here, if anywhere, "faith goes against
appearances," and that in the last resource we have to postulate free
moral resolution, the will to believe, the desire for the ideal, for
freedom, and for the eternity of the spirit, and the confidence of the
spirit in itself. All this is, or at least ought to be, self-evident and
generally admitted.

Let us once more take a brief survey of the reasons on the other side and
arrange them in order.

That nature is everything and spirit very little seems to follow from a
very simple circumstance. There are whole worlds of purely natural and
corporeal existence without mind, sensation, or consciousness, which,
quite untroubled by their absence, simply exist according to the
everlasting laws of matter and energy. But nowhere do we find spirit or
mind without a material basis. All that is psychical occurs in connection
with a physical being, and with relatively few physical beings. Spirit
seems wholly bound up with and dependent upon the states, development, and
conditions of material being. With the body of living beings there arises
what we call "soul"; with the body it grows, gains content, changes,
matures, ages, and disappears. According as the body is constituted and
composed, as it is influenced by heredity, race, and selection, by
nutrition, mode of life, climate, and other circumstances, there are
developed in a hundred different ways what we call the natural disposition
or character, inclinations, virtues or vices, passions or temperaments.
Even the names given to the different temperaments emphasise this
dependence of what is innermost in us, the deepest tendencies of our
being, on the bodily organisation and the nature of its physiological
constitution. The man whose blood flows easily and freely is called
sanguine, and the melancholic is the victim of his liver. According as our
organs are good or bad, function freely or sluggishly, our mood rises or
sinks, we are bold or cowardly, languid or impetuous, and enthusiasm is
often enough only a peculiar name for a state which, physiologically
expressed, might be called alcoholic poisoning. There is one soul in the
sound body, another in the sickly. Fever, and the impotence of the soul
against it, made Holbach a materialist. If the brain be diseased, that
marvellous order of psychical processes which we call reasoning is broken;
the "soul" is wholly or partly eliminated; it fades away, or becomes
nothing more than a confused d