treat in this way the alleged immaterial part of consciousness?  Why this emphatic protestation on their part that there may exist a something which, as far as the needs of their science go, is superfluous, and as far as the logic of their science goes is impossible?  The answer is plain.  Though their science does not need it, the moral value of life does.  As to that value they have certain foregone conclusions, which they cannot resolve to abandon, but which their science can make no room for.  Two alternatives are offered them—­to admit that life has not the meaning they thought it had, or that their system has not the completeness they thought it had; and of these two alternatives they will accept neither.  They could tell us ‘with an iron strength of logic’ that all human sorrow was as involuntary and as unmeaning as sea-sickness; that love and faith were but distillations of what exists diluted in mutton-chops and beer; and that the voice of one crying in the wilderness was nothing but an automatic metamorphosis of the locusts and wild honey.  They could tell us ‘with an iron strength of logic’ that all the thoughts and moral struggles of humanity were but as the clanging whirr of a machine, which if a little better adjusted might for the future go on spinning in silence.  But they see that the discovery on man’s part that his life was nothing more than this would mean a complete change in its mechanism, and that thenceforward its entire action would be different.  They therefore seek a refuge in saying it may be more than this.  But what do they mean by may be?  Do they mean that in spite of all that science can teach them, in spite of that uniformity absolute and omnipresent which alone it reveals to them, which day by day it is forcing with more vividness on their imaginations, and which seems to have no room for anything besides itself—­do they mean that in spite of this there may still be a second something, a power of a different order, acting on man’s brain and grappling with its automatic movements?  Do they mean that that ‘heathen’ and ‘gross’ conception of an immaterial soul is probably after all the true one?  Either they must mean this or else they must mean the exact opposite.  There is no third course open to them.[36]

Their opinion, as soon as they form one, must rest either on this extreme or that.  They will see, as exact and scientific thinkers, that if it be not practically certain that there is some supernatural entity in us, it is practically certain that there is not one.  To say merely that it may exist is but to put an ounce in one scale whilst there is a ton in the other.  It is an admission that is utterly dead and meaningless.  They can only entertain the question of its existence because its existence is essential to man as a moral being.  The only reason that can tempt us to say it may be forces us in the same moment to say that it must be, and that it is.