158 



KNOWLEDGE • 



[Feb, 20, 1885. 



have risen one stafre in the upward scale, aud conscious actions 

 which through frequent exercise have deteriorated into instincts. 



A. F. Osborne. 



THE CONNECTION BETWEEN WIND AND MATTER. 



[1601]— With reference to tlio letter of Mr. W. H. Jones, 

 No. 1581, I should like permission to make a few brief remarks. 

 We commonly speak of a " disembodied" soul, and current theo- 

 logical belief assigns an intermediate state, after death, to this 

 immaterial entity, in which it remains for a certain period divorced 

 from matter, but still conscious or living. To this materialists 

 demur, and go so far as to deny the existence of soul or spirit as 

 separate entities; asking, according to their well-known theory, 

 where soul or spirit can be when bodily faculties are paralysed ? 

 Now, it is a great assumption to say that, because physical sen- 

 sation is in abeyance, soul must be non-cxi.stent. After conscious- 

 ness is recovered, the original "ego" reappears, as Mr. Jones forcibly 

 points out. But the existence of a conscious soul in a completely 

 disembodied condition is quite another thing. I can only conceive of 

 one genuinely disembodied spirit, and that is the spirit of the 

 universe, which is God. Any purely disembodied spirit must in like 

 manner be without limitation and unconditional, which, as regai'ds 

 humanity, is inconceivable. I therefore hold that the connection 

 between human mind and matter is indissoluble. Mind must 

 always have a healthy body in which — so to speak — to display 

 itself. If the body is paralysed, the mind is jiractically non-ex- 

 esistent. The intermediate state of the disembodied soul is merely 

 a theological assunijition, with no warranty from Scripture, and 

 philosophically untenable. But we arc told of a spiritual body, by 

 which I understand a non-molecular, but still a material, incase- 

 nient of the immaterial soul, which latter may be described as 

 intellectual or spiritual force. I offer no opinion as to what becomes 

 of the soul after physical death, but I feel convinced that simul- 

 taneously with that catastrophe it is clothed upon with its more 

 ethereal and permanent garment, and wherever it may be there is 

 one condition in which it must always liud itself — namely, attached 

 to some description of what Isaac Taylor conveniently terms a 

 " material corporeity." H. B. L. 



[How an incasement can be at once "non-molecular but still 

 material," my acquaintance with physics is too limited to enable 

 me to form the slightest conception. — Ed.] 



HYLO-PHENOMENOLOGY r. ONTOLOGY'. 

 " Come to Physics and see the Eternal." — SchcUing. 

 [1602] — It is familiar knowledge that the Archimagus Kant, in 

 his " Critique of Pure Reason," annihilated as realities the trinity 

 of God, soul, and immortality. And that becoming terrified at the 

 Frankenstein thus evoked, he, in a later work, " Critique of Prac- 

 tical Reason," rehabilitated all three venerable hypotheses. It is 

 also well known that after the death of Frederick the Great, who 

 was a freethinker, the great Kiinigsberg iconoclast, nicknamed in 

 Germany Dcr Alhcrmalmcnde, was silenced by the Prussian 

 Government for his treatise " On Religion Within the Bounds of 

 Reason," which was held to be a covert attempt to substitute the 

 latter for the former. It is not, however, so well known that the 

 author of the critical philosophy devoted the last years of his intel- 

 lectual activity to the composition of a work only lately discovered, 

 entitled, " My Passage from Metaphysics to Physics,'"' in which he 

 is judged to recant his former cogent ontological method of thought, 

 just as Von Ilartman has recently followed suit by his palinode in 

 re "The Philosophy of the Unconscious," with the title "The 

 Unconscious from the Standpoint of Phy.siology and Descent 

 (Darwinism)." It is also well known that Dr. Thomas Brown, 

 justly considered to be the Coryphccus of the Scotch school of 

 moral philosophy, which he changed, by his method, into " Mental 

 Science," published, in the year Kane died, a tract on " Cause and 

 Effect," which demolished the doctrine of "Causes" altogether, 

 relegating atiology to the province of continuity of sequence, or, 

 as stated in his own words, " triat there is nothing in a canse but 

 the fact of immediate and invariable antecedence to the change 

 called its effect." To me this ontological infidelity on the 

 part of these three greatest of authorities seems the strongest 

 argument possible, short of physical demonstration, for the 

 baselessness of metaphysics or ontology, on wliich transcen- 

 dentalism in every form is founded. Eliminate animism, and the 

 absolute disappears. AVe are left alono face to face with the 

 material and mechanical <?«.'(( of relative or positive physical and 

 physiological science, these two de|iartmcnts having been quite 

 unified by recent chemical and histological research from Wohler's 

 synthesis of urea downwards, which categorically negatives any 

 real distinction b<-' ween crganic and inorganic nature. Now, I 

 desire scientifically to demonstrate, or rather to sliow by demon- 



stration already established, that the monism of these grea 

 abstract thinkers is ratified by physical or physiological science 

 Newton's law of gravitation, Lavoisier's antiphlogistic theory, and 

 the quite chimerical notion of a vital principle in sentient being, 

 seem unmistakingly to get rid entirely of any animating or motor 

 factor in the worlds of brute matter or of life and mind, other than 

 the I'is iiisifci; or indwelling energy of matter, organised or inor- 

 ganised, itself. Spirit and phlogiston seem in the same category. 

