he Lord against those
who were crushed. Doubt equally those who pretend to see in cholera,
cattle-plague, and bad harvests, evidences of Divine anger. Doubt
those spiritual guides who in Scotland have lately propounded the
monstrous theory that the depreciation of railway scrip is a
consequence of railway travelling on Sundays. Let them not, as far as
you are concerned, libel the system of nature with their ignorant
hypotheses. Looking from the solitudes of thought into this highest
of questions, and seeing the puerile attempts often made to solve it,
well might the mightiest of living Scotchmen--that strong and earnest
soul, who has made every soul of like nature in these islands his
debtor--well, I say, might your noble old Carlyle scornfully retort on
such interpreters of the ways of God to men:

The Builder of this universe was wise,
He formed all souls, all systems, planets, particles;
The plan he formed his worlds and Aeons by,
Was--Heavens!--was thy small nine-and-thirty articles!

********************

Here, indeed, we arrive at the barrier which needs to be perpetually
pointed out; alike to those who seek materialistic explanations of
mental phenomena, and to those who are alarmed lest such explanations
may be found. The last class prove by their fear almost as much as
the first prove by their hope, that they believe Mind may possibly be
interpreted in terms of Matter; whereas many whom they vituperate as
materialists are profoundly convinced that there is not the remotest
possibility of so interpreting them.

HERBERT SPENCER.

====================

VI. SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM.

[Footnote: President's Address to the Mathematical and Physical
Section of the British Association at Norwich.]

1868.

THE celebrated Fichte, in his lectures on the 'Vocation of the
Scholar,' insisted on a culture which should be not one-sided, but
all-sided. The scholar's intellect was to expand spherically, and not
in a single direction only. In one direction, however, Fichte
required that the scholar should apply himself directly to nature,
become a creator of knowledge, and thus repay, by original labours of
his own, the immense debt he owed to the labours of others. It was
these which enabled him to supplement the knowledge derived from his
own researches, so as to render his culture rounded and not one-sided.

As regards