ON THE EVOLUTION MATERIALISM AND THEOLOGY. 833' 



law, and be expressible, as our automatists say, in terms 

 of such. But the light of consciousness and thought, 

 how can we even faintly suppose this to have any rela- 

 tion to a particular collocation of the chemical elements ? 

 Is there not a gulf between chemistry and consciousness, 

 admitted by the most eminent authorities in science ; a 

 difference for ever, than which none greater is conceiv- 

 able, between mind and matter between the internal 

 and unextended states of knowing and feeling and their 

 external and extended material conditions ; an abyss not 

 to be bridged, between the cerebral atoms and thought,, 

 their supposed product? But it is acknowledged that 

 the word " product " is to be taken in Hume's sense of 

 something that invariably follows after something else, 

 though we see no reason why it should so follow. Be it 

 so ; but in that case your materialism and monism break 

 down and become dualism; for if matter is not the 

 efficient cause of thought, but only an antecedent, wholly 

 unlike its consequent ; if matter does not itself always 

 actually think, or if one of its associated forms of energy 

 is not transformed into thought, as the hardier mate- 

 rialists would affirm ; then there are two acknowledged 

 things or entities in the universe, totally different m 

 kind matter and thought. 



However, lest we should be thought to snatch at a 

 merely verbal victory, extorted from [particular scientific 

 concessions, of the difference between nfatter and con- 

 sciousness, we are ready to grant the materialist that if 

 he can prove, beyond doubt or question, that matter 

 adding all its properties, if he chooses was first in the 

 field at the beginning, and that there was nothing else 

 either behind it or immanent in it of a totally different 

 nature, then materialism in its most real and significant 

 sense is proved. We will allow it proved, without press- 



