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In his 31st section, Locke remarks-" Knowledge consists only in perceiving the habitudes and relation of ideas one "to another, which is done without words, the intervention "of sound helps nothing to it." The essayist quotes Lord Bacon in his preface to the "Novum Organum," to the effect that the old scholastic rule of logic falls very far short in educating the understanding in the real phenomena of nature, for grasping at what is beyond its reach, it has served to confirm and establish errors, rather than open a way to truth; but he still insists upon the practice of analogical reasoning according to logical probabilities.

In analogical reasoning we are not to assume that because the relation is similar in one or two particulars or qualities, it is necessarily absolutely the same in all resemblances throughout. The Aristotleans held that explicit quantification of the predicate was not possible. On the other hand, Sir William Hamilton contends that it is a postulate of logic to state explicitly what is thought implicitly, and that as the predicate has always a quantity of extension in thought, as much as the subject, therefore in logic the quantity of the predicate ought always to be stated, for there is a necessity in all cases for thinking the predicate at least as extensive as the subject, but whether it be absolutely (that is out of relation,) MORE extensive is generally of no consequence.

Sir W. Hamilton says that it is of no consequence generally whether the predicate is in its absolute sense "more exten"sive" than the subject, but this is surely to be abandoned in reference to the debated question of divine attributes. Else how is any revelation of the infinite possible? The inexorable logic of facts in this case limits the application of this rule. For the explicit quantification or definition of predicated attributes is impossible in nature, whose plan throughout its length and breadth generates the conceptions. of hierarchies of rank, and everywhere negatives the idea of equality, for it speaks of superior and inferior, positive and negative.

Every entity has this positive and negative relation. Nothing is good or evil per se, it is only good in reference

SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S LOGIC.

63 to what is worse, and bad in relation to what is better; thus qualities of comprehension are adjectives that are included in the mean between positive and superlative. Nouns, substantives, numerators, or quantities of extension, scarcely carry full weight in concepts for everyday logic, without the superadding of certain adjectives or attributes as quantities for assisting the identifying process. Ordinary language may endeavour to quantify the extension of the predicate, but can it explicitly state the quantity of full comprehension?

For according to the Bible the revelation of Deity has only been possible in a "negative" form, that is, through the relation of a definite Son to the infinite, absolute, and otherwise unknown paternal Deity.

Now the predicated paternity of an infinite Deity, in this revelation of the subject as a son, cannot, as it exists absolute and infinite, be comprehensively defined or explicitly quantified, either in reference to quantities of extension or of attributes, even although Sir William Hamilton's stipulated necessity be granted, that the predicate here must be as extensive as the subject, for out of relation as absolute it must undoubtedly be incalculably more extensive. Therefore an explicit definition, both as to quantity of extension and comprehension, that is, of every particular in the predicated attributes of Deity cannot possibly be given, because such definition would be tantamount to a limitation of the infinite Father to the inferior quantity of the Son as a conditioned and relative subject. The logical problem in probabilities, respecting the infinite attributes of Deity, is inextricably involved in this very question as to the predicate being absolutely and infinitely more extensive than the subject, which Hamilton asserts is generally of no consequence.

In conventional theologies deity is always postulated as a first cause, that is as a solitary initial cause; whereas as he is revealed he is distinctly said to be both first and final cause. That is, the circle of existence ends where it began, and thus the last is first, and the first is last. Thus there is no first cause in the sense of theistical ambiguity, because universal existence, per se, is an ENDLESS cause that includes Alpha

and Omega, first and last: therefore, in studying the problem of existence, the human mind must look to the end to meet the return of the beginning or genesis, since all circles end where they began.

Science has utterly failed to demonstrate the existence of such a monstrous or unnatural existence as a human being living as an immaterial breath or spirit, totally independent of a material organization; science maintains that man lives by that vital force or spirit that is inseparably connected with material processes, and therefore man is as truly and as absolutely as other creatures, dependent upon the indissoluble tie that binds matter and vital or imponderable force or spirit, in one homogeneous nature. In other words, that the vital spirit in the atmosphere, and elsewhere in material processes, which supports all organized beings, is not to be separated from material conditions, for matter and imponderable force are one nature, as truly to man as to all other creatures who can exist only by their intimate, indissoluble, and eternal connection; man, therefore, cannot exist as a disembodied ghost, for this is a monstrous and unnatural divorce of the marriage of the primary eternal parents of and in the universe. Whatever mind and matter might have been before the word of generation, which begot nature as its offspring, and impregnated material atoms as ova of vital processes, this making nature the fertile mother of all living beings, man has no power to look back to, for it is antecedent to the genesis or beginning of nature. Man must face eternity one way only, since the human mind is not constituted to fathom the bottomless ocean of the eternal past. Man's grasp of the infinite is bounded by this beginning or genesis of material consciousness. The eternity of the past is not within range of human vision, for it is outside of those conditions or relations that make the phenomena of the universe cognisable.

