for Being, those very same writers will probably ignore the Principle of Efficient Causation, or the knowledge of the relations which are for the good of the body or of the soul; or men like Professors Huxley and Tyndall will, whilst endorsing the Principle of Efficient Causation, ignore that of Final Cause or moral purpose, or even that of Sufficient Cause or Being itself. What I profess to have done, therefore, is to have been the first to show that intelligence or understanding is of the Ego or self-conscious subject, and that from this understanding of Being per se, which is directly known to us, from the feeling of our relation to other beings, we have the idea of relativity, and that from the feeling of power and the ability to resolve, or tendency or self-determination for the good for Being, we have the idea of action being for the good for Being, and also the idea of Being itself; for all concepts are of persons or of things, of Being or Existence in its modifications through relativity and tendency.

Dean Stanley, in speaking of the education of after life, once said, "Bishop Butler said that communities were liable to insanity equally at least with private persons." If then, says the Dean, we as communities, as churches, are liable to these fits of madness, it is so much the more "necessary that we should educate ourselves to be our own keepers." This expression is the complete statement of my object in offering the present opuscule to the public:

self-verification of what is rational in feeling, thought, and conduct, such as is recommended in the ancient rules, "Do not unto others what thou wouldest not have done to thyself," and "Love thy neighbour as thyself." This is what I assert to be equally the rule of reason and the test of truth, in feeling and thought as well as in action. Does my own experience in the constitution of my own being, as a being powerful to affect other beings, and capable of being affected by them, as a being whose tendency in action is the good for Being or for the preservation of the integrity of Being, and as a rational or intelligent agent, recognise similarity to my own feelings, thoughts, and actions in the feelings, thoughts, and actions of other beings? Do I in any great work, such as a cathedral or the starry heavens, recognise the exhibition of my own attributes of personality— power, wisdom, and goodness? In other words, in witnessing effects in some degree similar to those which I can and do produce, am I not necessitated by reason or in reasoning from my own being, which alone is positively known to me, to conceive a similar cause for similar effects? Professor Jevons defines reason to be the "substitution of similars," i.e., the formal necessary assumption of similar causes for similar effects in all argument-comprehension being through and of similarity or identity of nature, the intelligible being only so to the intelligent.

Before proceeding to my own definition of the

process of thought, I must call attention to the halftruth and half-fallacy of the great argument of the school of Locke and his French successors, that nothing comes into the mind but through sensation. This is true in as far as it is true that unless all the telegraphic signs are made which constitute a telegraphic message, the whole the whole message will not reach its destination. Mr. Lewes in his "Problems of Life and Mind" has shown the correlation of neural tremors in the brain with every act of feeling, thought, and will. These are the signs to the Ego of what is going on in its own organism, in the organic system, in the head, liver, lungs, &c., or through the peripheral nerves transmitting their signs to the sensorium of what is going on in the external world about us. But as the movements of the telegraphic apparatus are not thought or mental conception, so the neural tremors in the different cerebral centres are also not feeling, intelligence, and will, but only the means adopted by the Divine Wisdom for our conveying or receiving messages to and from other spirits.

Berkeley even supposed that sensation or sensible objects might be altogether arbitrary signs to us of non-existent things, or of a matter that was only apparently, not really, existing. But the advances made in physiology in late years have so clearly shown the intimate connection of physiology and psychology, that such a theory ceases to commend itself to our In fact, our conceptions or mental represen

reason.

tations are servile repetitions of the forces present in our own being-of the material force which we actually employ to effect any movement of our own bodies, of the spiritual force which is shown by our feeling and making others feel pain and pleasure, joy and suffering, and of our moral force or tendency to act always for the good for Being or preservation of the integrity of Being. Whenever we recognise effects similar to those produced by these integral forces of our own being, we categorise them as caused by one or other of these forces; and this very act of classification or categorising under the head of similars is the direct result of the reproduction in our nervous organism of similar states (when remembering what has happened or imagining what may happen) to those that we have already lived through and in; thus intimately is physiology interwoven with psychology: Mr. Lewes having shown that for feeling there is neural excitation, for logical classification there is neural grouping, and for self-determination, neuro-muscular discharge, although this discharge may manifest itself in no visible action, as in the formation by the vocal organs of words that are perhaps not uttered aloud.

And as for our own senses to be impressed, there must be some external object to impress them; so we cannot help according to our own normal experience (of course I am not speaking of the abnormal experience of delirium, hallucination, or madness), postulating or assuming an external agency, of a similar

nature to that of our own body, as acting directly upon others when their senses are similarly affected.

Again, even if direct or phenomenal action be conceivable, yet action for final cause cannot be predicated except of a noumenal or real being, to which kind of being all phenomenal action is ultimately to be traced. Thus all evidence is clearly seen to be based on self-evidence; and that self-evidence is the only conceivable test of truth in the theory or comprehensive principle of reasoning, is what I propose to endeavour to bring home to the mind and heart of my reader. Christians have hitherto limited selfexamination exclusively to the sphere of conduct, but it is of equally stringent necessity for the attainment of intellectual and emotional truth-the intellect having causation for its object, the emotions relativity of Being or personal affections.

The point then for consideration is, what are the necessary concepts or ideas of reason? How do we arrive, first, at the subjective concept;* secondly, at the abstract or universal ideas of reason which are the subject-matter of metaphysics? What I shall endeavour to show is, that psychology is the ground or source of metaphysics, and that physiology plays a part in psychology; logical conceptions being correlated by neural representations of the presentations of psychological activity through the processes of the

*The concept is a form of consciousness-having our own being for its object, "we cannot be conscious of nothing"-tendency of Being is the product of Being and relatively of Being-syllogistic synthesis of thought.