see a deeper reality in thought than in the sensations from which thought is evolved.

88. The examination of the conditions of knowledge was one half of the task before us; the second half must be an examination of what is known. The summa genera of what is known are Matter, Force, Cause, Life, and Mind. The three first will be treated here, the two last. must be reserved for future volumes, and in lieu of them we will consider the great metaphysical question of the Absolute. Other problems of profound interest, such as Materialism, Idealism, and the Religion of Science, must. also be reserved; the two first because they are so dependent on the theory of Perception that they cannot adequately be treated before that theory is expounded; and the last because it must be the superstructure raised upon the foundations of the knowable.

PROBLEM IV.

MATTER AND FORCE.

"There is no chapter in the history of man more marvellous than that which deals with his conception of matter. There has been the greatest difficulty in all ages in comprehending its existence, and still more so in conceiving how it can be constituted of so many different substances.

All the theories have been abstract; they have been efforts of the mind to comprehend matter, with a very meagre, if any, classification of phenomena." ANGUS SMITH, Life of Dalton, pp. 74, 117.

"The Metaphysick, though it be in the second and abstract Notions, and therefore be counted supernatural, yet doth it indeed build upon the depth of Nature.” SIR PHILIP SIDNEY, The Defense of Poesie.

9 *

MATTER AND FORCE.

CHAPTER I.

THE PROBLEM STATED.

1. THE problem of Matter is one of surpassing interest; but during the long minority of Science, under the regency of Metaphysics, there was no systematic discrimination of its empirical from its metempirical aspects; consequently general conceptions were so vacillating and contradictory, that discussion only served to darken what it proposed to elucidate. Scientific Method imposes on us the necessity of discriminating the three aspects, positive, speculative, and metempirical, corresponding to the Sensible, Extra-sensible, and Supra-sensible, in order that we may avoid the intermingling of separate meanings under one and the same symbol.

The exactness of Mathematics may be carried into Metaphysics, if the conditions of exactness be rigorously maintained, that is to say, if the symbols have fixed and definite significations. The angle, the circle, the plus and minus, are always interpreted in one and the same sense. When a word has different meanings, as tangent in Geometry and in Trigonometry, or square in Algebra and in Geometry, these differences, being defined, lead to no confusion. And so throughout.

This is very far from the case in Metaphysics, where the symbols express different meanings. What, for example, does the symbol Matter express? If we ask,

What is Matter? we may receive the most contradictory answers. One philosopher will say that nothing is better known, though it may not be easy to give a definition of it: It is the collective name for the solids, liquids, vapors, and gases, the ponderable, visible, and resistant objects of Sense. Another will declare that it is not these, but something underlying them; not the objects of Sense, but the object of Intellect, the perdurable cause of our sensations of objects. Here we have two conceptions of knowable Matter, the sensible and extra-sensible, the one positively known, the other speculatively known. Differing in these marked characteristics, the two conceptions agree in fundamental respects; the second being a higher degree of abstraction from the abstraction of the first, generalizing the particulars given in Sense, stripping them of their individual accidental traits, but not passing beyond the bounds of extra-sensible Experience. This second conception easily passes into the third, which is that of Noumenon, or Thing-in-itself, detached from all community with Sense; a cause of phenomena, not to be apprehended through Experience: a Supra-sensible knowable only through sources which transcend Sense. It is said to be directly intuited by Reason.

There are thus three widely different significations attached to the same symbol; and when philosophers are discussing the nature of Matter, they not only for the most part refrain from sharply defining which of the three significations they have in view, but often mingle one with the other in the course of the same sentence. When we are told, as lately we have frequently been told, that "nothing whatever is known of Matter," the meaning of course is, that nothing is known of Matter the Noumenon, -a truism, since by its definition that Matter is excluded from all sensible and extra-sensible relations. Those who speak thus are often those