ressed on him, Mr. Martineau will choose the first, which alone has any
thing like defensibility, let us go on to ask how far Evolution is made
more comprehensible by postulating Mind, universally immanent, as its
cause.

In metaphysical controversy, many of the propositions propounded and
accepted as quite believable, are absolutely inconceivable. There is a
perpetual confusing of actual ideas with what are nothing but
pseud-ideas. No distinction is made between propositions that contain
real thoughts, and propositions that are only the forms of thoughts. A
thinkable proposition is one of which _the two terms can be brought
together in consciousness under the relation said to exist between
them_. But very often, when the subject of a proposition has been
thought of as something known, and when the predicate has been thought
of as something known, and when the relation alleged between them has
been thought of as a known relation, it is supposed that the proposition
itself has been thought. The thinking separately of the elements of a
proposition is mistaken for the thinking of them in the combination
which the proposition affirms. And hence it continually happens that
propositions which cannot be rendered into thought at all, are supposed
to be not only thought but believed. The proposition that Evolution is
caused by Mind is one of this nature. The two terms are separately
intelligible; but they can be regarded in the relation of effect and
cause only so long as no attempt is made to put them together in this
relation.

The only thing which any one knows as Mind is the series of his own
states of consciousness; and if he thinks of any mind other than his
own, he can think of it only in terms derived from his own. If I am
asked to frame a notion of Mind divested of all those structural traits
under which alone I am conscious of mind in myself, I cannot do it. I
know nothing of thought save as carried on in ideas originally traceable
to the effects wrought by objects and forces on me. A mental act is an
unintelligible phrase if I am not to regard it as an act in which states
of consciousness are severally known as like other states in the series
that has gone by, and in which the relations between them are severally
known as like past relations in the series. If, then, I have to conceive
Evolution as caused by an "originating Mind," I must conceive this Mind
as having attributes akin to those of the only mind I know, an