of Edinburgh^ Session 1864 - 65 . 291 
by mau. The fewer those elementary forces, the greater must be 
the mental power, and skill, and knowledge, under which they are 
yoked to such various use. And it is apparently out of a small 
number of elementary forces, having fixed rules too, limiting their 
combination, that all the infinite varieties of organic and inorganic 
matter are built up by means of nice adjustment. As all the 
faculties of a powerful mind can utter their voice in language 
whose elements are reducible to twenty-four letters, so all the 
forms of nature, with all the ideas they express, are worked out 
from a few simple forces, having a few simple properties. 
And here I cannot help saying that I do not share in the im- 
pression which is felt by many, that the progress of modern in- 
vestigation is in a direction tending to materialism. Of course I 
am not speaking of what may be the tone of individual minds. 
But I do speak, and with strong conviction, of the general bearing 
of scientific truth. I not only do not share in that impression, 
but I entertain an exactly opposite belief. Nothing is more re- 
markable in the present state of physical research than what 
may be called the transcendental character of its results. And 
what is transcendentalism but the tendency to trace up all things 
to the relation in which they stand to abstract ideas ? And what 
is this but to bring all physical phenomena nearer and nearer into 
relation with the phenomena of mind ? Is this materialism ? 
Some of the ablest writers who have incurred reasonable suspicion 
as to the drift of their teaching, nevertheless give witness most em- 
phatically to what I would call the purely mental quality of the 
ultimate results of physical inquiry. Mr Lewes, whose work on 
Aristotle I have already quoted, says, ‘‘ The fundamental ideas of 
-modern science are as transcendental as any of the axioms in 
ancient philosophy.”* And this is true. Let us look for a moment 
on the light, small as it may be, which physiology has cast on the 
great mystery of Life. We never see Life separate from some ma- 
terial organisation. Yet what is the doctrine proclaimed, I believe, 
first, by the great John Hunter, and now emphatically repeated by 
men like Professor Huxley and Dr Carpenter ? It is that organisa- 
tion is not the cause of Life, but Life is the cause of organisation. 
* Lewes’ Aristotle, p. 66. 
