Then what can that ‘matter’ be with which the physicist must ultimately and in the beginning deal? When matter is divested of all its qualities, divested in thought of all the ‘modes of motion’ by which it manifests itself to us, what is it? Is it mass, wholly incapable of affecting our senses? Matter _sine perceptione_? That cannot be a thing, it is an abstraction, and he must be something more than a bold man, who would logically infer an actual factor, corresponding to the abstract conception. Manifestly, then, physical science and its methods cannot illuminate and explain all the dilating area of space, and flow of time, with which our consciousness and reason are concerned. Shapes and motion, form and number, are not data that can carry us to the origin of the universe. You must import an unacknowledged factor. Force stands ready: if you endow _it_, in imagination equipped in the uniform of science, with the very qualities of mind, no doubt you may cross the boundary of experimental science, and see in matter affected by motion the possibility of all that is. But, says Professor Huxley, ‘_Kraft und Stoff_—force and matter—are paraded as the Alpha and Omega of existence. This, I apprehend, is the fundamental article of the faith materialistic, and whosoever does not hold it is condemned by the more zealous of the persuasion (as I have some reason to know) to the Inferno appointed for fools and hypocrites. But all this,’ he continues, ‘I heartily disbelieve; and ... I will briefly give my reasons for persisting in my infidelity. In the first place, ... it seems to me pretty plain that there is a third thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness, which, in the hardness of my heart or head, I cannot see to be matter, or force, or any conceivable modification of either, however intimately the manifestations of the phenomena of consciousness may be connected with the phenomena known as matter and force. In the second place, the arguments used by Descartes and Berkeley to show that our certain knowledge does not extend beyond our states of consciousness, appear to me to be as irrefragable now as they did when I first became acquainted with them, some half-century ago. All the materialistic writers I know of, who have tried to bite that file, have simply broken their teeth. But if this is true, our one certainty is the existence of the mental world; and that of _Kraft und Stoff_ falls into the rank of, at best, a highly probable hypothesis.’[1] [Footnote 1: _Fortnightly Review_, No. ccxl., new series, December 1886, p. 794.]