62 AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 



priest, who dare not any longer, in the face of such verifications, 

 dogmatise. 



2. These are great advantages, but they are not greater than 

 those the same " New Philosophy " extends to us from the con- 

 sideration of substance. What do I know about this that you 

 call substance ? Where is it ? What is it ? Can you let me 

 see it? I will believe it when I see it. Meantime I know 

 qualities only I know all things in their qualities, not in them- 

 selves, not in their substance. And this, that we know not 

 substance, is " the greatest discovery of psychology." Consider, 

 too, how, in turn, it is related to infallible knowledge and dog- 

 mas ! We are emancipated from the priest when we can show 

 him that we know appearances only. To pretend to know all 

 that, when he does not know what bread is ! 



3. But a due application of the same principles to the ques- 

 tion of externality, elicits even greater advantages perhaps, and 

 in a double kind. For it not only secures us from what the 

 priest can do against us, but it renders us independent of what 

 he can do for us. I know no external world namely, or I 

 know no certainty of an external world. That fire that burns, 

 that sea that rages I know nothing of either but as a state of 

 my own. What I know of external things what 1 can know 

 of external things must be in my consciousness. What are 

 called such external things, then, are but bundles of my own 

 consciousnesses. To tell me, consequently, all that miraculous 

 story, is to tell me something which, even the existence of the 

 external world being unguaranteed, I must hold also to be 

 unguaranteed. This, at the same time, too, that my ignorance 

 of any actual external world and of any necessity, whether of 

 causality or substantiality in it, plenarily empowers imagination 

 to bring to my feet, in freedom, all the good things the priest 

 can only bring me in bondage God, Immortality, Free-will. 



This, then, is the " New Philosophy ; " and who will deny its 

 might, and its majesty? Knowledge is precipitation into a 

 " slough," but ignorance is " escape ! " To be awake with 

 the understanding is to fall into " crass materialism ; " but to 

 dream with the imagination is to be safe within the crystal 

 battlements of eternal idealism ! Knowledge is but the wretched 

 old oil-lamp, that spills, and bothers us with its wick and its 

 filth; it is ignorance that is the Aladdin's lamp, and brings 

 elysium ! 



But do these gentlemen mean it to be so ? To Mr Bain, for 

 example, is not the materialism all that is for him fundamental I 

 and is not the idealism but, profanely to say it, the tongue in 

 the cheek to the priest, who incontinently sinks silent, dumb- 

 founded'? But how are we to look at this extraordinary 

 Zwitterling, this extraordinary hermaphrodite? Is the world, 



