SCIENTIFIC EESEAECH AND BIBLICAL STUDY. 31 



them so safe for the practical purposes of life, viz., that we 

 are provided not with one sense only, but with many, and 

 that they work in harmony, and confirm or correct each other, 

 whilst reason, or the inner man, interprets and re-interprets 

 all the phenomena which they bring to it. Nor am I 

 altogether satisfied with his theory of nervous transmission, 

 which indeed is the ordinary one, that the image on the 

 retina is carried along to the brain, and thence to the ego. 

 Why should not the ego run to the retina, and thus come 

 into immediate contact with that which the light has brought 

 there. Nor do I find his own final view of things one which 

 I can grasp clearly and use effectively. I prefer a view 

 which he mentions and dismisses with doubtful approbation. 

 I believe that every human being is on the border of two 

 worlds; he belongs to both, and both belong to him ; he is 

 the true meeting place between them. 



Personally (if I may say so) 1 owe a great debt to the 

 school of Kant as embodied in the teaching of Sir AV. 

 Hamilton and Mansel (whose Oxford lectures I had the 

 privilege of attending). I also owe a debt to the school of 

 .Mill, whose "unknown possibilities of sensation" are discussed 

 somewhat unsympathetically by Mr. Balfour. But there is 

 a third school, which may be called Scotch, but whose most 

 worthy representative was the late Dr. McCosh, formerly of 

 Belfast ; in the kind of teaching to be found in his " intuitions 

 of the mind," I see a better prospect for sound mental 

 philosophy than in Mr. Balfour's Foundations. It is vain to 

 attack the school which puts its faith in the senses as 

 interpreted by reason. But it is equally vain to ignore that 

 the ego is a denizen of a sphere of being which the senses 

 alone tell us nothing about. 



Descartes' celebrated dictum, '• cogito, ergo sum,'' which is 

 graven on his statue at Tours, is the true basis of a sountl 

 philosophy of human nature. It will have its physiological 

 side, but it must also have its psychological and intuitional. 

 Consciousness — not self-consciousness, which seems to me an 

 utter misnomer — is the basis of a true philosophy of human 

 nature ; and there is plenty of room within its boundaries for 

 the dialectic of a Balfour and the analysis of a Spencer. 



(4) Another desideratum is a free and full liistorical 

 inquiry into the original nature and position of man. 



Whilst the tendency of geology is to reduce the time 

 needed for man's first appearance to a comparatively modem 

 period, the archseologist is pushing up the age of literature 



