188 THE REV. 3. H. BERNARD, D.D., ON THE 



must be made in language loliich is only intelligible for a mind. 

 His attempt to explain the intelligence as a function of matter 

 ends in nothing, for his account of matter in the ultimate 

 resort will be made by describing it as possessing attributes 

 which have no meaning except for an intelligence. And if there 

 be not an intelligence somewhere in the first instance, no 

 satisfactory account is given of matter or, consequently, ot 

 the genesis of mind. This answer, be it observed, has 

 nothing whatever to do with theories of Biogenesis or Abio- 

 genesis ; the physical possibilities of matter in which eminent 

 scientific men have found " the promise and the potency " of 

 life are not in question. The problem is entirely a meta- 

 physical one and not to be solved in the chemical laboratory. 



No matter how far material processes may be investigated, 

 materialism cannot give any rationally complete account of 

 mind; for in attempting to explain the genesis of any given 

 individual intelligence, it at least assumes another intelligence 

 behind to watch the process. 



But this is not all. Many materialists urge, and they can 

 appeal to well-known scientific facts in support of their 

 assertion, that different forms of mental activity can be 

 localised in different parts of the brain. It can be shown 

 without much difficulty that brain processes always precede 

 mental processes; now,it has been asked, what more is needed 

 to prove that mind is a function of body ? The answer to such 

 a question when put in the crude form in which I have stated 

 it, is not far to seek. Suppose it admitted that a certain 

 bodily motion is always the antecedent, a certain mental 

 state the consequent. It does not in the least follow that 

 the bodily antecedent is sufficient by itself to account for the 

 mental state which is spoken of as a " consequent." To make 

 such an inference would be to fall into the old logical fallacy, 

 post hoc, ergo propter hoc, the blunder of mistaking consecution 

 in time for causation. It may be said that, as a matter of 

 fact, few materialists would urge that the motion of the grey 

 matter of the brain afforded a good and scientifically complete 

 account of thought. They would probably say, as some of 

 them have said, that any mental state may be regarded from 

 two aspects, the objective and the subjective ; and that while 

 science gives a sufficient account of the former, the latter 

 aspect is outside its proper region. But it must be remembered 

 that this distinction between the subjective and objective, 

 though valid for an idealist, has no proper meaning and 

 cannot be appealed to by a thorough going materialist, and 



