In pronouncing this to be exceedingly evil counsel, as with the most unfeigned respect for its author I feel bound at once to do, it might not be necessary for me to undertake a detailed topographical survey of the path alluded to. It might, perhaps, suffice to specify the conclusions to which the path is represented as leading, in order to show that those conclusions cannot possibly be reached by any such route. By Professor Huxley himself they are thus described:--We know nothing of matter 'except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness,' nor of spirit, except that 'it also is a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of consciousness. In other words matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary _substrata_ of groups of natural phenomena.' But if matter be not a thing, but a name, and a name too not for a real, but only an imaginary thing, one perfect certainty is that matter cannot possibly be composed either wholly or in part of molecules, and, by necessary consequence, that life cannot possibly be 'the product of any disposition of material molecules,' nor the phenomena of life be 'expressions of molecular changes in the matter of life.' Of the particular Huxleian doctrine which we are considering, the two moieties are absolutely irreconcileable; so that on the assumption that either moiety were true, the truth of that moiety would be decisive against the other. If matter have no real, and only a nominal existence, life, which is undeniably a reality, cannot be a property of matter. If life, being an undisputed reality, be a property of matter, matter must needs be a reality also, and not merely a name. Any one, however, who, like myself, is thoroughly convinced that both halves of the doctrine are equally and utterly erroneous, is precluded from employing one for the refutation of the other, and in order to prove, as I shall now attempt to do, that life is in no sense either a product or a property of matter, must resort for the purpose to independent reasoning.