by certain
relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect
simplicity and identity." Here was mind rejected for the same negative
reasons as matter, and Huxley was as ready to point out that while we
can know nothing of the

"substance of the thinking thing, we go beyond legitimate
reasoning if we therefore deny its existence." ... "Hume may be
right or wrong, but the most he or anyone else can prove in
favour of his conclusions is, that we know nothing more of the
mind than that it is a series of perceptions. Whether there is
something in the mind that lies beyond the reach of observation,
or whether perceptions themselves are the products of something
which can be observed and which is not mind, are questions which
can in no wise be settled by direct observation."

In another passage he writes:

"To sum up. If the materialist affirms that the universe and all
its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley
replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to
us only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived
or known; and the existence of a state of consciousness, apart
from a thinking mind, is a contradiction in terms. I conceive
that this reasoning is irrefragable. And therefore, if I were
obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute
idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter
alternative. Indeed, upon this point Locke does, practically, go
as far in the direction of idealism as Berkeley, when he admits
that the 'simple ideas which we receive from sensation and
reflection are the boundaries of our thoughts, beyond which the
mind, whatever efforts it would make, is not able to advance one
jot.'"

Locke went further, and Huxley agreed with him. He declared that the
mind cannot "make any discoveries when it would pry into the nature
and hidden cause of these ideas." We must, in fact, definitely reject
what we know as matter as the absolute reality of the universe, for it
becomes very plain that what we call matter we know merely as
affections of our own consciousness. In a sense, then, so far as it is
opposed to materialism, idealism, according to Huxley, must be the
philosophical position of a scientific man. But the idealism is not
the absolute idealism of Berkeley, as we have no logical right to deny
or to