Past experience leads me to be tolerably certain that, when the propositions I have just placed before you are accessible to public comment and criticism, they will be condemned by many zealous persons, and perhaps by some few of the wise and thoughtful.  I should not wonder if “gross and brutal materialism” were the mildest phrase applied to them in certain quarters.  And, most undoubtedly, the terms of the propositions are distinctly materialistic.  Nevertheless two things are certain:  the one, that I hold the statements to be substantially true; the other, that I, individually, am no materialist, but, on the contrary, believe materialism to involve grave philosophical error.

This union of materialistic terminology with the repudiation of materialistic philosophy, I share with some of the most thoughtful men with whom I am acquainted.  And, when I first undertook to deliver the present discourse, it appeared to me to be a fitting opportunity to explain how such a union is not only consistent with, but necessitated by, sound logic.  I purposed to lead you through the territory of vital phenomena to the materialistic slough in which you find yourselves now plunged, and then to point out to you the sole path by which, in my judgment, extrication is possible.

An occurrence of which I was unaware until my arrival here last night, renders this line of argument singularly opportune.  I found in your papers the eloquent address “On the Limits of Philosophical Inquiry,” which a distinguished prelate of the English Church delivered before the members of the Philosophical Institution on the previous day.  My argument, also, turns upon this very point of the limits of philosophical inquiry; and I cannot bring out my own views better than by contrasting them with those so plainly, and, in the main, fairly, stated by the Archbishop of York.

But I may be permitted to make a preliminary comment upon an occurrence that greatly astonished me.  Applying the name of “the New Philosophy” to that estimate of the limits of philosophical inquiry which I, in common with many other men of science, hold to be just, the Archbishop opens his address by identifying this “New Philosophy” with the Positive Philosophy of M. Comte (of whom he speaks as its “founder"); and then proceeds to attack that philosopher and his doctrines vigorously.

Now, so far as I am concerned, the most reverend prelate might dialectically hew M. Comte in pieces, as a modern Agag, and I should not attempt to stay his hand.  In so far as my study of what specially characterises the Positive Philosophy has led me, I find therein little or nothing of any scientific value, and a great deal which is as thoroughly antagonistic to the very essence of science as anything in ultramontane Catholicism.  In fact, M. Comte’s philosophy in practice might be compendiously described as Catholicism minus Christianity.

But what has Comtism to do with the “New Philosophy,” as the Archbishop defines it in the following passage?