or as possible as to ’attempt to upset Euclid by the help of the Rig Veda.’  Now on Professor Huxley’s principles, this last sentence, though it sounds very weighty, is, if so ungracious a word may be allowed me, nothing short of nonsense.  It would be the lowest depth of immorality, he says, to believe in God, when we see that there is no physical evidence to justify the belief.  And physical science in this way he admits—­he indeed proclaims—­has upset religion.  How then has physical science in the same way failed to upset morality?  The foundation of morality, he says, is the belief that truth for its own sake is sacred.  But what proof can he discover of this sacredness?  Does any positive method of experience or observation so much as tend to suggest it?  We have already seen that it does not.  What Professor Huxley’s philosophy really proves to him is that it is true that nothing is sacred; not that it is a sacred thing to discover the truth.

We saw all this already when we were examining his comparison of the perception of moral beauty to the perception of the heat of ginger.  It is the same thing with which we are again dealing now, only we are approaching it from a slightly different point of view.  What we saw before, was that without an assent to the religious dogmas, the moral dogmas can have no logical meaning.  We have now seen that even were the two logically independent, they yet belong both of them to the same order of things; and that if our tests of truth prove the former to be illusions, they will, with precisely the same force, prove the same thing of the latter.

But the most crucial test of all we have still to come to, which will put this conclusion in a yet clearer and a more unmistakable light.  Thus far what we have seen has amounted to only this—­that if science can take from man his religious faith, it leaves him a being without any moral guidance.  What we shall now see is that, by the same arguments, it will prove him to be not a moral being at all; that it will prove not only that he has no rule by which to direct his will, but also that he has no will to direct.

To understand this we must return to physical science, and to the exact results that have been accomplished by it.  We have seen how completely, from one point of view, it has connected mind with matter, and how triumphantly it is supposed to have unified the apparent dualism of things.  It has revealed the brain to us as matter in a combination of infinite complexity, which it has reached at last through its own automatic workings; and it has revealed consciousness to us as a function of this brain, and as altogether inseparable from it.  But for this, the old dualism now supposed to be obsolete would remain undisturbed.  Indeed, if this doctrine were denied, such a dualism would be the only alternative.  For every thought, then, that we think, and every feeling or desire that we feel, there takes place in the brain some definite