328 
that he is consistent ; but in expressing that, he seems uncon- 
scious or forgets that his theories are irreconcilable. 
This is nowhere more conspicuous than here. He has occasion, 
(as “ Religion” was his general subject), to introduce the Human 
or “ conscious ” agency somewhere among the factors of his 
universe. No ingenuity, however, can rationally interpret the 
statement, that Natui’e, (having been defined as the “ aggregate ” 
of all the unexamined forces and phenomena of the Universe), 
may still be philosophically regarded as a whole, after certain 
“ conscious ” forces are eliminated. Rut there is not even an 
attempt to grapple with this difficulty. 
His definition had established that Nature is not really “ the 
abstract idea of Nature” without the “ conscious” beings; and, 
after that, he excuses the presence of those “ conscious beings” so 
far as to make of them another “Nature,” apart from that whole to 
which they were declared to be essential, and without which they 
could do nothing. He declares, “ the phenomena produced bv 
Human agency depend on the properties of the elementary forces, 
or of the elementary substances, and their compounds” (p. 7). 
But this, which no one wholly denies, does not protect 
materialism. Yet then he adds, “we take advantage, for our 
purposes, of the properties which we find ” ! What was here 
surely required was some explanation of the “ we,” the “ our 
purposes,” in a word the “conscious agent,” who acts upon and 
in the midst of the unconscious universe, and uses it. Surely we 
needed some frank distinction such as Aristotle confesses, aAAx; 
rig (pvcng rug xpw^rig, ilXoyog, k.t. A., or what Plato, (to whom 
Mr. Mill graciously defers), so plainly owns, to St k aO’ uvtu 
K ai ii o vcria TTporepov Ty r/mertt. 
13. We do not wish, in this matter, to be requiring with our 
Essayist — yet we want the truth. Of course for con- 
finitum "'seems venience sake, and for any temporary occasion, a part 
by r the fact” h * m °f un i versa l Nature may be mentally separated off, and 
regarded per se for its own sake. We are not finding 
fault with that. No logical blame can be imputed to such division. 
It simply reminds us of old Aldrich and his particula “wow.” 
But that is not the case here. It was as far as possible too 
from the scope and intention of Mr. Mill’s Essay ever to 
contemplate “ Man,” apart from “ Nature ” as a distinct whole. 
His definitions set out with evidently making “ Nature to be 
such as we either must, — or else ought not ancl cannot, — follow; 
and nothing, probably, but the felt impossibility of treating 
conscious and unconscious being on one level throughout his 
“ Essays on Religion,” now introduced a division into the defi- 
nition of “ abstract Nature.” Hence alone this recognition of 
Man, as apart from Nature — a recognition defied or neglected, 
of course, in his later argument. 
