''MENTAL PHYSIOLOGY."^ 117 



the openness of mind with which he surveyed them, gave 

 especial value to his treatment of difficult questions on 

 the border-land of the marvellous. Students of philo- 

 sophy who found that he approached their problems from 

 the scientific rather than the metaphysical side, sometimes 

 discovered gaps in his reasoning, even while they shared 

 his conclusions. This was especially the case in his dis- 

 cussions of speculative themes such as the nature of the 

 external world, or the presence of Mind and Will in the 

 Universe, to which the argument of the whole book was 

 one long prelude. He had not had a metaphysician's train- 

 ing ; and could not think in his language, or dwell at ease 

 with his abstractions. When he read the treatises of 

 Principal Caird or Professor Edward Caird, and attempted 

 to master the principles of Kant or Hegel, he felt himself 

 in a strange land, among men of other tongues which he 

 could not learn. But he believed that what was on one 

 side a limitation, might be on another a source of strength. 

 He managed to combine with the idealism of Berkeley 

 and Mill a robust realism which was intelligible to the 

 ordinary reader ; and he hoped that he might act as the 

 interpreter of important scientific truths to a growing 

 number of religious minds whose faith could not live in 

 the attenuated air of the new agnosticism. 



One great desire I have (he wrote to his brother Russell 

 in the birthday letter, this time on the right date, of December, 

 1874), to be of some use as a mediator in the conflict which has 

 now distinctly begun between science and theology. I see 

 quite clearly that it is of no use to try to grapple with the sub- 

 ject unless one thoroughly masters the question on both sides. 

 On the scientific side I find it taking a development such as 

 I never dreamed of, as in Professor Clifford's Sunday 1-ecture 

 published in the last Fortnightly^ in which it is asserted that 

 there is no room for a God within the solar system ; while his 

 and H.'s doctrine of human automatism pure and simple, seems 



