334 THE FUTURE OF RELIGION AND MORALS. 



ing him with the concessions of physicists and naturalists 

 like Dubois-Reymond, Helmholtz, and Tyndall, who have 

 admitted the gulf between consciousness and matter ; for 

 at least matter the cerebral atoms though unlike 

 thought, produces it, is the cause of it in the scientific 

 sense, the antecedent, without which it would not be ; 

 while again, ages ago, matter was the parent of it, and of 

 all things that have since been slowly evolved therefrom. 

 The controversy between the materialist and those 

 who differ from him in thinking his explanation of the 

 universe wholly insufficient, may fairly be narrowed to 

 this point: Was matter, and nothing else, first in the 

 field at the beginning of things, or from all eternity ? and 

 is matter, and nothing else wholly different from it, to- 

 day at the bottom of all things life and thought in- 

 cluded ? Was matter the first, and is it still the last 

 and deepest thing in the universe ? This is the real and 

 only important question ; and if, as said, the materialist 

 could really answer it satisfactorily in the affirmative, 

 materialism in its most serious and important sense 

 would be established. And further, we are ready to 

 accept the materialist's own statement of the nature of 

 matter, various and comprehensive as that has now 

 become. We give him the hard, indivisible atoms of 

 physics, though these are rather an hypothesis, or, as 

 Professor Bain terms them, " representative fictions ; " 

 we give the protoplasm in the organic sphere, and the 

 molecules in the brain, as equally material ; and, if he 

 wishes, we are ready to regard the various forms of 

 energy that play on or about matter as their solid basis 

 of operations, as material likewise. Heat, electrical, 

 chemical, and nervous energy, invisible in themselves, but 

 which demonstrate their existence by visible or palpable 

 effects, we shall grant to be material, because they have 



