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scientific consistency lie calls a machine. If this agent or 
force within is nothing more than an idealized abstraction, 
this abstraction discoursed most eloquently from the chair 
of the Midland Institute. Again : If we know nothing 
about the knowing process or the knowing agent, then what 
confidence have we in what it knows of matter ? If physical 
science and its methods are to furnish bounds to what we 
know and to impose law as to how we are to know it, then 
we know something about the spiritual activity which we call 
knowledge and the agent which exercises its functions. To 
say that the only species of existence which this agent can 
know is matter and its laws, and that every kind of activity 
which we can explain must be explained by material relations, 
or the so-called methods of physical science, is to beg the 
question to begin with, but in the very terms in which we beg 
it we assume that that function which we call knowledge has 
supreme authority and gives law and authority to itself and 
the science which it creates. 
But here Prof. Tyndall takes another step in advance. He 
graciously concedes to those who desire to do so the liberty 
to think and speak of the soul as the poetic rendering of 
peculiar phenomena when abstractly conceived, provided only 
that they will admit that in all these phenomena it obeys the 
law of necessity that rules in the world of matter. This, 
indeed, is the last point which he makes, and upon this he 
dwells at very great length. He introduces the discussion by 
saying : “ Amid all our speculative uncertainty, there is one 
practical point as clear as the day — namely, that the bright- 
ness and the usefulness of life, as well as its darkness and 
disaster, depend to a great extent upon our own use of this 
miraculous organ,” i.e., the brain. This means, that whether we 
are spirit or no it is certain we are brain, and what we are and 
what we become depends upon the use or abuse of this organ. 
But does not this imply that we are free, — for if we are not 
free how can we be responsible ? Here “ we stand face to 
face with the final problem ; it is this, — Are the brain and the 
moral and intellectual processes known to be associated with 
the brain * * * subjected to the laws which we find 
paramount in physical nature ? ” To this inquiry he gives the 
following as his answer, in a rambling series of remarks, which 
we shall seek to follow and condense as best we may. 
First, he observes, that Fichte recoiled from the thought of 
necessity in a well-known volume which records the struggle 
between his head and his heart. His recoil was so violent 
that rather than subject man to nature he made nature subject 
to man, creating nature out of the free actings of the spirit. 
VOL. XIII. H 
