The rest of the brochure is taken up with some excellent criticism of current conceptions of atoms, space and heterogenealism (a creed now so sorely wounded by Mr. Crooke’s “Protyle.”) Dealing with one of the late Mr. G. H. Lewe’s utterances, the author remarks with great truth: “By some mysterious law of occurrence the self-contradictions of the bulk of the erudite and enlightened are in point of gravity, palpableness, and number in direct proportion to their erudition and enlightenment.” With how many contrasted dicta from the pages of our Büchners, Spencers, Bains etc., etc., could this conclusion be supported.
One word before we close. Is the title of the work well chosen? It appears to us the least satisfactory sentence which has been traced by the writer’s pen. The definition of “mind as matter and matter as mind” not only offers no solution of the great psychological problem discussed, but does injustice to the contents of the work itself.
In the process of definition we “assemble representative examples of the phenomena,” under investigation and “our work lies in generalizing these, in detecting community in the midst of difference.” Now, there is no community whatever between mental and material facts. For as Professor Bain writes:
“Extension is but the first of a long series of properties all present in matter, all absent in mind ... our mental experience, our feelings and thoughts, have no extension, no place, no form[[133]] or outline, or mechanical division of parts; and we are incapable of attending to anything mental until we shut off the view of all that.”—“Mind and Body.” pp. 125 and 135.
The phenomenal contrast of mind and matter is not only at the root of our[our] present constitution but an essential of our terrestrial consciousness. Duality is illusion in the ultimate analysis; but within the limits of a Universe-cycle or Great Manwantaræ it holds true. The two bases of manifested Being—the Logos (spirit) and Mulaprakriti, (Matter, or rather its Noumenon) are unified in the absolute reality, but in the Manvantaric Maya, under space and time conditions, they are contrasted though mutually interdependent aspects of the ONE CAUSE.
EDITORS’ NOTES.
We have a good deal of correspondence now in type, but must stand over till next month owing to lack of space.
In particular we wish to acknowledge a letter on Hylo-Idealism, signed C. N., forwarded to us by Dr. Lewins from a correspondent of his now in the East. This letter places Hylo-Idealism in a new and very different light, and its straightforward style and language are in strong contrast to the turgid effusions of such writers as G. M. McC. An extract from one of the latter’s letters to the “Secular Review” (January 7, 1888), for instance, says that “Specialism is Superficialism, and vice versa, both being fractionalism; and that the true desideratum is generalisationism (i.e. all-roundism and all-throughism), whereby and wherein the Kantian and Hegelian metaphysic may be precipitated and modern Materialism sublimed? There is only one alembic for both, and that is Solipsism—that true ‘wisdom of the ages,’ in which the profoundest thinker is at one with the little child.—G. M. McC.”!!![[134]]