1884.] 
Hylo- Idealism f 
389 
illustrated make it possible for man to live with his 
fellow. 
C. N. and his followers should consult German scholas- 
ticism if they wished for a classical disquisition on the 
theory of the Sophist. It were a better inspiration than 
Dr. Buchner and their own Messiah. When he says that 
Erigena, Averroes, and Bruno found in Pantheism “ their 
spiritual home,” he shows he has never read their works, — 
if he has, then he has not understood the theses they pro- 
pounded.* With such authors, and too frequently with 
their readers, a parade of grand names is all-sufficient ; it 
is no matter whether wrongly quoted or ignorantly intro- 
duced, they go to make up the claptrap ; but perhaps C. N. 
may stand excused when a man known to fame endeavoured 
to make Bruno and Gassendi — one of the finest intellects of 
his time — the stalking-horses for his own Materialism. 
Carlyle and Goethe were not spared, and the great science of 
Maxwell introduced withasneer; and the ethic glow was a me- 
chanical monstrosity which existed only in hisown conception. 
It is quite true “ If our simple sensuous percep- 
tions are the result of cerebral organisation, it is evident 
the same must be affirmed of the ideas produced from their 
syntheses.” Well may we have an “ if”: it is evident C. N. 
was not convinced, despite the positive affirmation of the 
notes. He then kindly tells us — “ Though incapable of 
universal scepticism, and forced to assume the real existence 
of some protoplasmic substance generating all those images 
of which our consciousness is composed, we shall not clothe 
this protoplasm with Divine attributes, and bow in worship 
of the absolute and unknowable.” He says that the 
Agnostics are but half-hearted ; but this may be said, that 
whatever may be their conclusions the leaders of the move- 
ment are generally men of high science, and do not glean 
digests in order to establish their problem. The Agnostic 
holds that the existence of anything beyond and behind 
material phenomena is unknown and (so far as can be judged) 
unknowable, and especially that a first cause and an unseen 
world are subjects of which we know nothing; thus contra- 
vening the scientific parallel that the unknown shall be 
interpreted by the known. The phrase Agnostic is said to 
* If C. N. desires to know what was the teaching of Erigena (with his 
ideas Bruno greatly concurred), he will find a Synopsis of Erigena’s work 
“ De Divisione Naturae” in the fourth volume of Sharon Turner’s “Middle 
Ages ” (p. 417 et infra) ; he will find something more than Pantheism there. 
Erigena’s work on the Vision of God has eluded modern research. Nor in 
the account of Averroes and Bruno will he find any status for his assertion 
(vide Draper’s “ Conflict of Science and Religion ”). 
