874 
ETCC.] [March 1,. 
tn one half paragraph he confesses to a contradiction—to two opposite 
conclusions : that the theory he has announced as logically true, he him- 
self does not believe! Thus he says: ‘And, most undoubtedly, the 
terms of the propositions are distinctly materialistic. Nevertheless, two 
things are certain : the one, that I hold the statements to be substantially 
true ; the other, that I, individually, am no materialist, but, on the con- 
trary, believe materialism to involve grave philosophical error.’”’ Dr. 
Huxley has not said this to accommodate himself to the orthodox 
opinion of men. He who takes occasion frequently to encounter and 
brave that opinion cannot thus have insincerely conformed to it. He is 
obviously too candid and too brave for that. He seems in all his conduct 
to follow what he takes to be the truth, fearless of consequences. But 
what, then, must be our judgment of him? Can it be other than this: 
that he is possessed of a truer logic, based upon vastly more facts than 
the few embraced in his protoplastic theory ; and that his individual be- 
lief, for which he has not given us the grounds, contains the actual truth; 
and that, consequently, we have Huxley’s authority to condemn em- 
phatically Huxley’s theory, built upon ‘‘the Physical Basis of Life.’? But 
who will answer for his insincerity to the truth of science? For the con- 
sequences of the infidelity he has preached in his sermon? He proposes 
to conduct his hearers out of the slough, into which he confesses he had 
plunged them, and meant to plunge them ; but we read on to the end of 
the discourse in the vain expectation of finding the stepping-stones that 
would conduct us out of the slough to the firm land. Does he not in this 
trifle with his own and the understandings of men? His philosophical 
speculation is one thing ; his individual opinion is another. He describes 
no mitigated materialism that represents his own conviction. That which 
he has explained makes his uttered thoughts but matter; for these, he 
says, ‘‘are the molecular changes of that matter of life which is the 
source of our other vital phenomena.’’ And this is his hopeful and con- 
fident assertion: ‘‘And as surely as every future grows out of past and 
present, so will the physiology of the future extend the realm of matter 
and law, until it is co-extensive with knowledge, with feeling, and with 
action.’”’ ‘Thus the science of the physical basis of life is to absorb the 
mental and emotional, and make all one, all physical ;—all to have but a 
physical basis and a physical consummation. And yet, again, he con- 
fesses to two hopeful beliefs, but flagrantly at variance with his preten- 
sion for physiology : ‘‘The first, that the order of nature is ascertainable 
by our faculties to an extent which is practically unlimited ; the second, 
that our volition counts for something as a condition of the course of 
events.”? Yet neither of these could, logically, be a true belief, if man 
be but the product of matter and law, and these be taken as sole sources 
of his knowledge, feeling, and action; for all would yet be fatalism as 
well as paralyzing materialism. Indeed, there could be no thought, if all 
were matter. Mere changes of molecular matter could not be means to 
expand our knowledge, or rule the course of human events. What would 
it be to the world and its events, that the material of my brain had un- 
