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ISTo one will accuse Scou-hiiicn oi' liabilunlly Ibro-cttiug tlieir 

 great countrymen ; but it was enough to nialvc David ITume tui'u 

 in his grave, that liei'e, almost ^vitliin ear-sliot of liis liouse, an 

 instructed audience sliouhl liave Jisteiied, witliout a murmur, 

 Avhile his most characteristic doctrines were attiibuted to a 

 French writer of fifty yeai-s later date, in whose dreary and ver])ose 

 pages we miss alike the vigor of thought and the exquisite clear- 

 ness of the styhi of the man whonl I make bold to term the most 

 acute thinker of the eighteenth century — even though that cen- 

 tury produced Kant. J>ut I did not come to Scotland to vindi- 

 cate the honor of one of the greatest men she has ever pi'oduced. 

 My business is to point out to you that the only way of escape 

 out of the crass materialism in which we just now hmded is the 

 adoption and strict w^orking out of the very principles which the 

 Archbishop holds up to re})robation. 



Let us suppose that knowledge is absolute, and not relative, 

 and therefore, that our conception of matter represents that 

 which it really is.; Let us suppose, farther, that we do know 

 more of cause and effect than a certain definite order of succes- 

 sion among facts, and that we have a knowledge of the necessity 

 of that succession — and hence, of necessary laws — and I, for my 

 part, do not see what escape there is from utter materialism and 

 necessarianism. For it is obvious that our knowledge of what 

 ■\ve call the material world is, to begin with, at least as certain 

 and definite as that of the spiritual world, and that our ac(piaint- 

 ance with the law is of as old a date as our knowledge of spon- 

 taneity. 



Further, I take it to be demonsti-able that it is uttei-ly 

 impossible to prove that anything whatever may not be the effect 

 of a material and necessary cause, and that human logic is 

 equally incompetent to prove that any act is i-eall}- spontaneous. 

 A really spontaneous act is one whicli, by the assumption, has 

 no cause ; and the attempt to i)rove such a negative as this is, 

 on the face of the matter, absurd. And while it is thus a })hilo- 

 sophical impossibility to demonstrate that any given phenomenon ; 

 is not the effect of a material cause, any one who is acquainted ! 

 with the history of science will admit, that its progi-ess lias, in 

 all ages, meant, and now more than ever, means, the extension : 

 of the province of what avc call matter and causation, and the I 

 concomitant gradual b.-uiislnnent from all regions of human t 

 thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity. .^ 



