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It is beside my present purpose greatly to enlarge on the mental process 

 by which the philosophic Theist supplies the blank thus left by science. 

 Beyond the point we have now reached, the great contending sects of 

 metaphysical thinkers have no common ground. I can no longer vouch the 

 authority of the great Scottish sceptic and his followers, nor avoid collision 

 with the Positivist sect. Yet I do not assent to the suggestion that the 

 attempt to handle these great subjects, on intellectual grounds, yet, in a 

 popular way, is an unwise one, merely because philosophers are not agreed about 

 them. They are people's questions, for they concern the springs of human 

 action in daily life, and must be settled by appeal to the broad experience of 

 our common nature. There are some subjects on which men whose walk is in 

 the beaten tracks of life — who have experienced the ordinary lot — -acting, 

 suffering, feeling, thinking, in the way of all mankind ; may have a surer 

 vision of the truth than is accorded to the calm and pure, yet frigid, formal, 

 unimaginative intellect of the closeted Philosopher. Be it far from me to pass 

 a moral judgment on these exceptional natures ; or to conclude that their lives 

 must be vicious and unholy, because I deem their principles unsound ! 

 Judging men by their actions, it will appear, plainly enough, that some have 

 found a way to reconcile what seems a barren and repulsive creed of mere 

 negations with a life of strenuous effort and noble aspiration. Such have 

 become, and are an illustration to their country, and an honour to mankind. 

 Let it be left to the great Taskmaster to judge His servants. To him they 

 stand or fall. 



One word to some to whom the argument may be distasteful on another 

 ground. Faith, I concede, has her experiments as well as Science ; and they 

 are happy, who by wholly other ways than those which we are trying, may 

 have " felt after" and found Him who is "not far from every one of us." To 

 some such, I anticipate, discussion like the present may seem superfluous, or 

 worse. The Supreme certainty will appear to them too true and real for 

 elaborate proof, if not too sacred for metaphysical discussion. Yet let me urge, 

 that all men are not in this happy case. The intellect has its demands ; 

 demands which, at the present time, it is unwise, unsafe, and wrong, to over- 

 look. The reassuring faculty, " sounding on its dim and perilous way," can 

 never, I am well convinced, beget assurance on this great subject ; but it may 

 remove impediments which are stumbling blocks to many ; it may confirm 

 conclusions based on surer ground ; above all, it may rouse men from that 

 mental torpor which is a disease far commoner than positive unbelief. 



Eschewing, so far as I am able, the refinements of metaphysical discus- 

 sion, I shall, then, briefly state the grounds on which my own intellect arrives 

 at its conclusion. I accept, as satisfactory, the doctrine that we derive the 

 idea of "Force" from our own experience of the action of the "Will," In 

 volition, we have, I think, the sense of intellectual effort ; of force put out, 

 and resistance overcome ; of strain kept up in spite of weariness. Having 

 conceived a mental purpose we are conscious of putting forth a power whereby 

 the thing conceived of may be effected, I speak here of purely mental 

 experiences ; and in this sphere, it seems to me, I say, that our wills appear to 

 us to be efficient causes.* " Force," then, in our experience, is as Dr. 

 Carpenter has put it,—" the direct expression, or manifestation, of that mental 



* As regards our bodily motions, it may be granted to Hume, Brown, and J. S. Mill, 

 that our will really causes them "in the same sense," (to quote the last-named writer) 

 ' ' and in no other, in which cold causes ice, or a spark causes an explosion of gunpowder. 

 The volition, a state of our mind, is the antecedent ; [not cause ;] the motion of our limbs, 

 in conformity to the volition, is the consequent; [not effect.]" This much, I say, may be 

 granted as to the connection of the two events, viz. , the volition and ensuing bodily move- 

 ment. Our sense of power is in the volition itself apart from any physical result. 



