s corporeal machinery is one who not only has no notion how
to apply a moving force except to some few portions of the machinery,
but with regard to the other portions has most likely no suspicion that
they even exist. But how in the absence of some other intelligence, of
some other 'vegetative or sensitive soul or principle of motion or of
life,' is it possible for the inert and inanimate heart to generate
animal spirits?--how is it possible for death thus to give birth to
life?--or, if the generative faculty be supposed to be the necessary
result of a particular molecular structure, how is it that when the
animal spirits become from any cause extinct, they are not immediately
regenerated by the same molecular structure? or rather, how is it
possible for animal spirits to become extinct as long as the molecular
structure of which they are necessary concomitants remains unaltered? In
these questions the old insuperable difficulties reappear in new forms,
but on these we need not dwell. Apart from anti-materialistic arguments
of general applicability, there is a mode of refutation specially
adapted to the Cartesian form of materialism, which, besides flatly
contradicting itself, contradicts not less flatly a twin system of
unimpeachable veracity. Truth cannot be opposed to truth:--a doctrine
cannot be true, even though propounded by Descartes and Huxley, if it
conflict irreconcileably with doctrines which Descartes and Huxley have
unanswerably demonstrated. Now one-half of Cartesian philosophy shows
conclusively that amidst the countless infinity of human notions, the
one single and solitary certainty of independent and self-evident
authority is the existence of thought, and nothing else whatever,
therefore, can be entitled to be regarded as absolutely certain which
cannot be shown to rest mediately or immediately upon this. One thing
which can, by strictest logical process, be shown so to rest, is the
existence of a thinking self; and another is the existence of a non-self
or external universe; but of this external universe we know scarcely
anything beyond the bare fact that it exists. We know that outside the
thinking self there are potentialities capable of somehow or other
communicating sensations to the thinking self; but of the nature of
these potentialities our senses teach us absolutely nothing, and the few
particulars that reason is able to discover, are, with one single though
very momentous exception, to which w