( iSi ) 



CHAPTER X. 



THE ATTEMPT TO ELIMINATE MIND. 



What, it may be asked, were our biologists really 

 aiming at? — for men like Professor Huxley do not 

 serve protoplasm for nought. They wanted a good 

 many things, some of them more righteous than 

 others, but all intelligible. Among the more lawful 

 of their desires was a craving after a monistic con- 

 ception of the universe. We all desire this ; who can 

 turn his thoughts to these matters at all and not 

 instinctively lean towards the old conception of one 

 suprenie and ultimate essence as the source from 

 which all things proceed and have proceeded, both 

 now and ever ? The most striking and apparently 

 most stable theory of the last quarter of a century has 

 been Sir WUliam Grove's theory of the conservation 

 of energy; and yet wherein is there any substantial 

 difference between this recent outcome of modem 

 amateur, and hence most sincere, science — pointing as 

 it does to an imperishable, and as such unchangeable, 

 and as such, again, for ever unknowable underlying 

 substance the modes of which alone change — wherein, 

 except in mere verbal costume, does this differ from 

 the conclusions arrived at by the psalmist ? 



