248 Heredity. 



is an unconscious thought enclosed in matter; * the body is a 

 mind of a moment's duration.' In the inorganic world, at the 

 lowest grade of the scale, the phenomena of shock or of the com- 

 munication of motion, the clearest of all for mechanism, is in 

 fact the most obscure, because there the effort, the will, which 

 constitutes all thought, is more widely separated than elsewhere 

 from its effect : there thought is aliena a se. Further, the pheno- 

 menon of shock includes that which some would have it replace, 

 viz. spontaneity. * Inertia, with the elasticity which results from 

 it, is to the body what is to the soul the innate tendency to 

 preserve the action that constitutes its essence, and to restore it 

 when it is deranged.' Inertia is analogous to and derived from 

 will, and all motion is in its essence an aiming at something. Thus 

 everything is explained by thought, all that is intelligible ; and, as 

 Berkeley says, ' In all that exists is life, in all that lives is sensation, 

 and in all that has sensation is thought.' 



Such is the idealistic system a system that hangs well together, 

 even if it be not conclusive. We do not accuse it of depending 

 on an hypothesis, such as : ' Thought is the only reality,' for this 

 it shares in common with metaphysics, and, indeed, with all human 

 science. All our scientific knowledge, however coherent, how- 

 ever solid and fruitful in results, is like a gold chain, of which 

 we do not see the first link. As we are alike incapable of tran- 

 scending experience and of being content with experience, and as 

 science has the same limits as experience, the only way of tran- 

 scending these limits is hypothesis. Every system of thought 

 employs hypothesis more or less ; idealism more frankly than 

 any other system. A graver defect, as we view it, is, that even 

 though the hypothesis be admitted, the system nevertheless still 

 contains an insuperable difficulty. How does thought, which is 

 the only reality, become something else for itself) something so 

 different that it no longer recognizes itself? What is the cause 

 of this continuous and ever-increasing lapse of thought? It 

 evidently cannot be any external cause, for by the hypothesis 

 there is nothing beyond thought. What, then, is the internal 

 cause ? Nature, it will be said, is ' an exterioration of the mind ' 

 : a proposition that relatively is incontestable, but absolutely 

 doubtful, for experience shows that we are as incapable of sup- 



