o admit that a man {20} cannot
be a Theist, or that he cannot be a Theist on reasonable grounds,
without first being an Idealist. From my own point of view most of the
other reasons for believing in the existence of God resolve themselves
into idealistic arguments imperfectly thought out. But they may be
very good arguments, as far as they go, even when they are not thought
out to what seem to me their logical consequences. One of these lines
of thought I shall hope to develope in my next lecture; but meanwhile
let me attempt to reduce the argument against Materialism to a form in
which it will perhaps appeal to Common-sense without much profound
metaphysical reflection.

At the level of ordinary common-sense thought there appear to be two
kinds of Reality--mind and matter. And yet our experience of the unity
of Nature, of the intimate connexion between human and animal minds and
their organisms (organisms governed by a single intelligible and
interconnected system of laws) is such that we can hardly help
regarding them as manifestations or products or effects or aspects of
some one Reality. There is, almost obviously, some kind of Unity
underlying all the diversity of things. Our world does not arise by
the coming together of two quite independent Realities--mind and
matter--governed by no law or by unconnected and independent systems of
law. {21} All things, all phenomena, all events form parts of a single
inter-related, intelligible whole: that is the presupposition not only
of Philosophy but of Science. Or if any one chooses to say that it
_is_ a presupposition and so an unwarrantable piece of dogmatism, I
will say that it is the hypothesis to which all our knowledge points.
It is at all events the one common meeting-point of nearly all serious
thinkers. The question remains, 'What is the nature of this one
Reality?' Now, if this ultimate Reality be not mind, it must be one of
two things. It must be matter, or it must be a third thing which is
neither mind nor matter, but something quite different from either.
Now many who will not follow the idealistic line of thought the whole
way--so far as to recognize that the ultimate Reality is Mind--will at
least admit that Idealists have successfully shown the impossibility of
supposing that the ultimate Reality can be matter. For all the
properties of matter are properties which imply some relation to our
sensibility or our thought. Moreover, there is such a c