therefore, distinct from the matter which it animates, and, being thus immaterial, cannot possibly become better known by any analysis of matter. Of this emphatically vital question Professor Huxley, as has been already intimated, takes a diametrically opposite view. He does not merely, in sufficiently explicit terms, deny that there is any intrinsic difference between matter and spirit, and affirm the two to be, in spite of appearances, essentially identical. If this were all, I at any rate should not be entitled to object, for I shall myself presently have occasion to use very similar language, although attaching to it a widely different meaning from that with which it is used by Professor Huxley. But the latter goes on to avow his belief that the human body, like every other living body, is a machine, all the operations of which will sooner or later be explained on physical principles, insomuch that we shall eventually arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, even as we have already arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat. He considers that with the same propriety with which the amount of heat which a pound weight produces by falling through the distance of a foot, may be called its equivalent in one sense, may the amount of feeling which the pound produces by falling through a foot of distance on a gouty big toe, be called its equivalent in another sense, to wit, that of consciousness. Yet he protests against these tenets being deemed materialistic, which, he declares, they certainly neither are nor can be, for that while he himself certainly holds them, he as certainly is not himself a materialist. Professor Huxley is among the last to be suspected of talking anything, as Monsieur Jourdain did prose, without knowing it. He knows perfectly well that he has here been talking materialism, but he insists that his materialism is only another form of idealism. He seeks to evade the seemingly inevitable deduction from his premises by representing both matter and spirit as mere names, and names, too, not for real things, but for fanciful hypotheses which may be spoken of indifferently in materialistic or in spiritualistic terms, thought in the one case being treated as a form of matter, and matter in the other as a form of thought. The identity of matter and spirit is, in short, represented by him as consisting in this: that the existence of both is merely nominal, or at best merely ideal.