486 The Order of the Universe. [June, 



idea of deity has also been made dual, including a good and evil 

 principle, at war with each other. The evil principle, though 

 nominally the weaker, is, in the current belief, allowed to succeed 

 in the ruin of the future of the great majority of individual souls. 

 Thus a dualist has at least a definite philosophy, one which, how- 

 ever it may be doubted, can never be disproved ; and one which, 

 however it may be believed, can never be proved. 



Leaving dualism for a while, let us consider how monism can 

 explain consciousness ; let us see if it has yet fixed upon a definite 



II. Matter, Force and Consciousness. 

 The exigencies of language compel us to give names to ex- 

 press ideas which are not things, and it is a tendency of the hu- 

 man mind to figuratively speak of these names as though they 

 were objects, and too often to conceive of them as actual objects. 

 The word " matter," in the strict monistic sense, must include all 

 properties exhibited by matter just as surely as the name " man' 

 must be held to include all the physical and moral properties of 

 man. Just as justice is an abstraction of our language put in- 

 stead of" the state of being just," so is force an abstract term 

 meaning " the state of being forcible," and consciousness an ab- 

 stract noun meaning " the state of being conscious." The latter 

 word is in its very shape clearly a nominal form of the adjective 

 conscious, but in the case of force it is less easy to define, 

 since the adjective " forcible " is commonly held in a more limi- 

 ted sense than # the noun force, which is usually adjectived by 

 the words "potential" and "kinetic" (actual), dependent upon 

 whether the matter having force is using that quality internally 

 or externally. " Latent heat," " potential energy," and other 

 similar phrases, must be held simply to mean that a certain 

 quantity of matter, not at the moment exhibiting heat or energy 

 to our senses, may, under changed conditions, be made to do so, 

 whilst " sensible heat " and "kinetic energy " mean the exhibition 

 of those properties to our senses by portions of the universal 



But there is a particular exhibition of force, residing only in 

 certain complex and unstable compounds, which differs so widely 

 from other forces that we are compelled to give it a distinct name 

 —consciousness. Unable to explain how consciousness can be 

 produced, yet forced to acknowledge that it has never been me 



