140 SCIENCE AND MORALS. ni 



will and immortality, existed ages before anything 

 that can be called physical science, and would 

 continue to exist if modern physical science w^ere 

 swept away. All that physical science has done 

 has been to make, as it were, visible and tangible 

 some difficulties that formerly were more hard of 

 apprehension. Moreover, these difficulties exist 

 just as much on the hypothesis of Idealism as on 

 that of Materialism. 



The student of nature, who starts from the 

 axiom of the universality of the law of causation, 

 cannot refuse to admit an eternal existence; if he 

 admits the conservation of energy, he cannot deny 

 the possibility of an eternal energy; if he admits 

 the existence of immaterial phenomena in the 

 form of consciousness, he must admit the possi- 

 bihty, at any rate, of an eternal series of such 

 phenomena; and, if his studies have not been bar- 

 ren of the best fruit of the investigation of na- 

 ture, he will have enough sense to see that when 

 Spinoza says, " Per Deum intelligo ens absolute 

 infinitum, hoc est substantiam constantem infinitis 

 attributis," the God so conceived is one that only 

 a very great fool would deny, even in his heart. 

 Physical science is as little Atheistic as it is Ma- 

 terialistic. 



So with respect to immortality. As physical 

 science states this problem, it seems to stand thus: 

 " Is there any means of knowing whether the 

 series of states of consciousness, which has been 



