ed from the
standpoint of the thinker who holds that all that is is matter, it seems
a thing too superfluous, too unmeaning, to be even worth denial. And yet
the positive school announce solemnly that they will not deny it. Now
why is this? It is true that they cannot prove its non-existence; but
this is no reason for professing a solemn uncertainty as to its
existence. We cannot prove that each time a cab drives down Regent
Street a stick of barley-sugar is not created in Sirius. But we do not
proclaim, to the world our eternal ignorance as to whether or no this is
so. Why then should our positivists treat in this way the alleged
immaterial part of consciousness? Why this emphatic protestation on
their part that there may exist a something which, as far as the needs
of their science go, is superfluous, and as far as the logic of their
science goes is impossible? The answer is plain. Though their science
does not need it, the moral value of life does. As to that value they
have certain foregone conclusions, which they cannot resolve to abandon,
but which their science can make no room for. Two alternatives are
offered them--to admit that life has not the meaning they thought it
had, or that their system has not the completeness they thought it had;
and of these two alternatives they will accept neither. They could tell
us '_with an iron strength of logic_' that all human sorrow was as
involuntary and as unmeaning as sea-sickness; that love and faith were
but distillations of what exists diluted in mutton-chops and beer; and
that the voice of one crying in the wilderness was nothing but an
automatic metamorphosis of the locusts and wild honey. They could tell
us '_with an iron strength of logic_' that all the thoughts and moral
struggles of humanity were but as the clanging whirr of a machine, which
if a little better adjusted might for the future go on spinning in
silence. But they see that the discovery on man's part that his life was
nothing more than this would mean a complete change in its mechanism,
and that thenceforward its entire action would be different. They
therefore seek a refuge in saying it _may_ be more than this. But what
do they mean by _may be_? Do they mean that in spite of all that science
can teach them, in spite of that uniformity absolute and omnipresent
which alone it reveals to them, which day by day it is forcing with more
vividness on their imaginations, and which seems to have no room for
any