e not, as the whole
Berkeleian school so positively insist, that of mental testimony to its
existence.

Let us pause here for a moment to report progress. We have seen, on the
one hand, that unless mind and matter have been eternally coexistent,
mind must have preceded matter, and that it is idle, therefore, to
expect, by any researches into matter, to discover how mind (or life)
originated. We have seen that from a materialism which represents mind
as in any sense a property or product of matter there is no possible
outlet to an idealism which represents matter as owing its being to
mind. To see this is simply to see that the builder of a house cannot
possibly have been born in the house he has himself built. On the other
hand, we have seen that the idealism which represents being or existence
as consisting of perception is utterly incompatible with materialism of
any sort or kind, unless, indeed, with a materialistic nihilism wherein
would be no room for a solitary molecule, still less for any molecular
structure, and least of all for that motion of molecular structures into
which consistent materialists are logically bound to attempt to resolve
all natural phenomena. We have, in short, seen that materialism and
idealism, in the senses in which those terms are commonly used, are
utterly incapable of amalgamation, or indeed of even being harmoniously
approximated, without being first deprived of all the characteristic
traits which at present entitle them to their distinguishing
appellations.

To which of the two belongs the larger share of blame for this
implacable hostility is easily determined. Materialism, in dealing with
mental phenomena, begins by setting chronology at defiance; but between
idealism and the phenomena of matter there is no such aboriginal
incongruity. From principles common to every form of idealism a theory
is deducible which, while frankly acknowledging the reality of matter,
may, with perfect consistency, maintain that reality to be
mental--although mental in the sense of being, not a perception by, but
a metamorphosis of, mind. Of such a theory the outlines seem to me to
have been sketched, and the foundations partly laid, by Descartes, and
it cannot be otherwise than interesting to inquire in what manner and
how far so consummate an artificer advanced in the work, and where and
wherefore he suddenly stopped short in it.

When Descartes, after convincing himself of the hollow pretentiousness