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end by tracing it back to the intelligent will and power of a personal 
• ° iy . ^ agency, ie invariable and without shadow of turn- 
icg, is not incompatible with the so-called rigorous necessity of natural 
laws, ^ I cannot see that my hypothesis is “subversive of chemical 
laws ” If experience proves, as my critic admits, that unconscious 
ideality (au impersonal ideal nature) is possible, and that it acts with 
the wise and unerring certainty of fixed and divinely-given law, then there 
is nothing absurd in the attribution to atoms (chemically or otherwise con- 
sidered) ot an “ideal or spiritual aspect,” as their fundamental and charac- 
teristic one. But I would not, from this impersonal though ideal quality of 
“ force ” and “ matter,” argue, like Hartmann, that God is impersonal. On 
the contrary, I cannot account for the less but by reference to the greater. 
The “ unconscious ” implies the conscious, from which it derives its owm in- 
ferior nature, and receives the law of its action and being. Nor would I, as 
my critic virtually does, argue on the same ground, that force and matter are 
utterly unideal, aud have nothing to do with spirit. For this would be at 
best but a guess, and seems to me opposed to all true principles of reasoning. 
Had my accomplished and indulgent critic paid attention to the distinction 
enforced by me in a previous paper* (on Final Cause) between real knowledge 
(of being) and phenomenal knowledge (scientific knowledge of co-existences 
and sequences), perhaps he would have judged my views less adversely, seeing 
that no argument from the latter (phenomenal knowledge) can overthrow the 
former. Our “chemical knowledge,” it is quite true, is “up to a certain 
point,” “ unquestionable.” But it is so only within the limits which circum- 
scribe all phenomenal knowledge. It is “ unquestionable ” in all that it affirms 
concerning the appearances of things and the laics of their action, in as far as 
these laws are open to sensible observation. But it quits its proper sphere, and 
is absolutely valueless, when it is made the principal or only basis of inferences 
concerning the intrinsic nature of things. I consider my position the only 
tenable one for those who would not be landed in, what I deem, the inherent 
absurdities of a doctrine of universal mechanism. It is also the only one 
which, in my judgment, rests on a basis of anything like solid reasoning 
whether deductive or inductive. The doctrine of the primacy of spirit over 
“ matter,” in the order and in the substance of human knowledge; and the 
other doctrine, that all created things bear the impress of the spiritual nature 
of the Creator, and m some degree, no matter how faint, by their own intrinsic 
essence, bear witness to that nature; these doctrines I hold to be fundamen- 
tally true, and of the highest consequence in any philosophy of theism. I 
must therefore stoutly protest against any tendency to make concessions to 
1 ic dilettante, mechanistic philosophers of our day, by admitting that the know- 
ledge ot which positive Science boasts, is or can be primary, and that its 
mechanical conceptions and methods arc to be accepted as fundamental and 
axiomatic m all philosophical inquiiics. It is not that mechanism is false, or 
* ^ ol. ix. page 170. 
