or negative, as to what lies beyond consciousness.  It accuses the subtle Berkeley of stepping beyond the limits of knowledge when he declared that a substance of matter does not exist; and of illogicality, for not seeing that the arguments which he supposed demolished the existence of matter were equally destructive to the existence of soul.  And it refuses to listen to the jargon of more recent days about the “Absolute,” and all the other hypostatized adjectives, the initial letters of the names of which are generally printed in capital letters; just as you give a Grenadier a bearskin cap, to make him look more formidable than he is by nature.

I repeat, the path indicated and followed by Descartes which we have hitherto been treading, leads through doubt to that critical Idealism which lies at the heart of modern metaphysical thought.  But the “Discourse” shows us another, and apparently very different, path, which leads, quite as definitely, to that correlation of all the phaenomena of the universe with matter and motion, which lies at the heart of modern physical thought, and which most people call Materialism.

The early part of the seventeenth century, when Descartes reached manhood, is one of the great epochs of the intellectual life of mankind.  At that time, physical science suddenly strode into the arena of public and familiar thought, and openly challenged, not only Philosophy and the Church, but that common ignorance which passes by the name of Common Sense.  The assertion of the motion of the earth was a defiance to all three, and Physical Science threw down her glove by the hand of Galileo.

It is not pleasant to think of the immediate result of the combat; to see the champion of science, old, worn, and on his knees before the Cardinal Inquisitor, signing his name to what he knew to be a lie.  And, no doubt, the Cardinals rubbed their hands as they thought how well they had silenced and discredited their adversary.  But two hundred years have passed, and however feeble or faulty her soldiers, Physical Science sits crowned and enthroned as one of the legitimate rulers of the world of thought.  Charity children would be ashamed not to know that the earth moves; while the Schoolmen are forgotten; and the Cardinals—­well, the Cardinals are at the oecumenical Council, still at their old business of trying to stop the movement of the world.

As a ship, which having lain becalmed with every stitch of canvas set, bounds away before the breeze which springs up astern, so the mind of Descartes, poised in equilibrium of doubt, not only yielded to the full force of the impulse towards physical science and physical ways of thought, given by his great contemporaries, Galileo and Harvey, but shot beyond them; and anticipated, by bold speculation, the conclusions, which could only be placed upon a secure foundation by the labours of generations of workers.