126 
CONSTANCE C. W. NADEN. 
June, 1890. 
published at 63, Fleet Street, in 1887, entitled Humanism v. 
Theism , I have dwelt more fully than I do here on the bearing 
of this auto-centric Solipsism on Eschatology. This tract 
consists, in addition to her essay on Hylo-Idealism, of 
extracts from letters addressed to Miss Naden, selected by 
herself, during the years 1878-80. They are prefaced by a 
note of her own stating that, after further verbal illustra¬ 
tion, and after study of the exact and moral sciences, she 
became a convinced convert to this world-scheme. Berkeley’s 
plea for Absolute Idealism appeared in 1708, more than 180 
years ago. In that interval what stupendous experiential 
developments, which at bottom are all mental, have taken 
place. Scotch Moral Philosophy from Hutcheson to Hume 
and Thomas Brown, of which Eantism is an offshoot, 
German Bationalism dating from Lessing’s Wolfenbiittel 
Fragments (1774—78), the neology of modern philological 
exegesis, and last in order, but first in rank, the amazing 
evolution of the Positive Sciences, not one of which existed 
in 1708, with the exception of formal or ideal Newtonian 
Physics, and its application to Astronomy. Even that 
whilom Queen of the Sciences, now dethroned by “transcen¬ 
dental ” Anatomy, required the revision of Laplace and 
other French Neo-Materialists, to get rid of the immaterial 
extra-mundane Spiritism which vitiated its conclusions in the 
domain of Philosophy. No competent astronomer, now-a- 
davs, but must smile at Sir Isaac’s scholium about the Ens 
Supremum. It is quite on a par with Milton’s mythology of 
Creation. Medicine, in Berkeley’s age, and till the end of the 
eighteenth century, was quite in the scholastic stage. It only 
entered the Positive phase under the genius of Xavier 
Bichat, who, like the subject of this memorial sketch, was 
cut off prematurely at the age of thirty-one years. The 
Bishop’s delusion as to the “ virtue of tar water,” which, 
during almost his entire lifetime, he extolled as the 
“ infallible ” prophylactic and panacea for all diseases of 
animals and vegetables, is proof sufficient of the back¬ 
wardness of the healing art, as well as of his own 
visionary disposition and complete incapacity for valid 
experimental research. Mutatis mutandis , like Dean Swift, 
he was, in Thackeray’s words, “ strangled by his own 
[clerical] bands.” 
All such minds are, as fetichists, dualists, who must 
hold animal Life to be the union of Soul and Bodv 
%t 
—a now quite antiquated and anti-scientific position, funda¬ 
mentally one with the Archeism of Van Helmout, a Flemish 
nosologist, who died soon after Newton's birth. Now-a-days 
