construe the act of creation only by conceiving the power manifested in 
creation to have been before existing potentially in the Person of the Deity, 
and to have come into an existence cognisable by us by his creative Fiat. 
Now to reply to my esteemed friend Professor Griffith. He asks what is 
my authority for saying that cause and effect must be in eadem materia, in 
the same plane. He instances fire and pain ; motion of the keys of a piano, 
and our sensation of sound, in both of which he affirms the cause is not in 
the same plane as the effect. To this I beg to demur. It is the physical 
nerve which is submitted to the action of the physical fire, and these are in 
the same plane. ’ It is the mind that feels in that nerve, but it is the nerve 
to which what causes the feeling is applied. As for ourselves, we are both 
mind and matter, and hence are open to receive impressions on both these 
sides of our being. In the same way, Professor Griffith’s illustration of the 
motion of a piano’s keys and our sensation of sound seems to me unable to 
prove his assertion. The waves of [physical] air made by the motion of the 
strings of the piano beat upon the [physical] auditory nerve, which nerve 
since it is matter, can receive their impact, and since it contains mind can 
also interpret that impact in terms of consciousness. I submit, therefore, 
that in both the instances cited Professor Griffith is altogether wrong. I 
have a very profound sense of the value of his judgment in general, but, on 
this occasion, I am utterly unable to regard it as sound or just. In conclusion, 
permit me to thank him, and you all for the very kind way in which my 
paper has been received. 
(The meeting was then adjourned.) 
Further Reply by the Author. 
During the meeting I was unable to make out the exact drift of the second 
part of Professor Griffith’s criticism, wherein he stated that I had seriously 
misapprehended Mr. Spencer’s meaning. I have now had some conversation 
with him, of which he kindly permits me to make use : — I gather that he 
deems Mr. Spencer to hold and state in his Philosophy, the doctrine that 
there is a force beyond the phenomenal, in which implicitly resided not 
only all the matter but all the mind that is in the universe. Mr. Spencer, 
according to him, attempts nothing more than to trace the working of this 
force in our mundane sphere, in its twofold aspect of mind and matter 
remaining all the time 2 ^'^'ofoundly conscious of this immanence of the 
Unseen, and, in his own conception, tracing all things as evolved from it. 
Thus in Professor Griffith’s idea there is, in the system, a power, not unlike 
the Fates in a Greek play, who rides high above all the multiform events of 
life, and ordereth them all after the counsel of His own will. According to 
him, Mr. Spencer’s Philosophy is a sublime Theophany, and the danger with 
which it threatens us is the resolving of all things into God — a more vigorous 
Spinosism, carried out on a larger scale ! To this I beg to reply : — 
1. Even if true it makes nothing against my argument. Mr. Spencer 
has no right to travel from matter to mind without saying, if this indeed be 
his notion, that he regards matter as originally endowed, before it came into 
