176 
with the irrelrgion of Lucretius, whilst we have no excuse for 
copying his atheism. 
21. It is, however, to be most accurately noted that the 
refuge of Agnosticism is, at the present day, rather in the 
opposing doctrines of Boscovitch and of Spinoza, and in the 
“ everlasting haze ” in which they involve us.* 
22. Dr. Priestley was a champion of such mystical mate- 
rialism. Everything with him was matter that was not space. 
There was no third or different substance ; consequently the 
soul of man is material. t But what is matter ? or, rather, 
what is its definition ? “ Matter is a solid and extended 
substance, endowed with powers of attraction and repulsion.” 
With this definition he enters into controversy with his 
friend, Dr. Price. “ Can matter think? ” is the grand question 
proposed by the latter. Matter, observes Priestley in his repty, 
may think, for matter is not inert; it is not impenetrable; 
it is not, logically speaking, solid. We can form no concep- 
tion of the beginning of perfect solidity, and it is not an 
improbable conjecture that all the elementary matter employed 
in the formation of the solar system might be comprised in 
the capacity of a nut-shell. It is, indeed, most probable that 
there is no such thing as solidity in nature ; and that matter, 
consistently with the theory of Boscovitch, is nothing more 
than a compages of centres of various attractions and repulsions 
extending indefinitely in all possible directions (!) Hence, then, 
it was replied, the only powers or properties of matter are 
attraction and repulsion. But powers must be the powers of 
something ; yet if matter have nothing but these powers, and be 
nothing but these powers, then is it a nonentity , or rather 
becomes altogether immaterial. Towards the termination, 
therefore, of this literary contest, it seems to have been agreed 
that materialism and immaterialism were the same thing ; and, 
on the part of Dr. Priestley, that, provided there were but one 
essence admitted in the formation of man, he was totally 
unconcerned about the term, and was equally ready to 
denominate it a material or an immaterial substance. 
23. Happily there is a large (though perhaps diminishing) 
fund of common sense in the composition of the English 
character, and neither Priestley’s transcendentalism nor the 
theories of mystical materialists vegetate freely in our 
* See An Examination of Philosophy as advanced by Prof. Tyndall in 
his Belfast Address , by J. E. Howard, F.R.S., Trans, vol. x. p. 126. 
t Dr. Good’s Lucretius , vol. i. p. 90. 
