72 AS REGARDS PROTOPLASM, ETC. 



What then? Is not the lobster boiled the same lobster that it was 

 unboiled ? Mr Huxley, surely, does not expect us to follow him 

 into that silly, wholly antiquated and effete rubbish that bids 

 us cross our fingers to examine a pea, or squint our eyes to look 

 at the table. Shall we, then, only behold the world aright by 

 putting our head between our legs ? Is a cramp truth, convul- 

 sions reason, or distortion philosophy ? 



I do know substance, and I know it by and through the 

 qualities with which I know so well how to serve myself. Here 

 is a printed Shakespeare : is there in its regard an in itself 

 which I do not know, but which, if known, would dwarf into 

 insignificance all that I do know 1 Why, I do know it in itself 

 its very paper and boards, if you like I know them in them- 

 selves too. There is no such thing anywhere in it as this in 

 itself, that is said to be unknown. All that the book need be, 

 should be, can be in itself, it is for me. The true in itself 

 there is Shakespeare's soul, and that I have access to at least, 

 all that can be done is done for my access. Thinkers like Mr 

 Huxley are very wroth at obscurantism; but, by the same involun- 

 tary retribution through which they fall into the miraculous by 

 fleeing it, they themselves are the obscurantists proper. At 

 the very moment that they insist on knowledge, they insist also 

 on dream a dream that stultifies all knowledge into fragments 

 of an unknown inane. We must not delude ourselves with 

 phrases, then phrases that are but subterfuges and evasions. 

 God has not sent us to know only mockeries here appear- 

 ances. On the contrary, He has given it us to know things 

 things in themselves a concrete si/stern of things, as well 

 external as internal, that is perfectly intelligible. 



3. And this brings us to Mr Huxley's last ignorance the 

 ignorance of externality, the reason for which is that we know 

 only consciousnesses, and ^consciousness. Mr Huxley makes 

 only a convenience of this, however; in his actual world it is no 

 ingredient. That actual world is simply materialism ; and the 

 idealism it talks of in consciousness is only, as it were, an 

 occasional flash from a private lantern that is peculiarly con- 

 venient at times for the reassurance of others, perhaps of our- 

 selves ! Let us have the materialism of knowledge for our 

 daily work, he says, but the idealism of ignorance for our nightly 

 dream and the good of our souls, if we will 1 The expedient, 

 therefore, does not seem a very hopeful one an expedient that 

 would counsel reason to take refuge in ignorance. But neither 

 are the facts on its side. That we only know within is no 

 reason that what we know may not be really without. The 

 truth is that we can test it, and try it, and lay stumbling blocks 

 in the way of it, and experiment on it, and prove it in a thousand 

 ways to the result that we do know an actually independent 



