" COWARDLY AGNOSTICISM." 247 



and the question of human freedom is nothing if not practical. 

 What then is gained — is anything gained — is the case in any way 

 altered — by telling ourselves that, though there is certainty in the 

 case, there is no necessity ? Suppose I held a loaded pistol to 

 Prof. Huxley's ear, and offered to pull the trigger, should I recon- 

 cile him to the operation by telling him that, though it certainly 

 would kill him, there was not the least necessity that it should do 

 so ? And with regard to volition and action, as the result of pre- 

 ceding causes, is not the case precisely similar ? Let Prof. Huxley 

 turn to all the past actions of humanity. Can he point to any 

 smallest movement of any single human being, which has not been 

 the product of causes, which in their turn have been the product 

 of other causes ? Or can he point to any causes which, under 

 given conditions, could have produced any effects other than those 

 they have produced, unless he uses the word could in the foolish 

 and fantastic sense which would enable him to say that unsup- 

 ported stones could possibly fly upward ? For all practical pur- 

 poses the distinction between must and will is neither more nor 

 less than a feeble and childish sophism. Theoretically no doubt 

 it will bear this meaning — that the Unknowable might have so 

 made man, that at any given moment he could be a different be- 

 ing : but it does nothing to break the force of what all science 

 teaches us — that man, formed as he is, can not act otherwise than 

 as he does. The universe may have no necessity at the back of 

 it; but its presence and its past alike are a necessity at the back of 

 us ; and it is not necessity, but it is doubt of necessity, that is 

 really " the shadow of our own mind's throwing." 



And now let us face Prof. Huxley's other argument, which is 

 to save life from degradation by taking away the reproach from 

 matter. If it is true, he tells us, to say that everything, mind in- 

 cluded, is matter, it is equally true to say that everything, matter 

 included, is mind ; and thus, he argues, the dignity we all attribute 

 to mind, at once is seen to diffuse itself throughout the entire uni- 

 verse. Mr. Herbert Spencer puts the same view thus : 



Such an attitude of mind [contempt for matter and dread of materialism] is 

 significant not so much of a reverence for the Unknown Cause, as of an irrever- 

 ence for those familiar forms in which the Unknown Cause is manifested to us.* 

 . . . But whoever remembers that the forms of existence of which the unculti- 

 vated apeak with so mnch scorn . . . are found to he the more marvelous the 

 more they are investigated, and are also to be found to be in their natures abso- 

 lutely incomprehensible . . . will see that the course proposed [a reduction of all 

 things to terras of matter] does not imply a degradation of the so-called higher, 

 but an elevation of the so-called lower. 



The answer to this argument, so far as it touches any ethical 

 or religious question, is at once obvious and conclusive. The one 



* " First Principles," p. 556. 



