Now this statement of their position, if taken as they state it, is of course nonsense.  It is impossible to consider matter as ’that mysterious something by which all that is is accomplished;’ and then to solve the one chief riddle of things by a second mysterious something that is not material.  Nor can we ‘reject,’ as the positivists say they do, an ‘outside builder’ of the world, and then claim the assistance of an outside orderer of the brain.  The positivists would probably tell us that they do not do so, or that they do not mean to do so.  And we may well believe them.  Their fault is that they do not know what they mean.  I will try to show them.

First, they mean something, with which, as I have said already, we may all agree.  They mean that matter moving under certain laws (which may possibly be part and parcel of its own essence) combines after many changes into the human brain, every motion of which has its definite connection with consciousness, and its definite correspondence to some state of it.  And this fact is a mystery, though it may be questioned if it be more mysterious why matter should think of itself, than why it should move of itself.  At any rate, thus far we are all agreed; and whatever mystery we may be dealing with, it is one that leaves us in ignorance but not in doubt.  The doubt comes in at the next step.  We have then not to wonder at one fact, but, the mystery being in either case the same, to choose between two hypotheses.  The first is that there is in consciousness one order of forces only, the second is that there are two.  And when the positive school say that they reject neither of these, what they really mean to say is that as to the second they neither dare openly do one thing or the other—­to deny it or accept it, but that they remain like an awkward child when offered some more pudding, blushing and looking down, and utterly unable to say either yes or no.

Now the question to ask the positive school is this.  Why are they in this state of suspense? ‘There is an iron strength in the logic,’ as Dr. Tyndall himself says, that rejects the second order altogether.  The hypothesis of its existence explains no fact of observation.  The scheme of nature, if it cannot be wholly explained without it, can, at any rate, be explained better without it than with it.  Indeed from the standpoint of the thinker who holds that all that is is matter, it seems a thing too superfluous, too unmeaning, to be even worth denial.  And yet the positive school announce solemnly that they will not deny it.  Now why is this?  It is true that they cannot prove its non-existence; but this is no reason for professing a solemn uncertainty as to its existence.  We cannot prove that each time a cab drives down Regent Street a stick of barley-sugar is not created in Sirius.  But we do not proclaim, to the world our eternal ignorance as to whether or no this is so.  Why then should our positivists