But it is a little difficult not to ask which of these explanations is true.  Both of them cannot well be, seeing that they are different.  And neither of them can be adopted without very serious consequences.  It would require considerable hardihood to suggest that natural science should be swept away in favour of psychology, which would be done if the one view held by Mr. Huxley were true.  And, in my opinion, it requires quite as much hardihood to suggest the adoption of a theory that makes morality and religion illusory, which would be done were the other view valid.

As a matter of fact, however, such an attitude can scarcely be held by any one who is interested both in the success of natural science and in the spiritual development of mankind.  We are constrained rather to say that, if these rival lines of thought lead us to deny either the outer world of things, or the world of thought and morality, then they must both be wrong.  They are not “explanations” but false theories, if they lead to such conclusions as these.  And, instead of holding them up to the world as the final triumph of human thought, we should sweep them into the dust-bin, and seek for some better explanation from a new point of view.

And, indeed, a better explanation is sought, and sought not only by idealists, but by scientific men themselves,—­did they only comprehend their own main tendency and method.  The impulse towards unity, which is the very essence of thought, if it is baulked in one direction by a hopeless dualism, just breaks out in another.  Subjective idealism, that is, the theory that things are nothing but phenomena of the individual’s consciousness, that the world is really all inside the philosopher, is now known by most people to end in self-contradiction; and materialism is also known to begin with it.  And there are not many people sanguine enough to believe with Mr. Huxley and Mr. Herbert Spencer, that, if we add two self-contradictory theories together, or hold them alternately, we shall find the truth.  Modern science, that is, the science which does not philosophize, and modern philosophy are with tolerable unanimity denying this absolute dualism.  They do not know of any thought that is not of things, or of any things that are not for thought.  It is necessarily assumed that, in some way or other, the gap between things and thought is got over by knowledge.  How the connection is brought about may not be known; but, that there is the connection between real things and true thoughts, no one can well deny.  It is an ill-starred perversity which leads men to deny such a connection, merely because they have not found out how it is established.