125 
1883.] The Brain Theory of Mind and Matter, 
judgments of experience or synthetic judgments d priori 
possible? thus: ‘The only way this can be done is 1o 
recognise from the first that thought and things are not 
diverse or dualistic. The one does not exist apart from the 
other. Objedts are not passively apprehended by the mind 
as something distindt from it, hut are actively constructed 
by it.' " * 
As I have already stated, the Absolute Idealism of Fichte 
and Hegel is by no means adopted by the authors of this 
treatise. They consider, with David Hume himself, that 
the real existence of Matter can be denied only by a meta- 
physical quibble, which carries no convidlion to any sane 
mind. Matter, so far from being a nonentity, is the fons et 
origo of all entities. In this connedtion, two of the annota- 
tions appended by Dr. Lewins, may profitably be studied. 
“ It must be steadily kept in mind — a fadt too apt in discus- 
sion to be lost sight of — that Hylo-Idealism, which deals 
alone with the relative, ignoring the absolute as utterly 
beyond human gnosis , in no sense denies the objedtive, but 
only contends for identity of objedt and subjedt, proved as it 
is by natural Realism itself, from the dodtrine of molecular 
metamorphosis , which shows the Ego continually undergoing 
transubstantiation with the Non-Ego, and vice versa, so as 
to form one indivisible organism. ”t Again — “I have always 
striven to render intelligible the significance of Hylo- 
Idealism by the following illustration : — Our bodies and the 
so-called external universe, — i.e., the Ego and Non-Ego, or, 
in other words, Subjedt and Objedt, — resemble a porous 
vessel of ice, filled with water, immersed in an infinite 
ocean. What is within and without, and the septum that 
seems to divide the two, are all three consubstantial or 
identical, and, owing to the porosity, always interchanging 
particles. So that, in reality, the seeming three are, like the 
mystic Athanasian Trinity, virtually one, and essentially 
indivisible. It is thus a distinction without real difference 
to speak of division between substances homogeneous and 
* One remark that, “ with all his originality, Kant never disengaged himself 
from much of the traditional nonsense of philosophy,” is susceptible of a far 
wider and deeper application than that intended by the Edinburgh reviewer. 
Kant started back in terror from the obvious consequences of his ov/n prin- 
ciples, and endeavoured to rebuild in the “ Critique of Practical Reason ” what 
the “ Critique of Pure Reason ” had pulled down. The persistently dualistic 
chara&er of his thought is well illustrated by his famous confession of the 
awe inspired by two things, — the order of the starry heavens and the moral 
law in the human mind. A consistent Monist must have felt that these 
“two” are essentially one. 
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