'You cannot get mind as an ultimate product of matter, for in the very attempt to do so you have already begun with mind. The easiest step of any such inquiry involves categories of thought, and it is in terms of thought that the very problem you are investigating can be so much as stated. You cannot start in your investigations with a bare, self-identical, objective fact, stripped of every ideal element or contribution from thought. The least and lowest part of outward observation is not an independent entity--fact _minus_ mind, and out of which mind may, somewhere or other, be seen to emerge; but it is fact or object as it appears to an observing mind, in the medium of thought, having mind or thought as an inseparable factor of it. Whether there be such a thing as an absolute world outside of thought, whether there be such things as matter and material atoms existing in themselves before any mind begins to perceive or think about them, is not the question before us. If it were possible to conceive of such atoms, at any rate you, before you begin to make anything of them, must think them; and you can never, by thinking about atoms, prove that there is no such thing as thought other than as an ultimate product of atoms. Before you could reach thought or mind as a last result you must needs eliminate from it the data of the problem with which you start, and that you can never do, any more than you can stand on your own shoulders or outstrip your own shadow.... In one word, to constitute the reality of the outward world--to make possible the minimum of knowledge, nay, the very existence for us of molecules and atoms--you must needs presuppose that thought or thinking self, which some would persuade us is to be educed or evolved from them.... To make thought a function of matter is thus, simply, to make thought a function of itself[5].' From this reasoning there can be no escape; and it is more rational for a man to believe that colour exists as such in a flower than, after having plainly seen that such cannot be the case, forthwith to disregard the teaching of this analogy, and to imagine that any apparent evidence of mind as a result of matter or motion can possibly be entertained as real evidence. Remembering, then, that from the nature of this particular case it is as impossible for mind to prove its own causation as it is for water to rise above its source, it may still be well, for the sake of further argument, to sink this general consideration, and to regard such spurious evidence of causation as is presented by Materialism, without prejudice arising from its being _prima facie_ inadmissible.