Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/679

 necessity complete its fabric by the admission of a Power from which both consciousness and the objects of consciousness have taken their rise. Should it persist in denying anything but a mental reality to the objects of consciousness, it must still suppose an unknown source from which consciousness itself has been derived; otherwise it will entangle itself in two unthinkable propositions. First, that before men (or animals) existed there was absolute nothingness, an idea which we cannot frame; secondly, that where there was nothing at one moment there was the next moment something, a process which we cannot realize without supposing a time antecedent to that something, and which we may not, without the contradiction of introducing time in the midst of nothingness, realize by supposing a time antecedent to that something.

It was no doubt the vague feeling of these perplexities that forced John Stuart Mill, the most eminent defender of this school of thought, to denominate matter a Permanent Possibility of Sensation. This singular phrase well exemplifies the difficulties of his position. For is matter an external substance, existing independently, or not? If it is, then what becomes of the Berkeleyan doctrine? Mill and his followers are simply metaphysical Realists. But if not, what becomes of the permanence? It is not in us, for our sensations are not permanent; it is not in the matter, for there is none. And what is there a possibility of? Causing sensation, or having it? Not the former, for there is nothing to cause it; not the latter, for the possibility of our having sensations is a mere fact of our nature, and cannot serve to define matter. And where is the sensation located? The phraseology would seem to imply, that matter is in the permanent condition of possible feeling; just as the nerve may be in the permanent condition of possible excitation. But this would be placing sensation in the wrong quarter. And if sensation be in us, we have not a permanent possibility, but a permanent actuality of sensation. So that unless the words be construed to mean that there is outside of us a permanent something which excites sensation, of which the modes vary (for this is the sense of possibility), they have no assignable meaning whatever. Mill, in fact, had been compelled, without wishing it, to recognize an ultimate power in nature; and his per