by abstract thought into
independent realities. He indeed partly retracts his assertion that
mind and matter severed from each other are _res completae_, when he
declares that neither can be conceived as existing apart from God, and
that therefore, strictly speaking, God alone is a substance. But, as
we have seen, he avoids the necessary inference that in God the
opposition between mind and matter is reconciled or transcended, by
conceiving God as abstract self-consciousness or will, and the
material world not as his necessary manifestation, but simply as his
creation,--as having its origin in an act of bare volition and that
only. His God is the God of monotheism and not of Christianity, and
therefore the world is to God always a foreign matter which he brings
into being, and acts on from without, but in which he is not revealed.

Animals automata.

It is a natural consequence of this view that nature is essentially
_dead matter_, that beyond the motion it has received from God at the
beginning, and which it transmits from part to part without increase
or diminution, it has no principle of activity in it. Every trace of
vitality in it must be explained away as a mere false reflection upon
it of the nature of mind. The world is thus "cut in two with a
hatchet," and there is no attraction to overcome the mutual repulsion
of its severed parts. Nothing can be admitted in the material half
that savours of self-determination, all its energy must be
communicated, not self-originated; there is no room for gravitation,
still less for magnetism or chemical affinity, in this theory. _A
fortiori_, animal life must be completely explained away. The machine
may be very complicated, but it is still, and can be nothing but, a
machine. If we once admitted that matter could be anything but
mechanical, we should be on the way to admit that matter could become
mind. When a modern physical philosopher declares that everything,
even life and thought, is ultimately reducible to matter, we cannot
always be certain that he means what he seems to say. Not seldom the
materialist _soi-disant_, when we hear his account of the properties
of matter, turns out to be something like a spiritualist in disguise;
but when Descartes asserted that everything _but_ mind is material,
and that the animals are automata, there is no such dubiety of
interpretation. He said what he meant