Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/514

494 personated by a wench who is much uglier and has no virtue worth speaking of. I hope I should be ready to stand by a falling cause if I had ever adopted it; but suffering for a falling cause, which one has done one's best to bring to the ground, is a kind of martyrdom for which I have no taste. In my opinion, the philosophical theory which Mr. Lilly attributes to me—but which I have over and over again disclaimed—is untenable and destined to extinction; and I not unreasonably demur to being counted among its defenders.

After the manner of a mediæval disputant, Mr. Lilly posts up three theses, which, as he conceives, embody the chief heresies propagated by the late Professor Clifford, Mr. Herbert Spencer, and myself. He says that we agree "(1) in putting aside, as unverifiable, everything which the senses can not verify; (2) everything beyond the bounds of physical science; (3) everything which can not be brought into a laboratory and dealt with chemically" (page 477, preceding article).

My lamented young friend Clifford, sweetest of natures though keenest of disputants, is out of reach of our little controversies; but his works speak for him, and those who run may read a refutation of Mr. Lilly's assertions in them. Mr. Herbert Spencer hitherto has shown no lack either of ability or of inclination to speak for himself; and it would be a superfluity, not to say an impertinence, on my part to take up the cudgels for him. But for myself, if my knowledge of my own consciousness may be assumed to be adequate (and I make not the least pretension to acquaintance with what goes on in my "Unbewusstsein"), I may be permitted to observe that the first proposition appears to me to be not true; that the second is in the same case; and that, if there be gradations in untrueness, the third is so monstrously untrue that it hovers on the verge of absurdity, even if it does not actually flounder in that logical limbo. Thus to all three theses I reply in appropriate fashion, Nego—1 say No; and I proceed to state the grounds of that negation, which the proprieties do not permit me to make quite so emphatic as I could desire.

Let me begin with the first assertion, that I "put aside, as unverifiable, everything which the senses can not verify." Can such a statement as this be seriously made in respect of any human being? But I am not appointed apologist for mankind in general, and, confining my observations to myself, I beg leave to point out that, at this present moment, I entertain an unshakable conviction that Mr. Lilly is the victim of a patent and enormous misunderstanding, and that I have not the slightest intention of putting that conviction aside because I can not "verify" it either by touch, or taste, or smell, or hearing, or sight, which (in the absence of any trace of telepathic faculty) make up the totality of my senses.

Again, I may venture to admire the clear and vigorous English in which Mr, Lilly embodies his views; but the source of that admiration does not lie in anything which my five senses enable me to