May 30, 1884.] 
simple question which nowadays the plain man 
puts whenever he hears of such a discussion as 
this. The objection to ‘ vital force’ and ‘ im- 
material agents’ in the plain man’s mind is, 
that they are like the ‘dormitive virtue’ of 
opium. They are just w and y, used where 
all hypotheses of a more definite nature just 
now fail to do the required work; and they 
simply say that some conditions not now better 
known must be present to cause certain phe- 
nomena, such as those of life, or such as the 
phenomena of the human mind. They differ 
from x and y only in being less frank expres- 
sions of ignorance. They masquerade (so 
thinks our plain man) in the long-clothes of 
Latin or Greek terms; but they are none the 
_ better for that, and we are none the wiser. 
Now, Professor Coues altogether neglects, in 
his discussion, to set the plain man’s mind at 
rest about this matter, so far as this objection 
would apply to his biogen. Apart from the 
wildest assumptions concerning the ‘ ether’ or 
the ‘ astral fluid,’ Professor Coues has nothing 
to say in favor of biogen, save that nobody 
can make living matter, and that nobody can 
explain the origin of our minds. Hence, he 
reasons, the soul is immortal, and biogen is a 
fact. 
All this is of course tedious. We have 
long since abandoned such methods. Materi- 
alism, as a philosophic theory, is indeed un- 
tenable enough, and no intelligent student of 
philosophy in our day is apt to become an old- 
fashioned dogmatic materialist; but heaven 
knows, that, if such arguments as this of our 
author were our only refuge from materialism, 
we should all forthwith be either materialists 
or word-mongers. 
Such thinkers as Professor Coues lets him- 
self be joined with in this lecture, have no 
genuine conception of what a philosophic prob- 
lem is. ‘To them materialism is a doctrine to 
be combated by talking about the mysterious 
character of life, and the possibility of ‘ semi- 
material’ substances. ‘They do not see, that 
if the spiritual character of the world, and the 
supremacy of reason in it, are to be proved at 
all, they must be so proved as to make reason 
actually manifest in all parts of the world. If 
an atom or a brick-bat, however incomplete an 
expression of reason it may be, is not as truly 
an embodiment of the rational and spiritual 
reality that lies at the foundation of things as 
is the best-organized structure on the planet, 
then there is no truth at all in a spiritual theory 
of the world. ‘Therefore let nobody fancy that 
he proves or disproves the world to be rational 
or spiritual by proving or disproving that there 
SCIENCE. 
663 
are one or two subtle fluids in it more or less 
than had been noticed before. If life result 
from an altogether unique natural ‘ force,’ so 
be it. Prove and make plain the meaning of 
the fact, and we shall be as content with it as 
with any other natural truth. But that proof 
would not make life one atom more or less 
spiritually significant than it now is. The 
moral and the rational order of the universe 
would be in no wise more or less manifest ; the 
fallacy of philosophic materialism would be no 
more or less evident; and, if we could make 
shiploads of Shakspeares in our laboratories 
to-day, the spiritual nature of things would be 
no less certain. Discussions that dwell with 
rapture on possible, vaguely defined, mysteri- 
ous, ‘ semi-material ’ fluids and potencies, help 
us no nearer to the explanation or to the proof 
of the rational truth of things, and do help us 
to think less rationally ourselves. 
There are, in fact, two forms of idealism 
prevalent amongst us. One we might call the 
mendicant form of idealism ; since it is always 
begging the world of experience to show us 
something fantastic, romantic, intangible, un- 
utterable, so that we may live in awe as at a 
juggler’s show. To this view God is himself 
a sort of showman, who likes to hear our out- 
bursts of wonder when he does odd things. 
Such idealists are never so sure of the spiritual 
truth of things as when somebody has just 
finished a ghost-story. Or, if they abandon 
this fashion of idealism, they devote themselves 
to inventing halfway substances, too fine to be 
seen or touched, too subtle to be reached by 
physical experiments of any sort, far less the 
objects of experience than is the universal 
ether an object of experience, and unlike the 
ether in having no definable properties. These 
they glory in. ‘These are the earnest to them 
that our world is not commonplace nor gross, 
but the offspring of reason, the dwelling-place 
of God’s power. 
To such idealism Professor Coues seems 
willing to join himself. His idealism, it would 
seem, would be in some danger if we found 
how to produce live germs in our laboratories. 
He hints at mysterious stories of a super- 
natural character as indicating something about 
the nature of biogen. He seems to depend 
on the phenomena that are not yet explained, 
as the sole foundation for a spiritual theory 
of the world; and he seems, meanwhile, to 
suppose himself a kind of Elijah among those 
worshippers of Baal, the materialists. Only 
believers in the fantastic and indefinable can 
be idealists ; and he is one of the few faithful. 
But there is another form of idealism in the 