Mental perspective must necessarily be forward into eternity, since eternal life is a flux forwards, not backwards; and thus eternal life for the begotten sons is but another name for the indefinite or infinite extension of the eternal

now.

HUMAN DISREGARD OF ORDAINED CONDITIONS.

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It cannot be a flux of life passed into other arrangements of the universe. Therefore the effort to grasp both ends of the infinite and eternal, or to separate or divorce immaterial mind from matter, is an insane attempt to effect what king Solomon asserted was impossible, and that is to number the thing that is wanting, or not in existence, or to turn into a straight line that which God has ordained to be eternally moving in a circle.

As the divine word of generation has for ever established the indissoluble union between mind and matter, the two have been begotten one phenomenal nature, and thus only by their duality, or mutual relationship, can life be sustained. Yet notwithstanding this, man, in his ignorant impatience of wisely ordained material conditions, has despised and ignored all natural phenomena, and seeking to divorce what has been for ever united, he claims immortal, that is self-existent life upon the basis of his theological creeds and catechism of absolute good and evil principles, outraging all natural morality by substituting a bastard class of speculative metaphysical misconcepts, as crude, childish, and petulant as they are illogical and unphilosophical. The priest argues that if a material organization is absolutely essential for life and psychical action, then immortality, or eternal self-existence, is hopeless. Dr. Morell, arguing for the immortality of the immaterial soul of man, when he is editing Fichte's metaphysical works, speaks to this effect:

"When dependence of mind upon body is made absolute, "I cannot conceive that any mind much accustomed to "logical consecutiveness can hold the doctrine of a life here"after with any real tenacity."

Now the real significance of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth consists in the fact that he was not a disembodied ghost after his rising again from the tomb he was laid in. He appeared as an angel of light, that is he was a MAGNETIC being, or angel possessing an osseous, muscular, and nervous system, without being blood-sustained. The involuntary

system was gone.

If sacerdotal mysticism has misled its students, it remains

F

for the science of naturalism or cosmism to guide men back to the lost track. The present design, however, is to show that immaterialism is not the teaching of the Bible, but that on the contrary, the heathen dogma of the soul's immortality is therein controverted,—and if this metaphysical misconcept upon which all theologies are based, be shewn to be false, then there will not remain one stone upon another of the great ecclesiastical temple; down it must all come tumbling headlong into the mud sooner or later, leaving nothing but a gigantic mound of rubbish and calcined bricks, to mark the site of ancient mystical Babylon, the mother of harlotry or false doctrine, fallen, for ever fallen, with all its fetish gods and goddesses, big, little, and middle sized; painted, graven, pictured, and written,-flat to the ground.

This marvellously constructed sacerdotal edifice, with its bloody sacrificial atonements, its purifications, purgations, signs, or sacraments; its standards, baptisms, fingerings, headrubbings, confessions, absolutions, unctions, together with all ecclesiastical penances, plasters, and pills powerfully stomachic and mildly aperient, will fall with this gratuitously assumed dogma of the immortality of the immaterial human soul; for when man, as Lucifer, the star of the morning, falls, he must have all his bag and baggage shot out of the temple along with him.

To return to the Hebrew canonical scriptures. Here is king Solomon, admitted to be, by repute, the wisest monarch that ever lived to be recorded in the chronicles of the Jewish history. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, chapter 3rd:

"I said in mine heart, concerning the estate (condition?) "of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, (or "clear their vision to perceive) and that they might see "that they themselves are beasts, for that which befalleth "the sons of men befalleth beasts, even one thing befalleth "them, as the one dieth so dieth the other, yea they have

"all one spirit or so that a man hath no pre-eminence over a

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breath,

"beast, for all is vanity-all go unto one place-all are of