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with previous explorers and fellow-travellers — children of faith 
and thought, from whom he must own he may have some- 
thing to learn. We now part, however, with Professor Clifford. 
64. It is not to be disguised that there is much that is unsa- 
tisfactory in some vital parts of the Scientific statement given us. 
That “ Matter” may, according to one hypothesis, be 
nothing — the stuff of the whole Universe being all “ matter” 
and energy, — is “hazy” indeed; (while by others we are told 
that matter contains the “potency of all things.”) Then, as to 
Continuity. It is properly enough expressed as the ButtheLaw 
natural expectation of all Rationality. But this im- of continuity 
plies much more, of course, than continuity of form, stated^^he 
Our Rationality expects a continuity, including the authors - 
idea of Means and End. This is too little noticed, by far; 
indeed not directly so at all in this controversy: it is slurred 
over. Take this away, and our Rationality is as much “con- 
founded ” as it would be by the denial of Continuity altogether. 
If the very confident tone of later science has, as our 
authors intimate, been unworthy, surely the acknowledgment 
should have been accompanied, in such an argument as theirs, 
by a little more hesitation as to conclusions deduced from such 
very indefinite premisses. Again, when physical law has 
been admitted entirely to fail to account for the production 
of life, is it at all right to resolve that physical Continuity 
shall be assumed as the condition of life? To resolve that 
physical, though attenuated, matter is the basis of the In- 
visible or Unseen Universe, which yet lies beyond all physi- 
cal experience, is at least, we once more say, gratuitous. 
Again, if all we know of the constituents of the Visible Uni- 
verse be called molecules and ether; and if molecules be but 
coagulated atoms, and matter nothing, as Faraday inclined to 
say, but an imaginary centre of “relations,” then (even though 
Professor Clifford’s question be wholly set aside, “whether mole- 
cules and ether represent any object external to our minds ”?) 
this ought to be some check to the very knowing-seeming 
way in which the motion of molecules is constantly talked of, 
as if men of “ Science” understood all about it. 
65. Or again: If “Ether” is thought to be coagulated 
“ molecules,” molecules to be coagulated “ atoms,” atoms (if 
anything) to be “ electric currents,” or to convey And the 
them; if “Perfect Fluid” is not made of molecules jj e ' 
at all ; (and so may be hard for the mind to distin- least incom- 
guish from a perfect void) ; how are “matter” and plete- 
the “ fluid ” related at all ? 
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