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business to be astonished, but to deal calmly with them from a philoso- 
phical and not from a theological point of view ; and this we shall 
endeavour to do as briefly as possible. 
If we believed that the author meant by his broad declaration concerning 
“ all the phenomena of the universe,” that all material operations in nature 
are carried on through the instrumentality of secondary causes, we should 
(as would most of our readers) quite agree with him, and should experi- 
ence some surprise that he considers it necessary to tell the world so ; but 
from the mode’in which lie braces together “blind force” and “conscious 
intellect and will,” which he regards as “ co-ordinated terms in nature’s 
great progression,” we are not able to put this construction on his words. 
Let us for an instant test the accuracy of this generalization, which we 
can do without departing from the field of scientific inquiry. 
Heat, as we understand it, is a “ mode of motion ;” and when a moving 
material form comes to a standstill, or when it changes its nature, motion 
ceases, and becomes converted or transformed into heat, and vice versu. In 
like manner, according to the author’s general law, when an individual brain 
ceases to act as a brain, that particular mode of action, thought or intellect, 
ceases to be ; and the matter having been converted into a plant, the action 
of thought becomes growth, and the brain no longer thinks, but — say, as a 
cabbage — grows. 
If the author meets us by stating that he has not denied the independent 
existence of thought or intellect — that the matter of the brain only grows, 
just as it afterwards grows in the cabbage — then we must inquire what he 
means when he says elsewhere'"" that “ all functions, intellectual, moral, 
and others, are the expression or the result in the long run of structures, 
and of the molecular forces which they exert.” 
We shall be glad to hear that he means something that we have been 
unable to discover ; meanwhile we must take his meaning to be as above 
stated, and turning to his neosophy for “ evidences ” of the truth of this 
doctrine, we find — what ? 
First, — That man has a secular period in his existence. 
Then is his spiritual existence that of a cabbage or cauliflower? 
Secondly, — That he reflects occasional rays from the “source of truth,” 
which rays have transfigured his nature. 
Then what becomes of these rays, or of their influence on him, after his 
brain has ceased to reflect them ? Do they also act in the turnip or 
broccoli ? 
And again, the new philosophy teaches that “ the highest faculties of 
feeling and intellect begin to germinate in lower forms,” and that there is 
“ no mental distinction between man and the animals which immediately 
precede him in the scale (a generalization which the author is shrewd 
enough to perceive to be indispensable to the complete acceptance of his 
physical teachings). 
But what evidence have we of the truth of these broad assertions? Is 
it to be found in the statement that “man is the only consciously intelligent 
denizen of the world?” or that he alone is capable of “reflecting rays 
* Lectures, p. 154, par. 2. 
