3°6 
Correspondence. 
[May, 
generation of formal physicists, and even by far-seeing elder 
ones, like Leibnitz, free from academic myopia. That encyclo- 
pedic and cosmopolitan thinker, indeed, expressly complained to 
the Princess of Wales, afterwards Queen Caroline, that Newton, 
by his “ revival of occult causes,” had destroyed the very essence 
of Natural Religion, It was long considered abroad that such 
was the case ; it was the all but universal belief, even when 
Voltaire and Madame du Chatelet popularised the Newtonian 
Physics, well on in the 18th century, ac which epoch — long after 
Newton’s death in extreme old age — only a handful of continental 
geometers were converts to the much-decried English Materialism. 
The chief objections were on the score of its irreligion, on its 
abrogation of spiritual influx or impulse, — a point Halley at once 
recognised, thereby earning the reputation of Atheism, which 
eventually alienated him from the founder of that sublime system 
he himself had done so much to establish. Since the publication 
of the “ Principia,” then, in 1687, — one year before the English 
Revolution, — it seems perfectly certain that Materialistic Monism, 
not Spiritualistic Dualism, has been the watchword of the Uni- 
verse.* The idea, therefore, of a caput mortuum, inert Matter, 
“ animated ” by Spirit, which to me seems, moreover, a quite 
incoherent and inconceivable hypothesis, has not only no locus 
standi whatever, but is relegated to the limbo of other exploded 
provisional pseudo- sciences, as Alchemy, Astrology, Phrenology, 
&c., by all the canons of Physics and Logic. Mind is clearly 
seen to be only the dynamical condition of the cerebral vesiculo- 
neurine, as Motion is of Muscle. It is just as absurd and un- 
tenable to teach, or hold, the union of two separate entities, 
Mind and Matter, as it would be in the case of Muscle and 
Motion. The two cases are self-evidently quite parallel, and 
resolve themselves into that of Organ and Function, Mind or 
Sense being the special function of one strudlure and region of 
bodily tissue, as Motion is of another. So that the non-existence 
of soul or spirit in an ontological sense — for etymologically the 
terms mean only breath or life (soul), i.e., the sum total of the 
organic functions — has been a settled question for nearly two 
centuries ! It is the same thesis as that of a Vital Principle or 
Archceus, which all sound Medical Science has long since aban- 
doned. It is another instance of the Phlogiston delusion so fatal 
to scientific Chemistry, yet clung to so fervidly by the discoverer 
of oxygen. All of sentient immortality, therefore, we can inherit 
is the sense, or idea, of it in our present body ; which somatic 
entity, and not some “ I know not what ” of an impalpable 
* I may here notice the virulent opposition to the “ Atheistic Principles 
deducible from the Newtonian Physics,” by John Hutchinson, author of 
“ Moses Principia,” who bitterly arraigned also Woodward’s “ Natural 
History ” on the score of impiety. His sedt, of which Bishop Horne and the 
Rev. Wm, Jones, of Nayland, were the most conspicuous polemics, became 
extindt only so late as in 1800. 
