HE announcement of another volume from the pen of Mr. Mallock on the subject of theism has aroused new interest in the author and in his recent discussions. The readers and critics. of his philosophical writings recognize in him a man groping in a medley of intellectual difficulties, striving to unravel the tangled skeins of thought with a view of presenting perhaps a constructive basis for the philosophical justification of the grounds of faith. In The Reconstruction of Religious Belief we have a solution, although our hopes as to its. strength and cogency are sadly disappointed.

The Reconstruction of Religious Belief is a sequel to the volumes Religion as a Credible Doctrine and The Veil of the Temple. These prepare the mind for the train of thought advanced in the present publication. The two former are more argumentative and critical; the latter more positive and constructive. The reader, however, perceives a continuity between all. The ground and view-point of his reasoning are the same The development in the last volume, far from answering the purpose of the writer, or meeting the expectations of the intelligent reader, takes a direction that sets things all awry. Reconstruction of Religious Belief is a misnomer; a more fitting title would be "The Bankruptcy of the Science-Philosophy." The Reconstruction of Religious Belief. By W. H. Mallock. New York: Harper & Brothers. Copyright. 1906. THE MISSIONARY SOCIETY OF ST. PAUI. THE APOSTLE IN THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

VOL. LXXXII.-46

Mr. Mallock prefaces the discussion by asserting that every one must have some background of belief with regard to the nature of man and the meaning of man's existence in order to live a healthy, civilized, and enjoyable life. This belief must not be a goal of intellectual inquiry, but a starting point of practical judgment and action. But at the present day the old dominant belief in Christianity is no longer accepted. Hence we must justify the old belief by supplying it with new foundations, or build up some new belief which may possibly take its place. This work is going on with but little success. The failure is mainly due to wrong methods. The present volume is written to suggest a better method.

The book, therefore, is naturally divided into two parts. The former is a criticism of the false methods of apologetics, which he calls the clerical and the philosophical. The latter, which takes up three-fourths of the work, is a lengthened exposition and attempted justification of the new method, which Mr. Mallock makes his own and calls the method of science.

I.

The present article is confined to an examination of Mr. Mallock's theory of reconstruction. We therefore pass over his criticisms of other methods with the remark that he absolutely rejects what is designated as the clerical method and, on the contrary, contends that what is good in the philosophical method is absorbed and presented more completely in the method of science.

Science-Philosophy explains existence as a single necessary process, man being a momentary product of it, God being the process as a whole, and no personal relation between these two being possible. "Man and the universe," writes Mr. Mallock, "when studied as science studies them, neither can have, nor require to have, any other explanation than that which science actually or potentially offers us, this explanation being summed up in the principle with which science starts as its postulate, and which it verifies as its last conclusion, that all phenomena, from the stars to the thoughts of man, result from a single system of interconnected causes, and are so many modes of a single undivided substance, which are all alike transient, and all equally necessary" (pp. 13, 14).

Science, therefore, as a reasoned system of thought, claims to explain everything. The various existences are modes of a single substance, which in itself is unknown to us, is by our own experience apprehended under the guise of matter "just as the movements of a hand, itself invisible, might be known and studied by us if it wore a visible glove." Yet the scientific presentation of things does not result in Materialism. For by destroying the old notion of matter a way is found by which science can absorb and consolidate the teaching of Idealism. The distinctive doctrine of science is that all individual things, the mind of man included, result from a process of which matter is, for us, the inseparable concomitant, and which develops them in accordance with a single system of causes, the working of which science studies by means of its material equivalents. Thus, science is presented as a system of pure determinism. A necessary outcome of the whole scientific scheme is to reduce us to puppets of some sort or other, by linking our whole lives to the general process of the universe. And Mr. Mallock bids us "accept the fact that, so long as it is tried by ordinary scientific tests, the scientific doctrine is invulnerable" (p. 21).

The specific doctrines, without which Science-Philosophy as a system would have no existence, and would be unable to present us with the conception of the universe "as one continuous whole," are certain pecular teachings concerning the nature of matter and the origin and nature of man.

