103 



nothing but will, and that the will of perhaps one Supreme 

 Intelligence/' He says, It does not seem an improbable conclu- 

 sion that all force may be will-force ; and thus that the whole 

 universe is not merely dependent on, but actually is, the will of 

 higher intelligences, or of one Supreme Intelligence/' We 

 at once grant that the universe is the manifestation of the will 

 of God, but is not that will itself, else it were God. He 

 acknowledges that when we touch matter, we experience sensa- 

 tions of resistance, implying repulsive force; but what resists and 

 what repels ? According to him it is the will of God only : 

 there is neither matter to resist, nor force to repel ; there is 

 nothing to touch, for God cannot be touched, and consequently 

 there can be neither touch, repulsion, nor resistance ; for 

 God is a spirit, and these cannot be predicated of spirit. 

 All material and all mental substances, in all their modes, 

 are, according to Mr. Wallace, states of the Divine conscious- 

 ness or will. Therefore no action can be wrong, for Divinity 

 must be always right ; no theory can be false, for Divinity must 

 be always true. It matters not whether we believe in matter 

 only, or in force only, or in will only; whether we be atheistic 

 or theistic ; whether we be followers of Moses or of Darwin, of 

 Huxley or of his vehement partisans : we are all believing that 

 which is absolutely true, for we are all the will of God ; we are 

 all one of God's states of existence. If this be not a fair in- 

 ference, or rather unavoidable deduction, from Mr. Wallace's 

 words, we will gladly retract when shown to be in error. 



9, Very much in accordance with this is the teaching of Mr. 

 C. Bray, who in his work on " Force and its Mental Correlates," 

 says (p. 47), Our faculties make us acquainted with qualities 

 or attributes without ourselves, and we assume that these must 

 be the qualities or attributes something, and we have called it 

 Matter ; we have feelings and ideas, and we equally assume 

 that they also must belong to something, and we call it Mind ; 

 but there is in reality nothing to which these mental and 

 physical attributes belong, — they exist per se as force and its 

 correlates. There is nothing underlying phenomena — phenomena 

 are correlates of force, and force is all. When we speak of 

 qualities, we indicate only how we are affected by force exter- 

 nal." It does seem a very natural assumption that a quality is 

 the quality of something. Mr. Bray acknowledges that we 

 know qualities and attributes, but denies that they belong to 

 anything; or, in other words, denies that they are qualities or 

 attributes, — asserts, in fact, that we are acquainted with the non- 

 existent. For to say that there is a quality, but nothing to pos- 

 sess a quality, is to deny the existence of the quality, as such. 

 Again, he says, "We have feelings;" but there is no one to whom 



