189 
these I shall not enter. But in the meantime I challenge the 
popular philosophers above mentioned to the disproof of that 
which I have sought to establish. 
APPENDIX. 
DR. HUXLEY’S “ IDOLA.” 
I fully appreciate Dr. Huxley's talent, but cannot submit to 
his guidance, when I know that he is wrong. His greatest 
admirers must concede that he is human, and that he shares 
the common lot, humanum est err are. 
Take as an illustration his paper on u Yeast," in the Con- 
temporary Revieiv , 1871, reprinted in his Critiques and 
Addresses , 1873. 
of a lecture at the London Institution on “ The Ether,” summing up very 
well what we do not know, but infer, about this difficult subject of investi- 
gation. “ Ether is often called a fluid or a liquid, and again it has been 
called a solid, and has been likened to a jelly because of its rigidity ; but 
none of these names are very much good. All these are molecular groupings, 
and, therefore, not like ether. Let us think simply and solely of a con- 
tinuous frictionless medium possessing inertia, and the vagueness of the notion 
will be nothing more than is proper in the present state of our knowledge.” 
But it is characteristic of the present age of dreamy speculation that to this 
“vague notion” of an unknown “ something ” is to be sacrificed all the 
knowledge of substantial reality that mankind has accumulated. “ One con- 
tinuous substance filling all space, which can vibrate as light, which can be 
sheared into positive and negative electricity, which in whirls constitutes 
matter ; and which transmits by continuity, and not by impact, every action 
and reaction of which matter is capable.” This is the Thomsonian or mystical 
theory of matter ; which is thus resolved into an everlasting dance of the 
vortices of Something of which “ we have no distinct idea at all ” (see No. 34 
above). Is not this absurdity worthy to be placed side by side with that 
other piece of folly which made life to descend upon this planet on the back 
of a meteorite, like the image which fell down from Jupiter ? 
