rred. For it connects thought
with the other phaenomena of the universe, and suggests inquiry into the
nature of those physical conditions, or concomitants of thought, which
are more or less accessible to us, and a knowledge of which may, in
future, help us to exercise the same kind of control over the world of
thought, as we already possess in respect of the material world;
whereas, the alternative, or spiritualistic, terminology is utterly
barren, and leads to nothing but obscurity and confusion of ideas.

Thus there can be little doubt, that the further science advances, the
more extensively and consistently will all the phaenomena of Nature be
represented by materialistic formulae and symbols.

But the man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical
inquiry, slides from these formulae and symbols into what is commonly
understood by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with
the mathematician, who should mistake the _x_'s and _y_'s with which he
works his problems, for real entities--and with this further
disadvantage, as compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of
the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of
systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the beauty
of a life.

NATURALISM AND SUPERNATURALISM

[FROM PROLOGUE TO CONTROVERTED QUESTIONS, 1892.]

There is a single problem with different aspects of which thinking men
have been occupied, ever since they began seriously to consider the
wonderful frame of things in which their lives are set, and to seek for
trustworthy guidance among its intricacies.

Experience speedily taught them that the shifting scenes of the world's
stage have a permanent background; that there is order amidst the
seeming contusion, and that many events take place according to
unchanging rules. To this region of familiar steadiness and customary
regularity they gave the name of Nature. But at the same time, their
infantile and untutored reason, little more, as yet, than the playfellow
of the imagination, led them to believe that this tangible, commonplace,
orderly world of Nature was surrounded and interpenetrated by another
intangible and mysterious world, no more bound by fixed rules than, as
they fancied, were the thoughts and passions which coursed through their
minds and seemed to exercise an intermittent and capricious rule over
their bodies. They attributed to the entities, with which they peopled