_Answer._ Not so when we consider that men seldom comprehend the deep meaning of their practical assumptions; and when we recollect the prejudices, once dignified as good sense, which have successively surrendered to philosophy. _Ninth objection._ (Sect. 56, 57.) Any Principle that is inconsistent with our common faith in the existence of the material world must be rejected. _Answer._ The fact that we are conscious of not being ourselves the cause of changes perpetually going on in our _sense_-ideas, some of which we gradually learn by experience to foresee, sufficiently accounts for the common belief in the independence of those ideas, and is what men truly mean by this. _Tenth objection._ (Sect. 58, 59.) The foregoing Principles concerning Matter and Spirit are inconsistent with the laws of motion, and with other truths in mathematics and natural philosophy. _Answer._ The laws of motion, and those other truths, may be all conceived and expressed in consistency with the absence of independent substance and causation in Matter. _Eleventh objection._ (Sect. 60-66.) If, according to the foregoing Principles, the material world is merely phenomena presented by a Power not-ourselves to our senses, the elaborate contrivances which we find in Nature are useless; for we might have had all experiences that are needful without them, by the direct agency of God. _Answer._ Elaborate contrivances in Nature are relatively necessary as signs: they express to _us_ the occasional presence and some of the experience of other men, also the constant presence and power of the Universal Spirit, while the scientific interpretation of elaborately constituted Nature is a beneficial moral and intellectual exercise. _Twelfth objection._ (Sect. 67-79.) Although the impossibility of _active_ Matter may be demonstrable, this does not prove the impossibility of _inactive_ Matter, _neither solid nor extended_, which may be the occasion of our having sense-ideas. _Answer._ This supposition is unintelligible: the words in which it is expressed convey no meaning. _Thirteenth objection._ (Sect. 80, 81.) Matter may be _an unknowable Somewhat_, neither substance nor accident, cause nor effect, spirit nor idea: all the reasonings against Matter, conceived as something positive, fail, when this wholly negative notion is maintained. _Answer._ This is to use the word “Matter” as people use the word “nothing”: Unknowable Somewhat cannot be distinguished from nothing. _Fourteenth objection._ (Sect. 82-84.) Although we cannot, in opposition to the New Principles, infer scientifically the existence of Matter, in abstraction from all realising percipient life, or form any conception, positive or negative, of what Matter is; yet Holy Scripture demands the faith of every Christian in the independent reality of the material world. _Answer._ The _independent_ reality of the material world is nowhere affirmed in Scripture.