ADDRESS. Xcili 
been adduced; and that were some of us who have pondered this question to 
follow a very common example, and accept testimony because it falls in with 
our belief, we also should eagerly close with the evidence referred to. But 
there is in the true man of science a wish stronger than the wish to have his 
beliefs upheld; namely, the wish to have them true. And this stronger wish 
causes him to reject the most plausible support if he has reason to suspect 
that it is vitiated by error. Those to whom I refer as having studied this 
question, believing the evidence offered in favour of ‘spontaneous genera- 
tion” to be thus vitiated, cannot accept it. They know full well that the 
chemist now prepares from inorganic matter a vast array of substances which 
Were some time ago regarded as the sole products of vitality. They are in- 
timately acquainted with the structural power of matter as evidenced in the 
phenomena of crystallization. They can justify scientifically their belief in 
its potency, under the proper conditions, to produce organisms. But in reply 
to your question they will frankly admit their inability to point to any satis- 
factory experimental proof that life can be developed save from demonstrable 
antecedent life. As already indicated, they draw the line from the highest 
- organisms through lower ones down to the lowest, and it is the prolongation 
of this line by the intellect beyond the range of the senses that leads them 
to the conclusion which Bruno so boldly enunciated *. 
The “materialism” here professed may be vastly different from what you 
suppose, and I therefore crave your gracious patience to the end. “The ques- 
tion of an external world,” says Mr. J. 8. Mill, “is the great battle-ground 
of metaphysics” t. Mr. Mill himself reduces external phenomena to “ possi- 
bilities of sensation.” Kant, as we have seen, made time and space “ forms ” 
of our own intuitions. Fichte, having first by the inexorable logic of his un- 
derstanding proved himself to be a mere link in that chain of eternal causa- 
tion which holds so rigidly in nature, violently broke the chain by making 
nature, and all that it inherits, an apparition of his own mind+. And it is by 
no means easy to combat such notions. For when I say I see you, and that 
I have not the least doubt about it, the reply is, that what I am really con- 
scious of is an affection of my own retina. And if I urge that I can check 
my sight of you by touching you, the retort would be that I am equally trans- 
-gressing the limits of fact; for what I am really conscious of is, not that 
you are there, but that the nerves of my hand have undergone a change. 
All we hear, and see, and touch, and taste, and smell, are, it would be urged, 
mere variations of our own condition, beyond which, even to the extent of a 
hair’s breadth, we cannot go. That any thing answering to our impressions 
exists outside of ourselves is not a fact, but an inference, to which all validity 
would be denied by an idealist like Berkeley, or by a sceptic like Hume. 
Mr. Spencer takes another line. With him, as with the uneducated man, there 
is no doubt or question as to the existence of an external world. But he dif- 
fers from the uneducated, who think that the world really is what conscious- 
ness represents it to be. Our states of consciousness are mere symbols of an 
outside entity which produces them and determines the order of their 
succession, but the real nature of which we can never know§. In 
* Bruno was a “ Pantheist,” not an “ Atheist” or a “ Materialist.” 
} Examination of Hamilton, p. 154, 
-t Bestimmung des Menschen. 
§ In a paper, at once popular and profound, entitled “ Recent Progress in the Theory 
of Vision,” contained in the yolume of Lectures by Helmholtz, published by Longmans, 
this symbolism of our states of consciousness is also dwelt upon. The impressions of sense 
are the mere signs of external things. Jn this paper Helmholtz contends strongly against 
the view that the consciousness of space is inborn; and he evidently doubts the power 
