54 THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 
THE RELATION OF MATTER TO SPIRIT. 
Read before the Hamilton Scientific Association, May 9th, 1901. 
WMG Yo IVA Aals NCS ID) 
The good Bishop Berkeley denied the existence of the 
external or the material universe ; but as a remedy for the 
bodily ailments of mankind, he had an almost boundless faith 
in the hygenic virtues of tar water. 
Hume, following some of the conclusions of Berkeley, based 
his metaphysical theories on perceptions, and thought that 
existence was reducible to a train, or series of atomic sensa- 
tions, which had no relations to one another. His theories, 
therefore, took little or no account of experience. While 
Kant, who followed Hume, theorized that experience was the 
ouly legitimate object of reason, and that to transcend exper- 
ience would lead inevitably to self contradictions. Such 
subjects, therefore, as God or the soul were according to 
Kant’s theories, outside the province of man’s reason and it 
was deemed necessary by him in order to find a place for faith 
to deny a knowledge of God, freedom and immortality. If, 
however, we lay aside the metaphysical speculations of Kant 
and take up the conception of his gaseous cosmogony, based on 
a knowledge of physics, it may be possible for us to see a great 
deal of God and to have a very extensive knowledge of Him. 
We must admit that Kant laid the foundation upon which 
Laplace built his wonderful, yet simple, theory of the origin 
of the material universe and of our planetary system. The 
Laplace theory, dating from the last quarter of the eighteenth 
century asserts that our planetary system originated in a fiery 
cloud, or nebula, and this is now generally accepted by astron- 
omers and other scientists as reasonable and true. This fiery 
