make the materialistic hypothesis more plausible. When matter was
believed to be inert, the mere vehicle or theatre of forces,
materialism remained a singularly crude and unsatisfying position. But
now that science has shewn all that we call matter--the most solid
metals and the most attenuated vapours, the most stable and resisting
inorganic bodies, and the unstable tissues of living bodies--to be
alike in restless, orderly motion, to be, in fact, motion itself and
not the thing moved, to be changeable but indestructible, passing
through phases but eternal, there seems less difficulty in assuming it
to be the ultimate reality, and mind and consciousness to be its most
highly specialised qualities. Huxley, while stating this view plainly
enough, refused to accept it as a legitimate conclusion from the
facts.

"For anything that may be proved to the contrary, there may be a
real something which is the cause of all our impressions; that
sensations, though not likenesses, are symbols of that something;
and that the part of that something, which we call the nervous
system, is an apparatus for supplying us with a sort of algebra
of fact, based on these symbols. A brain may be the machinery by
which the material universe becomes conscious of itself. But it
is important to notice that, even if this conception of the
uuiverse and of the relation of consciousness to its other
components should be true, we should, nevertheless, be still
bound by the limits of thought, still unable to refute the
arguments of pure idealism. The more completely the materialistic
position is admitted, the easier it is to show that the
idealistic position is unassailable, if the idealist confines
himself within the limits of positive knowledge."

However we attempt to form what philosophers call "ejects," to imagine
that what is really in our consciousness is really the world outside
ourselves, these ejects remain mere phenomena of our minds. Matter
itself and its changes may, in the long run, be but modes of motion,
but "our knowledge of motion is nothing but that of a change in the
place and order of our sensations; just as our knowledge of matter is
restricted to those feelings of which we assume it to be the cause."
Huxley's exact position in regard to materialism is most plain in his
expositions of the writings of Berkeley, with whom began in England
the greatest moveme