22 2 Thomas Henry Huxley 



that science has shewn all that we call matter — the 

 most solid metals and the most attenuated vapours, 

 the most stable and resisting inorganic bodies, and the 

 unstable tissues of living bodies — to be alike in restless, 

 orderly motion, to be, in fact, motion itself and not the 

 thing moved, to be changeable but indestructible, pass- 

 ing through phases but eternal, there seems less diffi- 

 cult)' in assuming it to be the ultimate reality, and 

 mind and consciousness to be its most highly special- 

 ised qualities. Huxley, while stating this view plainly 

 enough, refused to accept it as a legitimate conclusion 

 from the facts. 



"For anything that maybe proved to the contrary, there 

 may be a real something which is the cause of all our impres- 

 sions ; that sensations, though not likenesses, are symbols of 

 that something ; and that the part of that something, which 

 we call the nervous system, is an apparatus for supplying us 

 with a sort of algebra of fact, based on these symbols. A brain 

 may be the machinery by which the material universe becomes 

 conscious of itself. But it is important to notice that, even if 

 this conception of the universe and of the relation of con- 

 sciousness to its other components should be true, we should, 

 nevertheless, be still bound by the limits of thought, still un- 

 able to refute the arguments of pure idealism. The more 

 completely the materialistic position is admitted, the easier it is 

 to show that the idealistic position is unassailable, if the idealist 

 confines himself within the limits of positive knowledge." 



However we attempt to form what philosophers call 

 "ejects," to imagine that what is reall}- in our con- 

 sciousness is really the world outside ourselves, these 

 ejects remain mere phenomena of our minds. Matter 

 itself and its changes may, in the long run, be but 

 modes of motion, but "our knowledge of motion is 

 nothing but that of a change in the place and order 



