3 



of the eighteenth century even though that century pro- 

 duced Kant. But I did not come to Scotland to vindi- 

 cate the honor of one of the greatest men she has ever 

 produced. My business is to point out to you that the 

 only way of escape out of the crass materialism in which 

 we just now landed is the adoption and strict working 

 out of the very principles which the Archbishop holds 

 up to reprobation. 



Let us suppose that knowledge is absolute, and not 

 relative, and therefore; that our conception of matter rep- 

 resents that which it really is. Let us suppose, further, 

 that we do know more of cause and effect than a certain 

 definite order of succession 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 nec- 

 essitarianism. For it is obvious that our knowledge of 

 what we call the material world is, to begin with, at least 

 as certain and definite as that of the spiritual world, and 

 that our acquaintance with the law is of as old a date as 

 our knowledge of spontaneity. 



Further, I take it to be demonstrable that it is ut- 

 terly 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 really spontaneous. A really spontaneous act is 

 one which, by the assumption, has no cause ; and the 

 attempt to prove such a negative as this is, on the face 

 of the matter, absurd. And while it is thus a philo- 

 sophical impossibility to demonstrate that any given 

 phenomenon is not the effect of a material cause, any 



