130 SCIENCE AND MORALS HI 



wearisome repetition of an old story, I will briefly 

 give my reasons for persisting in my infidelity. 

 In the first place, as I have already hinted, it 

 * seems to me pretty plain that there is a third 

 thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness, which, 

 in the hardness of my heart or head, I cannot see 

 to be matter, or force, or any conceivable modifica- 

 tion of either, however intimately the manifesta- 

 tions of the phenomena of consciousness may be 

 connected with the phenomena known as matter 

 and force. In the second place, the arguments 

 used by Descartes and Berkeley to show that our 

 certain knowledge does not extend beyond our 

 states of consciousness, appear to me to be 

 as irrefragable now as they did when I first 

 became acquainted with them some half-century 

 ago. All the materialistic writers I know of who 

 have tried to bite that file have simply broken 

 their teeth. But, if this is true, our one certainty 

 is the existence of the mental world, and that of 

 Kraft und Stoff falls into the rank of, at best, a 

 highly probable hypothesis. 



Thirdly, when I was a mere boy, with a per- 

 verse tendency to think when I ought to have 

 been playing, my mind was greatly exercised by 

 this formidable problem, What would become of 

 things if they lost their qualities ? As the qualities 

 had no objective existence, and the thing without 

 qualities was nothing, the solid world seemed 

 whittled away to my great horror. As I grew 



