438 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. hi, 



of them ; and at the end of our inquiry we no more stand 

 committed to any conclusion regarding the real nature of 

 either group than we did at the beginning. When we admit 

 that a blow on the head is likely to make a man insensible, 

 we are just as much or just as little materialists as when we 

 suggest the hypothesis that cerebral inflammation, by ob- 

 structing certain particular transit-lines, may prevent certain 

 particular associations of ideas and thus obliterate certain 

 specific memories. Eepeating Mr. Spencer's words, we may 

 say that " the general relation between mental manifestations 

 and material structure traced out [in this work], has implica- 

 tions identical with, and no wider than, those which familiar 

 experiences thrust upon us." In objective psychology, as in 

 other departments of inquiry, science is but an extension 

 of common knowledge. " That drowsiness impedes thinking, 

 that wine excites or stupefies according to amount and cir- 

 cumstances, that great loss of blood produces temporary un- 

 consciousness, — are facts admitted by everyone, be his theory 

 of things what it may. That you cannot get out of the 

 undeveloped child thoughts and feelings like those you get 

 out of the developed man ; that the idiot, with brain perma- 

 nently arrested in its growth, remains permanently incapable 

 of any but the simplest mental actions ; are propositions not 

 denied by the most intemperate reviler of physiological psy- 

 chology. But one who recognizes such facts and propositions 

 is just as much chargeable with materialism as one who puts 

 together facts and propositions like those which constitute 

 the exposition [of psychical phenomena contained in this 

 work]. Whoever grants that from the rudimentary con- 

 sciousness implied by the vacant stare of the infant, up to 

 the quickly apprehensive, far-seeing, and variously-feeling 

 consciousness of the adult, the transition is through slow 

 steps of mental progress that accompany slow steps of bodily 

 progress, tacitly asserts the same relation of Mind and Matter 

 which is asserted by one who traces out the evolution of the 



