EiCHMOND. — Reply to Mr. Frankland's paper on " Mind-Stuf.'" 221 



he lias, of coiu'se, a right to discard any part of their doctrine which he 

 conceives to be unsound. But the disciple often finds himself involved, by 

 a partial departure from the established creed of his sect, in unexpected 

 inconsistency. With this preface, I wish to cite a few Imes from Professor 

 Bain's " Compendium" (Apioendix, p. 98 j. After asserting that, " Every- 

 thing that we know, or can conceive, may be termed a quality or attribute," 

 he pertinently inquires, what is left to stand for ' substance ?' — and answers 

 the query as follows : — " One way out of the difficulty is to postulate 

 an unknown and unknowable entity, underlying, and in some mysterious 

 way holding together, the various attributes. "We are said to be driven by 

 an intuitive and in-esistible tendency to make this assumption ; which 

 intuition is held to justify us in such an extreme measure. There is an 

 unknowable substance, "matter," the subject of the attribute inertia, and 

 of all the special modes of the different lands of matter — gold, marble, 

 water, oxygen, and the rest. The same hypothetical unknown entity is 

 expressed in another antithesis — the noumenon as against the phenomenon ; 

 what is, in contrast to what appears." Now, Mr, Frankland seems to think 

 that in the particular class of experiences which he has selected he has 

 evaded the difficulty insisted upon by Bain. Self-consciousness has given 

 him entrance behind the scenes of external Nature which he can now con- 

 template ab intra. He needs not " to postulate an unknown and unknow- 

 able entity," since he is himself the entity observed. In the co-related 

 phenomena of intellect and brain he seems to recognize himself as self- 

 conscious substance, simultaneously cognizant of his own being, of the 

 material organism with which it is allied, and of the nexus between the 

 two. This is his key to the enigma of the Kosmos. If I interpret him 

 rightly, he has at all events emerged from Phenomenalism, and may be 

 welcomed over by the Ontologists. Differing, as I do myself, from Professor 

 Bain, I cannot here press his authority upon Mr. Frankland. In regard to 

 the idea of "substance," Mr. Frankland is clearly at liberty to reject Bain's 

 characteristic attempt to explain away a notion which human thought can- 

 not dispense with, and will ever insist upon supplying. Nor should I 

 quarrel with the application, to mind, of the term " substance," which is 

 properly a metaphysical notion. The use of the term in theology is familiar. 

 Spinoza regards God as a substance. But every argument which I have 

 adduced to show that the cerebral changes are not effects of mental causes 

 within our consciousness is also valid to prove that they are not accidents 

 or motions of our own mental substance. This supposed substance is, be 

 it remembered, ex hypothesi, a self-conscious entity, and could not be 

 ignorant of its own vibration, or even of its own capability of vibration. 

 Besides which, as I have already iirged, the changes, or vibrations, are 



