300 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



certainly compose all that we directly know of it, we 

 have an assertion of idealism. To this system, indeed, 

 both Lange and Professor Huxley agree ; but also and 

 this is a most material point if all be the " mere images 

 of that which actually exists" a third system, very 

 different from both materialism and idealism, is indicated 

 the system of realism, as old as Plato, and held by 

 Kant and Herbert Spencer, who both believe that there 

 are real things or a real something behind the phenomena 

 that compose the material of our knowledge, though they 

 do not make the old Platonic mistake of supposing the 

 phenomena to be copies or images of it, but merely 

 effects, or modes, or expressions of it. 



But after all, is not consciousness, or thought, an 

 energy of a certain sort ? Bare consciousness, the mere 

 passive knowledge of our mental states, may not be 

 energy, though it is the unique product of it ; still, the 

 severe effort of thought in which cerebral energy is 

 drawn upon and consumed should, we think, when pro- 

 duced, be reckoned as energy, at least as stored-up or 

 potential energy. It is admittedly the product of energy ; 

 then, unless there is a waste, contrary to the law of con- 

 servation, this product should count as energy. It has, 

 to use the scientific language, energy of position, or 

 potential energy ; and, in fact, it may sometimes exert a 

 most potent energy. But it is not energy of the sort that 

 physics is concerned with, says the materialist. " Were it 

 possible for thought to move a single cerebral atom so 

 much as the millionth part of a millimetre out of the 

 path marked for it by the laws of dynamics, the whole 

 'world-formula' would be inapplicable," thinks Lange. 

 But still, the thought which has burned up my cerebral 

 energy to produce it, may, when produced, react on the 

 cerebral atoms of other minds, if not on those of my own. 



