70 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 



while we still recognize tbe mutual dependence of the two spheres 

 of knowledge which necessarily involve one another. Entire disre- 

 gard of either side, subjective, or objective, active or passive, phe- 

 nominal or real, material or formal, to employ the old phraseology, 

 widens the gulf of separation. Frank acceptance of different 

 methods in different spheres for different ends may aid both par- 

 ties in reaching the common meeting place. 



Nature is all around us, and reflected within us, inviting us to 

 investigate, to master it. Phenomena are to be carefully observed, 

 experimentally produced, classified, and referred to general laws. 

 This is tbe objective, the passive, which the free conscious thought 

 of man is reducing to order within him by discerning the order 

 in it, and without him. Thence come to us the notions of con- 

 straint, of necessity, of energy communicated to something which 

 is passively removed, and of invariable sequence. And this is all 

 that the mind thus knows. It knows no power, no cause ; but 

 only a transfer, merely of sensible effects, whose resultant always 

 remains the same, and it arrives at that consumation of phvsical 

 discovery, the conservation of energy. Thus far I believe all are 

 agreed, for the analysis of the empiricist himself finds nothing 

 more than this in cause or force. The mind indeed requires an 

 attraction called "force " to account for these effects, because the 

 free soul demands that they shall be accounted for. But it will 

 only confuse language and thought, to confound such an assump- 

 tion, giving unity to sensible results, with intelligent will in our- 

 self as a name for our spontaneous activity which we know in 

 exercising it, or with cause as expressing a notion derived from 

 our own spontaneous^ and productive activity; which also we 

 know in exercising it. 



Let one travel on the road of the senses as far as he may, he is 

 still at an infinite distance from the infinite form which christians 

 call Grod, and from his own free self. For no aggregate of phe- 

 nomena is any more than an aggregate, even when it vanishes in 

 the indefinite, which we are so apt to confound with the infinite ; 

 this indefinite sum of phenomena has not led us a step towards 

 active being, finite or infinite. 



Beside nature, then, is this active ego of ours, attending by 



