mr. 

 Balfour sup]:)Osed they would acknowledge the position he 

 ascribed to them, and that one of his complaints was that 

 they did not work out their premises to their logical con- 

 clusions. I added that so far as one of Mr. Balfour's chief 

 points was concerned — the existence of the external world 

 — Mill was almost the only man on their side in this 

 century who had faced the problem frankly, and -he had 

 been driven to say that all men can know is that there 

 are " permanent possibilities of sensation." He did not 

 seem inclined to pursue the question of an external world, 

 but said that though Mill's "Logic" was very good, 

 empiricists were not bound by all his theories. 



He characterised the book as a very good and even 