 I get, however, nearer the goal I have in view by what I call the 

 lliuin theory oj Mind and Matter, vr Hylu-Ideali^ini, which, by 

 referring every "thing" — abstract or concrete — to ideas or 

 " thinks " engendered in the brain, makes egoism the true 

 criterion, and, indeed, matri.r of all things, gets entirely rid 

 of the absolute, and leaves us " alone in our glory with 

 the relative or solipsismal self and self .alone is thus the 

 only knowable universe. The notion of Dr. Carpenter, "C.B.," 

 and of other animistic dualists getting behind nature to some 

 hypothetical core or substance of ijhenomena, called by Kant 

 during his mystical epoch of development novmenon, becomes thus 

 a self-evident absurdity, since, strictly speaking. Nature herself is 

 only an ideal personification of the self. Aud surely all can see 

 that the idea of getting behind, or outside, or beyond self is a 

 clean reductio ad absurdunj. As well rave of jumping down our 

 own throats. The mere supposition is ludicrous and grotesque. 

 Thus primary causes, unless we elect to term self, such self being 

 necessarily with each of us A 1, as beyond us, are nothing to us. 

 They concern us not at all, no more than the Eidola of the Rosi- 

 crucian " philosophy." They may or may not exist, but, at all 

 events, ontology as the absolute inystery underlying phenomena is 

 from the necessary and benign limitation of the human mind a 

 terra incofjnita et ineofjitaliilis forbidden us to explore. The fii'st 

 duty of the sound scientific imagination, therefore, is to eradicate 

 the vicious " cause-seeking " propensity altogether. He who suc- 

 ceeds not in tills sine rjiia nun remains ever in statu puj^iilldri, were 

 he Newton or Faraday himself. Science can never enter into 

 her rights, can never be mistress in her own ]ioii=e, till this burning 

 question is settled, for good, once for all. Sceptics like Newton, 

 and even Darwin, render themselves liable to the reproach Cuvier 

 directed .against Priestley, that he was a graceless father who dis- 

 owned his own child. It will be remembered that Darwin withheld 

 his " Descent of Man " for thirteen years, out of mistaken deference 

 to the claims and scruples of spiritual ontology. 



Army and Navy Clnb. Robert Lewins, M.D. 



HUMAN AUTOMATON. 



[1G03] — The following circumstance affords an equally striking 

 example of the influence of habit with that mentioned by your cor- 

 respondent in No. 170, Jan. 30. From 1875 to 1878 1 was employed as 

 clerk in a manufacturing establishment situated about eight minutes' 

 walk from my own. Almost the whole of the road between lay 

 through a deep defile, known as the Glen, which, to a stranger, was 

 generally very impressive, and in my four or sis daily passages I 

 often met scarcely a single passenger. 



During the whole of this time I was a fairly diligent student pre- 

 paring for a competitive examination, and the quietness of the road 

 was very favourable to the studious turn of mind natural to one in 

 such a position. 



In 1878, having successfully p.assed my examination, I g.ave up 

 my situation, and removed to London. 



Eighteen months later, I was on a visit to my parents, who had, 

 in the meantime, removed to a house in a different pnrt of the 

 town. During my stay, I had occasion to pass through the Glen in 

 the direction leading to my home. 



Unconsciously I fell into the habits which for nearly two years 

 had been totally suspended. I took the road towards my former 

 home, walked through the back yard, opened the door of the house, 

 inhabited then by people quite strange to me, and did not discover 

 my mistake till I stood on the doorstep. No one appearing to be 

 in the room, I beat a hasty retreat, but not before being noticed, 

 as I afterwards learned, by some of the family then occupying the 

 house. Libra, B.A. 



THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE. 

 [1604] — Permit me a few words in reply to your anonymous 

 correspondent " Ilallyards " [1,589], who, enjoying the privilege, as 

 he terms it, of controverting statements in the teaching articles of 

 your staff, h,as either not been sufficiently careful in reading my 

 second article on " Thought and Language," or is more anxious 

 " to havo truth on his side than to be on the side of truth." I 

 distinctly stated, on p. 64, that the problem of the origin of Ian- 

 gu.age is " inherently impossible of solution, since no data are given 

 with which to work," Ac. ; and the passages on p. 6G, to which he 

 takes exception, are put forward simply as the most tenable hypo- 



