140 SCIENCE AND MORALS III 



will, and immortality, existed ages before any- 

 thing that can be called physical science, and 

 would continue to exist if modern physical science 

 were swept away. All that physical science has 

 done has been to make, as it were, visible and 

 tangible some difficulties that formerly were more 

 hard of apprehension. Moreover, these difficulties 

 exist just as much on the hypothesis of Idealism 

 as on that of Materialism. 



The student of nature, who starts from the 

 axiom of the universality of the law of causation, 

 cannot refuse to admit an eternal existence ; if he 

 admits the conservation of energy, he cannot 

 deny the possibility of an eternal energy ; if he 

 admits the existence of immaterial phenomena 

 in the form of consciousness, he must admit the 

 possibility, at any rate, of an eternal series of 

 such phenomena ; and, if his studies have not been 

 barren of the best fruit of the investigation of 

 nature, he will have enough sense to see that 

 when Spinoza says, " Per Deum intelligo ens 

 absolute infinitum, hoc est substantiam constantem 

 infinitis attributis," the God so conceived is one 

 that only a very great fool would deny, even in 

 his heart. Physical science is as little Atheistic 

 as it is Materialistic. 



So with respect to immortality. As physical 

 science states this problem, it seems to stand thus : 

 "Is there any means of knowing whether the 

 series of states of consciousness, which has been 





