wanting in frankness, and principally consists in subterfuges.
In brief, it affirms that we are surrounded with mystery, that we are not sufficiently learned to have the right to impose limits to the power of matter, and to say to it: “Thou shalt not produce this phenomenon.” A materialist theologian declares that he sees no impossibility in stones thinking and arguing, if God, in His infinite power, has decided to unite thought with brute matter. This argument is not really serious; it demands the intervention of so powerful a Deus ex machina, that it can be applied equally to all problems; to solve all is to solve none.
Modern materialists rightly do not bring God into the question. Their mode of argument takes another form; but it remains to be seen if, at bottom, it is not the same as the other. It simply consists in affirming that up till now we know certain properties of matter only, but that science every day discovers new ones; that matter is a reservoir of unknown forces, and that it is not impossible that the origin of psychical forces may yet be discovered in matter. This idea is clearly hinted at by Littré. The physicist Tyndall gave it a definite formula when he uttered at the Belfast Congress this phrase so often quoted: “If I look back on the limits of experimental science, I can discern in the bosom of that matter (which,