"The old and crude conception of matter," writes Mr. Mallock, "was that of a substance essentially inert." Now, however, science and philosophy unite in presenting matter as something altogether different. To science matter is never inert in any form or condition, "even a brick being the theatre of a greater internal activity than any that a philosopher is conscious of in his own head" (p. 24). And philosophy has shown that all those familiar qualities, by which matter is revealed to us and which were once attributed to itself, do not reside in itself and cannot possibly do so, but are merely so many effects produced by it in our own consciousness. Of their cause we do know and can know nothing, "except that it cannot be what we commonly call material." Hence we can no longer hold that matter is inert and dead, or that it is less active than mind. As a result, the defenders of religion can

not attack science on the ground that it deduces life from nonliving matter, and one of the great gaps or rifts in the scientific process is smoothed over and disappears.

Having done away with the division between organic and inorganic, the Science-Philosophy attempts to bridge the chasm between mental and organic life. "This is done," says Mr. Mallock, "by showing man's mind to be a highly composite product, having in itself the workmanship of a hundred million years, rooted in the universe which it confronts, and drawing therefrom its daily nutriment. The doctrine that organic life, human and animal equally, had its origin in the simple organic cell, in a particular way plays a part in the gradual process of evolution." The same result on a larger scale is accomplished by the doctrine of conation. Science-Philosophy admits that the nature of mind is one of action, effort, or conation, but asserts that in this it is not peculiar. There is activity or conation in every part of the universe, in the breaking sea, in gunpowder, as in thought. But the conation is in no case isolated. It is a part of and depends upon the universal conation of nature. The same is true of the brain, which is the physical side of the mind. Its millions of cells are in a state of constant movement; but all these movements are part of a wider process and are all determined by extra-cerebral causes, just as a flower is determined by causes outside itself-by soil, by air, by sun, and by its parent plant or tree. Man and the universe are both of the same unknown substance, and the activities which are outside man are constantly being absorbed into him, in the form of what we call food, and by the process which we call digestion. Hence, instead of exhibiting the activity or conation of the mind as a proof that the mind is independent of the external universe, science exhibits it as illustrating, in the most vivid possible way, the fact that the former is entirely governed by the latter, and is, indeed, merely a part of the general cosmic process.

The only point which presents any inherent difficulty is the break between the brain-stuff and the conscious mind. But science is ready with its solution. It asserts that the "self of each of us-the thinking and feeling is a mental and material existence at one and the same time, that the conception of thought, as existing apart from the brain, is like the conception of breathing as existing apart from lungs." Moreover, the

study of hypnotism, of the brain, and of mental pathology, which has grown up during the last twenty-five years, shows that individual consciousness and mind are by no means coextensive and identical, but that, though without mind there can certainly be no such consciousness, such consciousness is by no means essential to the existence and operations of mindthat the larger part, indeed, of the mental life of each of us, lies as much outside the sphere of the conscious ego as the process of digestion does, or the growth of our nails and hair.

In this way the chasm which seemed to yawn between brain-matter, which is known to us in the form of conscious thought, and matter which is "not yoked to this mysterious companion, consciousness," has been filled up by matter in a third and intermediate condition—namely, matter which is not "egotistically" conscious, but which nevertheless thinks. Thus "science presents us with a descriptive record, already practically complete in all its salient features, of a process which, beginning as the movements of some cosmic nebula, results at last automatically in the mind and the personality, of man.”

The existence of necessary truths and the interaction of mind and body present only apparent difficulties. Mr. Mallock contends that science gives a complete answer, The former is solved by Spencer's theory that what is necessary to truth in the individual is the result of accumulated experiences in the race. The individual mind of the slowly evolved man has ideas which are prior to its own individual experience; but it has none which were not derived in the first instance from the experiences of its human and subhuman progenitors.

The latter difficulty disappears before an analysis of the nature of consciousness. Mr. Mallock rejects the doctrine that "consciousness in all its forms is nothing but a cerebral byproduct, or an epiphenomenon, which registers what the brain does, but has no share in directing it." He also rejects the doctrine of parallelism, viz., that the changes in consciousness are not caused by the changes in the brain, but are parallel to them. He proposes a new explanation. States of consciousness, he holds, cannot, as independent things, react on the brain, any more than the brain can act on them as things independent of itself; but "tracts of the brain, when they come. to be in such a condition that consciousness emerges from