But what if the "delighted spirit" has been developed by brain, and with brain must be dissolved? Our whole distinctive human life, our mind, moral, intellectual, spiritual, rebels against a doom of subjection to that crass material law! Yet can we establish a difference? Can we show that the law of our true being differs from the law of things outside us? This question, unspeakably interesting to every one of us, might be put in various shapes. We might ask, Can the protest of soul be set down as a mere sentiment only? If it were no more than an instinct of our nature, it would deserve consideration; for why should so high and noble an instinct be aimless and misleading? If we cannot trust our own souls, what are we to trust? Phenomena themselves are given us within. Mathematical truths, which Positivists are obliged to exempt from phenomenal law, have a subjective validity--we cannot help thinking them, and we cannot think their contradictories. But suppose that a future state of recompence with its inferential moralities cannot be denied without denying our own consciousness--pronouncing the clearest of our intuitions a will o' the wisp--or, sadder still, a corpse light on the grave of hope--nay, more, without subverting the law which makes human society to differ from animal gregariousness, and gives to human action its spring, its liberty, its life--suppose all this true, what shall, what can we say? And such is the issue I propose to try this morning. The plan I have devised for trying it fairly is, first, to get as clear an idea as short compass will allow of what Positivism says on our question. Afterwards to state a case for moral law by way of antithesis. It is through the law of our moral being that we may most readily look for something to difference our souls from creatures below them. The strain I shall have to put on your attention lies in this; after grasping in brief the Positivist attitude, I must ask that you will not take my facts or arguments on trust, but will verify each severally by an appeal to your own consciousness. It is always upon the law deduced from or applied to facts that you ought to exercise your greatest vigilance. For law interprets facts to us--we might almost say that under its manipulation they bend like a nose of wax; nothing, you will remember, so flexible as figures, except facts.