262 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap. xVII 



phenomena at present addressing you knows nothing. In fact, 

 if I am pushed, metaphysical speculation lands me exactly where 

 your friend Raphael was when his bitch pupped. In other 

 words, I believe in Hamilton, Mansell and Herbert Spencer 

 so long as they are destructive, and I laugh at their beards as 

 soon as they try to spin their own cobwebs. 



Is this basis of ignorance broad enough for you? If you, 

 theologian, can find as firm footing as I, man of science, do on 

 this foundation of minus nought — there will be nought to fear 

 for our ever diverging. 



For you see I am quite as ready to admit your doctrine that 

 souls secrete bodies as I am the opposite one that bodies secrete 

 souls — simply because I deny the possibility of obtaining any 

 evidence as to the truth and falsehood of either hypothesis. My 

 fundamental axiom of speculative philosophy is that materialism 

 and spiritualism are opposite poles of the same absurdity — the 

 absurdity of imagining that we know anything about either 

 spirit or matter. 



Cabanis and Berkeley (I speak of them simply as types of 

 schools) are both asses, the only difference being that one is a 

 black donkey and the other a white one. 



This universe is, I conceive, like to a great game being 

 played out, and we poor mortals are allowed to take a hand. 

 By great good fortune the wiser among us have made out some 

 few of the rules of the game, as at present played. We call 

 them " Laws of Nature," and honour them because we find 

 that if we obey them we win something for our pains. The 

 cards are our theories and hypotheses, the tricks our experi- 

 mental verifications. But what sane man would endeavour to 

 solve this problem : given the rules of a game and the winnings, 

 to find whether the cards are made of pasteboard or gold- 

 leaf? Yet the problem of the metaphysicians is to my mind 

 no saner. 



If you tell me that an Ape differs from a Man because the 

 latter has a soul and the ape has not, I can only say it may be 

 so; but I should uncommonly like to know how either that the 

 ape has not one or that the man has. 



And until you satisfy me as to the soundness of your method 

 of investigation, I must adhere to what seems to my mind a 

 simpler form of notation — i.e. to suppose that all phenomena 

 have the same substratum (if they have any), and that soul 

 and body, or mental and physical phenomena, are merely diverse 

 manifestations of that hypothetical substratum. In this way, 



