t is it that
differentiates your superiority? Why do things outside you obey your
will? Who gave you a will? and, if so, what is it? I think you must
allow that intellect is a thing almost divine, if there be anything
divine; and I think also you must allow that it is not a thing to be
propagated as we propagate well-made and high-bred cattle. Whence came
Alexander the Great? Whence Charlemagne? And whence the First Napoleon?
Was it through a mere process of spontaneous generation that they sprang
up to alter by their genius and overwhelming will the destinies of the
world? Whence came Homer, Shakespeare, Bacon? Whence came all the
great historians? Whence came Plato and all the bright lights of divine
philosophy, of divinity, of poetry? Their influence, after all, you must
allow to be quite as wide and enduring as any produced by the masters
of those positive material sciences which you worship. Do you think that
all these great minds--for they are minds, and their work was not the
product of a merely highly organised material frame--were the outcome
of some system of material generation, which your so-called science can
subject to rule, and teach men how to produce by growth, as they grow
vegetables?"

The Archbishop is not a very skilful physician. His prescription shows
that he has not diagnosed the disease. These strange questions might
strike the infidel "all of a heap," as the expressive vernacular has
it, but although they might dumbfounder him, they would assuredly
not convince. If the Archbishop of Canterbury were not so exalted a
personage we should venture to remark that to ask a man how he knows
that he exists betrays a marvellous depth of ignorance or folly.
Ultimate facts of consciousness are not subjects of proof or disproof;
they are their own warranty and cannot be transcended. There is,
besides, something extraordinary in an archbishop of the church to
which Berkeley belonged supposing that extreme idealism follows only the
rejection of deity. Whether the senses are after all delusory does not
matter to the Atheist a straw; they are real enough to him, they
make his world in which he lives and moves, and it is of no
practical consequence whether they mirror an outer world or not. What
differentiates you from the lower animals? asks his Grace. The answer is
simple--a higher development of nervous structure. Who gave you a will?
is just as sensible a question as Who gave you a nose? We have every
reaso