a
savage feels, when, during an eclipse, the great shadow creeps over the
face of the sun. The advancing tide of matter threatens to drown their
souls; the tightening grasp of law impedes their freedom; they are alarmed
lest man's moral nature be debased by the increase of his wisdom.

If the "New Philosophy" be worthy of the reprobation with which it is
visited, I confess their fears seem to me to be well founded. While, on
the contrary, could David Hume be consulted, I think he would smile at
their perplexities, and chide them for doing even as the heathen, and
falling down in terror before the hideous idols their own hands have
raised.

For, after all, what do we know of this terrible "matter," except as a
name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own
consciousness? And what do we know of that "spirit" over whose threatened
extinction by matter a great lamentation is arising, like that which was
heard at the death of Pan, except that it is also a name for an unknown
and hypothetical cause, or condition, of states of consciousness? In other
words, matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary substrata of
groups of natural phenomena.

And what are the dire necessity and "iron" law under which men groan?
Truly, most gratuitously invented bugbears. I suppose if there be an
"iron" law, it is that of gravitation; and if there be a physical
necessity, it is that a stone, unsupported, must fall to the ground. But
what is all we really know, and can know, about the latter phenomenon?
Simply, that, in all human experience, stones have fallen to the ground
under these conditions; that we have not the smallest reason for believing
that any stone so circumstanced will not fall to the ground; and that we
have, on the contrary, every reason to believe that it will so fall. It is
very convenient to indicate that all the conditions of belief have been
fulfilled in this case, by calling the statement that unsupported stones
will fall to the ground "a law of nature." But when, as commonly happens,
we change _will_ into _must_, we introduce an idea of necessity which most
assuredly does not lie in the observed facts, and has no warranty that I
can discover elsewhere. For my part, I utterly repudiate and anathematize
the intruder. Fact I know, and Law I know, but what is this Necessity,
save an empty shadow of my own mind's throwing?

But, if it is certain that we can have no knowledge of the nature of
either