efficient or final, from the field of
human knowledge, and confines our inquiries to the mere phenomena and
laws of material nature.

There are not wanting various significant indications of the existence
of this tendency at the present day. It is sufficiently indicated, in
some quarters, by the mere omission of all reference to Mind or Spirit
as distinct from Matter; and, in others, by elaborate attempts to
explain all the phenomena of life and thought by means of physical
agencies and organic laws. The writings of Comte, Crousse, Cabanis, and
Broussais,[146] afford ample evidence of its growing prevalence in
France; and although it has been said by a recent historian of
Philosophy that in England there has been no formal avowal, or at least
no recognized school, of Materialism, since the publication of Dr.
Thomas Brown's reply to Darwin's Zooenomia, yet there is too much reason
to believe that it was all along cherished by not a few private
thinkers, who had imbibed the spirit of Hobbes and Priestley; and now it
is beginning to speak out, in terms too unambiguous to be misunderstood,
in such works as "The Purpose of Existence" and the "Letters" of
Atkinson and Martineau. But apart from the opinions of individual
inquirers, it must be remembered that there is a tendency in certain
studies, when exclusively pursued, to generate a frame of mind which
will tempt men either to adopt the theory of Materialism, or at least to
attach undue importance to physical agencies and organic laws. This
tendency may be observed in the study of Physiology, especially when it
is combined with that of Phrenology and Animal Magnetism; not that there
is any necessary or strictly logical connection between these studies
and Materialism, for some of their ablest expounders, including Cabanis,
Gall, and Spurzheim, have explicitly disavowed that theory; but simply
that, in prosecuting such inquiries, the mind is insensibly led to
bestow an undue, if not exclusive, attention on the phenomena and laws
of our material organization, so as to become comparatively unmindful of
what is mental, moral, and spiritual in the constitution of man. For
these reasons, and considering, especially, the close connection of
Materialism both with the mechanical Atheism of the past, and the
hylozoic Pantheism of the present age, we deem it necessary to subject
its claims to a rigorous scrutiny, in connection with the subject of our
present inquiry.

What, then,