Huxley is among the last to be
suspected of talking anything, as Monsieur Jourdain did prose, without
knowing it. He knows perfectly well that he has here been talking
materialism, but he insists that his materialism is only another form of
idealism. He seeks to evade the seemingly inevitable deduction from his
premises by representing both matter and spirit as mere names, and
names, too, not for real things, but for fanciful hypotheses which may
be spoken of indifferently in materialistic or in spiritualistic terms,
thought in the one case being treated as a form of matter, and matter in
the other as a form of thought. The identity of matter and spirit is, in
short, represented by him as consisting in this: that the existence of
both is merely nominal, or at best merely ideal.

Ordinary folk may perhaps be somewhat slow to derive from this
compromising theory all the comfort which its author deems it capable of
affording. Most of us may, probably, be inclined to think that we might
as well have been left to fret in the frying-pan of materialism as be
cast headlong into idealistic fire, to no better end than that of being
there fused body and soul together, and sublimated into inapprehensible
nothingness. Our immediate concern, however, is not with the
pleasantness of the theory, but with its truth; in proceeding to test
which we shall probably find that there is as little warrant for
idealising matter after this fashion as we have already seen that there
is for materialising mind.

The originator of the theory about to be examined, or rather, perhaps,
of a somewhat different theory out of which this has been developed--not
to say perverted--may, without much inaccuracy, be pronounced to be
Descartes. He it was who, perceiving that we are surrounded on all sides
by illusions of all sorts, that not only is there no authority or
testimony implicitly to be depended on, but that our senses likewise
often play the traitor, and that we can never be perfectly sure whether
we are really seeing, hearing, or feeling, or merely thinking or
dreaming that we see, hear, or feel, and looking anxiously around for
one single point at least on which complete confidence might be placed,
discovered such a point in thought. Whatever else we may doubt about, we
cannot, he justly argued, doubt that there are thoughts. If it were
possible to doubt this, our very doubt would be thought, constituting
and presenting as evidence the very existenc