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equally laborious, companion. As a question of method and 
object, the distinctive feature of this school no doubt consists in the 
application of the means and appliances of physical research as 
being sufficient to solve questions which in the ordinary language 
of daily life are other than physical, yet, as can readily be seen to 
follow, the tone and temper generated are distinctively more aggres- 
sive, imperious, and dogmatic than what accompanies the applica- 
tion of physical methods to objects exclusively, and in the ordinary 
sense, physical. Not being content with taking man as an ani- 
mated organism, and showing by minute investigation his connexion 
in the chain of physical sequence with all other animated organisms, 
it, finding that there are in man elements which by no known 
principles can be conceived to be of the same character as those 
which obviously make up the organism, not only strives, which we 
can understand, to show that they are the literal scientifically 
measurable outcome of the physical forces, and of nothing else, and 
therefore are properly physical, but, when baffled in this attempt, is 
loud in asserting that they are such an outcome, and that to suppose 
otherwise is to impair the scientific conception of unity, and leave 
a department of fact under cover of perpetual darkness. To take 
any other view, unless perchance it be that thought in germ is a 
quality of all atoms, just as attraction is, 1 or to stand in doubt, is a 
mark of scientific cowardice — a sacrifice of the essential unity of 
thought and aspiration, without which Science is deprived of its 
very soul ! Men must be made to see that that which is highest 
— thought, conscience, will — is but the last and most subtle link 
in the long and unbroken chain of mechanical necessity which has 
worked its way from primal simplicity ! It bears its own peculiar 
name, and has its own functions in the complex order, but is in 
essential nature just what all other things are ! Man, Society, all 
that is deemed sacred and fundamental in thought and feeling, is 
to bear the unrelenting scrutiny appropriate to this principle, and 
be viewed and treated as objects of knowledge just as we should 
view and treat the foam of the ocean and the stratification of the 
rocks ! 
Thus far I have stated my own reading of the modern scientific 
spirit, but, lest it should be supposed that I have drawn upon my 
1 This conjecture is the resort of those who are compelled on scientific 
principles to renounce the dogma that thought is caused by molecular discharge 
of force in the brain. 
