going astray here if we allow ourselves for a moment to forget that a quality and the conception of that quality are not one single thing, but two things. Can it be seriously supposed that if all the conscious creatures, of every description, by which the universe is peopled, were to fall temporarily into complete stupor, the material universe would, at the commencement of the trance, be deprived of its extension, solidity, figure, and all its other constituent properties, recovering them again as soon as its inhabitants woke up again? Can it be doubted that, on the contrary, all potentialities resident in its material composition would pursue the even tenor of their way just as if nothing had happened; performing, during the temporary absence of external percipient minds, precisely those operations which, as soon as consciousness returned to those minds, would be followed by the perceptions of sight, hearing, and touch? But if so, then plainly it is exceedingly derogatory to matter to charge it with such absolute dependence on external support that its very being consists in being perceived from without. That matter cannot exist without mind I cheerfully admit, or rather most earnestly affirm, proposing presently to explain in what sense I make the affirmation. Meanwhile let it suffice to have ascertained that the mental service with which matter cannot dispense, whatever else it be, is at any rate not, as the whole Berkeleian school so positively insist, that of mental testimony to its existence. Let us pause here for a moment to report progress. We have seen, on the one hand, that unless mind and matter have been eternally coexistent, mind must have preceded matter, and that it is idle, therefore, to expect, by any researches into matter, to discover how mind (or life) originated. We have seen that from a materialism which represents mind as in any sense a property or product of matter there is no possible outlet to an idealism which represents matter as owing its being to mind. To see this is simply to see that the builder of a house cannot possibly have been born in the house he has himself built. On the other hand, we have seen that the idealism which represents being or existence as consisting of perception is utterly incompatible with materialism of any sort or kind, unless, indeed, with a materialistic nihilism wherein would be no room for a solitary molecule, still less for any molecular structure, and least of all for that motion of molecular structures into which consistent materialists are logically bound to attempt to resolve all natural phenomena. We have, in short, seen that materialism and idealism, in the senses in which those terms are commonly used, are utterly incapable of amalgamation, or indeed of even being harmoniously approximated, without being first deprived of all the characteristic traits which at present entitle them to their distinguishing appellations.