BiicnuoNt).— Reply to Mr. Frankland*s paper on " Mind- Stuff.*' ^15 



menal world must be paralleled by a nexus, at least equally complex, of 

 syuchronous relations in the noumenal world. But the complexity of the 

 latter may be greater by any amount than that of the former. There may be 

 facts of structure in the noumenal world which have no representatives, so 

 to speak, in the world of phenomena. It has always seemed to me probable 

 that this was the truth which Spinoza had in his mind when he said that 

 extension was only one out of a perhaps infinite number of attributes 

 possessed by the universal substance. The possibility in question shows 

 that there is nothing in the doctrine of Mind- Stuff ^er se — Professor Clifford 

 to the contrary notwithstanding — to negative the belief either of the 

 spiritualist or of the theologian. It may or may not be the tendency 

 of physiological research to exclude the conceptions with which these two 

 classes of thinkers are concerned, but this exclusion can certainly not be 

 the result of an acceptance in its most general form of the doctrine here 

 described. On the other hand, there is equally little in it to encourage or 

 lend assistance to theological belief. The proposition that there is a dim 

 quasi- sen tiency pervading the world, is as far removed as possible from the 

 proposition that there are intelligences unconnected with any brain, and 

 this latter proposition, which is the essence of all spiritualism and theology, 

 can derive no support from the former. In regard to theology, then, the 

 doctrine of Mind- Stuff is neutral. It may rather be described as monistic 

 than as materiahstic. It affirms that there is only one Existence — that 

 which Herbert Spencer* speaks of as the "Substance of Mind" — and that 

 the supposed dualism of matter and spirit is an illusion. 



Akt. XVIII. — A Reply to Mr. Frankland' s paper on " The Doctrine of Mind- 

 Stuff.'" By C. W. EicHMOND, a Judge of the Supreme Court of New 

 Zealand. 



[Read before the Wellington Philosophical Society, 1st November, 1879. J 



Mk. Frankland's paper, + as suggesting a Monistic theory of the Universe, 

 is in entire accordance with a prevailing tendency of thought amongst 

 physical philosophers. To close the long contest of Spiritualist with 

 Materialist by cancelling the difference between inind and matter appears to 

 many persons at the present day an enterprise of which the ultimate success 

 is certain. " One substance," to quote the words of Professor Bain, " with 

 two sets of properties, two sides, the physical and the mental — a double- 



* To a hint thrown out in the concluding paragraph of Mr. Herbert Spencer's 

 chapter on " The Substance of Mind," I feel that I owe the suggestion of the doctrine. 



t Art. XVn., ante. 



