REPLIES TO CRITICISMS. 299 



in those having them, imperatively demand beliefs that Sir W. Ham- 

 ilton would regard as untrue. A New-Zealand chief, discovering his 

 wife in an infidelity, killed the man ; the wife then killed herself that 

 she might join her lover in the other world; and the chief thereupon 

 killed himself that he might go after them to defeat this intention. 

 These two acts of suicide furnish tolerably strong evidence that these 

 New-Zealanders believed in another world to which they could go at 

 will, and fulfill their desires as they did here. If they were asked the 

 justification for this belief, and if the arguments by which they sought 

 to establish it were not admitted, they might still fall back on emo- 

 tional consciousness as yielding them an unshakable foundation for it. 

 I do not see why a Feejee-Islander, adopting the Hamiltonian argument, 

 should not justify by it his conviction that, after being buried alive, 

 his life in the other world, forthwith commencing at the age he has 

 reached in this, will similarly supply him with the joys of conquest 

 and the gratifications of cannibalism. That he has a conviction to 

 this effect stronger than the religious convictions current among civil- 

 ized people is proved by the fact that he goes to be buried alive quite 

 willingly ; and, as we may presume that his conviction is not the out- 

 come of a demonstration, it must be the outcome of some state of 

 feeling — some " emotional consciousness." Why, then, should he not 

 assign the " facts " of his " emotional consciousness " as " imperatively 

 demanding "this belief? Manifestly, this principle, that " conscious- 

 ness must be accepted entire," either obliges us to accept as true the 

 superstitions of all mankind, or else obliges us to say that the con- 

 sciousness of a certain limited class of cultivated people is alone meant. 

 If things are to be believed simply because the facts of emotional con- 

 sciousness imperatively demand them, I do not see why the actual 

 existence of a ghost in a house is not inevitably implied by the intense 

 fear of it that is aroused in the child or the servant. 



Lastly, and chiefly, I have to deal with Dr. Mansel's statement 

 that " Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, takes these negative inferences 

 as the only basis of religion." This statement is exactly the reverse 

 of the truth, since I have contended, against Hamilton and against 

 him, that the consciousness of that which is manifested to us through 

 phenomena is positive, and not negative as they allege, and that this 

 positive consciousness supplies an indestructible basis for the religious 

 sentiment (" First Principles," § 26). Instead of giving here passages 

 to show this, I may fitly quote the statement and opinion of a foreign 

 theologian. M. le pasteur Grotz, of the Reformed Church at Nismes, 

 writes thus : 



" Is Science, then, the natural enemy of Keligion ? To preserve our re- 

 ligion, must we cry Science down ? Why, Science, experimental Science, is now 

 beginning to speak in favor of Keligion ; and it is Science that is about to reply 

 at once to M. Vacherot and to M. Comte through the mouth of one of the think- 

 ers of our age, Mr. Herbert Spencer." .... 



