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the play of forces on the nervous centres of each being. This creates a thousand worlds adapted to the different wants of each, and is so much better, therefore, than if it had objective reality; and man stupidly thinks it was all made for him, and that the way these forces affect him is the absolute measure of truth: whereas a very few only of the forces around him reach him through his five senses or otherwise, and produce those impressions and ideas which are sufficient to guide him towards the objects of his being, towards his real world-that of his pleasures and pains, and which he calls his moral world. In reality he knows very little indeed of all that is going on without him, as he is cognisant only of the influences that can penetrate through his thick skin; and whole worlds of beings may exist without his intellectual ken. If our faculties, then, are few and limited, and not designed to penetrate into the inward essence and constitution of things, they are yet sufficient for our purpose, the use of our intellectual consciousness being not to teach absolute truth, but to guide us towards our wants, which in their fulfilment are always pleasurable, and thus contribute towards the stock of happiness in the world.

Good and evil are purely subjective, and the moral world is as entire a creation of the mind as the physical world. It is merely a record of man's pleasures and pains, of his likes and antipathies, and of the various fine names by which he distinguishes the different varieties of feeling as he wishes to promote the one and to prevent the other. As our thoughts and ideas compel a reference to objects out of self, so do our feelings, aud we talk of the eternal aud immutable distinctions between right and wrong, whereas these distinctions have no existence out of ourselves, and one action is as good as another in itself, and is good, pure, holy, &c., in proportion as it tends to carry out the purpose of creation, which is not man's happiness alone, but that of all of sensitive existence. Morality is the science of living together in the most happy

manner possible; at present it is confined to men alone, but we must widen its sphere of action so as ultimately to take in all living creatures. Do not let us be be alarmed, then, for the interests of morality, for as J. S. Mill says, "a volition is a moral effect, which follows the corresponding moral causes as certainly and invariably as physical effects follow their physical causes."

Physical science has made rapid progress since the introduction of the inductive method, while mental science, to which it is supposed not to apply, is little further advanced than it was two thousand years ago; but on the recognition of this great truth, that causation is as constant, and that law reigns as much in the realm of mind as of matter, our future progress in this department must depend. This truth occupies, in the present day, much the same position in mental science, as the earth's position with respect to the sun in the days of Copernicus did in physics. Men saw that the sun went round the earth, and the Bible said it did, and Galileo was imprisoned for saying it did not. Men say they now feel that they are free, as they before saw that the sun went round the earth; and theologians say that responsibility, which, according to them, is the right to take revenge for past misconduct, depends upon this freedom, and that morality depends upon this kind of responsibility; and when our philosophers are appealed to as to whether man is free, or subject to law, like everything else, they say, " Sometimes one, and sometimes the other." To give an instance in each class: Froude, the philosopher, says: "The foolish and the ignorant are led astray by the idea of contingency, and expect to escape the just issue of their actions; the wise man will know that each action brings with it its inevitable consequences, which even God cannot change without ceasing to be himself."* Praise and blame "involve that somewhere or other the influence of causes ceases to operate, and that * Froude's Essays, "Spinoza," vol. ii, p. 48.

THE ABSOLUTE EXISTENCE.

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some degree of power there is in man of self-determination, by the amount of which, and not by their specific actions, moral merit or demerit is to be measured." * How "inevitable consequences are to be expected where causes cease to operate," he does not tell us ; but no doubt the earth goes round the sun in physics, and the sun round the earth where man's volition is concerned. Huxley, the man of science, says: "Theology in her purer forms, has ceased to be anthropomorphic, however she may talk. Anthropomorphism has taken her stand in its last fortress-man himself. But science closely invests the walls; and philosophers gird themselves for battle upon the last and greatest of all speculative problems. Does human nature possess any free volitional or truly anthropomorphic element, or is it only the cunningest of all nature's clocks? Some, among whom I count myself, think that the battle will for ever remain a drawn one, and that, for all practical purposes, this result is as good as anthropomorphism winning the day."†

Notwithstanding, we are slowly, but surely, coming to the conviction that in nature there is no beginning,-merely pre-existent and persistent force and its correlates—that is, "that each manifestation of force can be interpreted only as the effect of some antecedent force, no matter whether it be an inorganic action, an animal movement, a thought or feeling"; that all force, or power, or ability is derived and inseparable from that of which it is the force-the Supreme Cause of all. If we have lost matter, we have found force; if we have lost mind-a suppositious, capricious existence, governed by nothing—we have found universal law, and “a supreme and infinite and everlasting Mind in synthesis with all things." In the correlation of force, we have one great heart-beat of the Absolute Existence. "Being underlies all

*Froude's Essays, "Spinoza," vol. ii., p. 59.

