308 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



be an orderly phantasmagoria generated by the ego,, 

 unfolding its successive scenes on the background of 

 nothingness ; as a firework, which is but cunningly 

 arranged combustibles, grows from a spark into a corrus- 

 cation, and from a corruscation into figures and words 

 and cascades of devouring fire, and then vanishes into 

 the darkness of night." 



" On the other hand," he continues, " it must no less 

 readily be allowed that, for anything that can be proved 

 to the contrary, there may be a real something which 

 is the cause of all our impressions ; that sensations, 

 though not likenesses, are symbols of that something ; 

 and that the part of that something which we call the 

 nervous system, is an apparatus for supplying us with a 

 sort of algebra of fact, based on these symbols : a brain 

 may be the machinery by which the material universe 

 becomes conscious of itself." * 



Now, so far as one holds the first of these two 

 alternative positions here offered to us, he is an absolute 

 egoist and idealist, as Fichte was. The world is phe- 

 nomena and nothing else, constructed by the ego, which 

 is the single and solitary existence, on the vast vacuity 

 of nothingness.f But so far as one holds the second 



* Life of Hume, pp. 81, 82. 



t This, however, is not quite the view of Hume, as Professor 

 Huxley must know ; for Hume surpassed Fichte in not only destroying 

 matter, but in dissolving the ego itself. He denied that there was an 

 underlying spiritual substance, or ego, any more than a material sub- 

 stance ; and he took away all unity, reality, identity, and substance 

 from the ego, by resglving it, or what we call " self," into a series of 

 internal phenomena, " a bundle of perceptions," to use his own remark- 

 able phrase. With Hume, there is only phenomena in the universe, 

 self-produced, or wholly unknown as to their causes, since we have no 

 conception of causation or productivity beyond the fact of observed 

 succession. With Fichte, the ego exists as a creative agency ; with 

 Hume, it does not exist at all as any single or real thing ; not even 

 as the light of consciousness or thought, nor yet as will. In strictness, 

 Hume is not even an idealist. In his view there exists only phenomena, 

 which come and go without any reason, We should not even ask the- 



