not be
assigned a high place; he is one of our great English writers, but he
is not a great writer of English.

CHAPTER XIII

THE OPPONENT OF MATERIALISM

Science and Metaphysics--Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes--Existence of
Matter and Mind--Descartes's Contribution--Materialism and
Idealism--Criticism of Materialism--Berkeley's
Idealism--Criticism of Idealism--Empirical Idealism--Materialism
as opposed to Supernaturalism--Mind and Brain--Origin of
Life--Teleology, Chance, and the Argument from Design.

The prosecution of independent thinking in any branch of knowledge
leads to the ultimate problems of philosophy. The mathematician cannot
ponder over the meaning of his figures, the chemist that of his
reactions, the biologist that of his tissues and cells, the
psychologist that of sensations and conceptions, without being tempted
from the comparatively secure ground of observations and the
arrangement of observations into the perilous regions of metaphysics.
Most scientific men return quickly, repelled and perhaps a little
scared by the baffling confusion of that windy region of thought where
no rules of logic seem incontrovertible, no conclusions tenable, and
no discussions profitable. Huxley, however, not only entered into
metaphysical questions with enthusiasm, but gave a great deal of time
to the study of some of the great metaphysical writers. His views are
to be found scattered through very many of his ordinary scientific
writings, but are specially set forth in a volume on _Hume_, which he
wrote for Mr. John Morley's series, _English Men of Letters_, and in
essays on Berkeley and on Descartes, all of which are republished in
the _Collected Essays_. He contrived to preserve, in the most
abstrusely philosophical of these writings, a simplicity and clarity
which, although they have not commended him to professional
metaphysicians, make his attitude to the problems of metaphysics
extremely intelligible. The greatest barrier and cause of confusion to
the novice in metaphysics is that the writings of most of the great
authorities are overburdened by their great knowledge of the history
of philosophy. Huxley, in a characteristic piece of "parting advice"
in the preface to his work on Hume attacked this confusion between the
history of a subject and the subject itself.

"If it is your desire," he wrote, "to discourse fluently and
learnedly about philosophical questions,