+ Fortnightly Review, June, p. 664.

"First Principles," by Herbert Spencer.

to itself. It is this also that acounts for the unity of consciousness; for although our ideas and feelings are simultaneously various, the reflective faculty that attends to them is one, and they can therefore only be attended to in succession one at a time, whether they be simple or complex.

But it is said that "how consciousness arises cannot be explained, either from the scientific or from the philosophical side." But is this so? I think the knowledge we now have admits of its explanation-at least so far as we can explain anything. Force, or automatic mind, passing through the brain, by means of the peculiar molecular action of each nervous centre, resumes its conscious as an idea or feeling, and passes from unconscious to consciousness, and back again, as illustrated by the action of our own minds. A certain amount of vital energy or force passing through Destructiveness gives rise to the feeling of anger, and this concentrated energy is all accounted for when it returns through the muscles and knocks a man down in consequence. The brain is acted upon through the eye or the ear, pulls the trigger called the Will, and releases a reservoir of internal force, derived from the food, from the region of the brain between the ears, which passing along the motor-nerves of the arm, expends us that there are three things implied in one act of vision, viz., a tree, an image of that tree, and a mind that apprehends that image. Fichte tells me that it is I alone who exist: the tree and the image of the tree are but one thing, and that is a modification of my mind. This is Subjective Idealism. Schelling tells us that both the tree and my Ego are existences equally real or ideal, but they are nothing less than manifestations of the Absolute. This is Objective Idealism." And this is our idea. "But, according to Hegel, all these explanations are false. The only thing really existing (in this one fact of vision) is the Idea-the relation. The Ego and the Tree are but two terms of the relation, and owe their reality to it. This is Absolute Idealism."—(" Biographical History of Philosophy," p. 607.) The force reflected from the object or tree, meeting the force within the brain, or the Ego, passes into consciousness, forming the idea. This is the fact of which Hegel had at least a dim perception.

CONSCIOUSNESS HOW DIVIded.

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itself the cause of anger. Whether we shall ever, upon Prof. Huxley supposes, arrive at an exact mechanical equivalent for facts of consciousness, it is impossible to say; although it is highly probable we are far from it at present. Huxley says: "I believe that we shall, sooner or later, arrive at a mechanical equivalent for facts of consciousness, just as we have arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat. If a pound weight, falling through a distance of a foot, gives rise to a definite amount of heat-which may properly be said to be its equivalent the same pound weight, falling through a foot on a man's hand, gives rise to a definite amount of feeling-which might, with equal propriety, be said to be its equivalent in consciousness." It will probably be later rather than sooner that this problem will be solved, for it is much complicated by the fact that the consciousness evolved is the joint produce of the brain or nervous force, and that from the pound weight, the one derived from the arrested motion of the atoms of oxygen and carbon, as they clash together in the body; the other from the arrested motion of the pound weight.

"The broad distinction between nerve-energy and mindenergy has been distinctly maintained by many of the most distinguished promoters of scientific inquiry."*

The sequence and variation of our consciousness, which we call modes of action of the mind, are divided into Perception, Conception, Memory, Imagination, and Judgment. The first of these perception, is composed of the force within and the force from without, and therefore has a double intensity to any of the others, which proceed from the action of the brain alone without the sense. Intensity of thought and feeling is always in proportion to the amount of force expended in producing it, and this furnishes a good criterion of externality, that is, of the difference between the ideas we receive from *Contemporary Review, "Physical Science and Mental Philosophy," p. 230, January, 1871.