necessity, and come to an agreement as to some fundamental conceptions.


[1] Huxley, speaking of psychology and physiology (idealism and
materialism), says: "Our stem divides into two main branches, which grow
in opposite ways, and bear flowers which look as different as they can
well be. But each branch is sound and healthy, and has as much life and
vigor as the other. If a botanist found this state of things in a new
plant, I imagine he might be inclined to think that his tree was
monoecious, that the flowers were of different sexes, and that, so far
from setting up a barrier between the branches of the tree, the only hope
of fertility lay in bringing them together. This is my notion of what is
to be done with physics and metaphysics. Their differences are
complementary, not antagonistic, and thought will never be completely
fruitful until the one unites with the other."--HUXLEY, Macmillan's Mag.,
May 1870.

Descartes' method (according to Huxley) leads straight up to the critical
idealism of his great successor, Kant, in declaring that the ultimate
fact of all knowledge is a consciousness and therefore affirming that the
highest of all certainties, and indeed the only absolute certainty, is
the existence of mind. But it stops short of Berkeley in declaring that
matter does not exist: his arguments against its existence would equally
tend to prove the non-existence of soul. In Descartes' stem, the body is
simply a machine, in the midst of which the rational soul (peculiar to
man) is lodged, and which it directs at its will, as a skilful engineer
familiar with its working might do--through will and through affection he
can "increase, slacken, and alter their movements at his pleasure." At
the same time, he admits, in all that regards its mere animal life--in
active functions, such as those connected with hunger, respiration,