" PHYSIOUS " ON THEISX. [To THE EDITOR OF THE
mgamorAroa.1 SM,—I trust you will allow me to correct one error that occurs in your review of my work on Theism. Your reviewer says :— "The belief that when we have catalogued the data of the senses, we have completed the inventory of existence, has been hinted at or implied often and often ; but the work named below presents us with the first example, so far as we know, of a dis- tinct acceptance of this belief expressed in the English language, and addressed to the average reader." So far am I from dis- tinctly accepting such a preposterous " belief," that I have devoted a whole chapter of my work to its express negation.— [" Physicus " was probably putting one meaning upon the words "the data of the senses," and our reviewer another. The view the latter ascribes to " Physicus " is so far from being a pre- posterous one, that it is apparently the belief of the majority of scientific sceptics in our day. No belief, we are taught, which can- not in the last resort be connected with some sensible impression, can be regarded as the image of an objective reality. If our author's argument against Theism did not mean this, his critic certainly misunderstood him. This was all that was meant by the words he has quoted. The book consists of an examin- ation of arguments on the side of Theism which are repre- sented as inconclusive, and it does not therefore afford any very convenient statement of the writer's own view ; but he appears to hold that the persistence of force and the primary qualities of matter being sufficient to account for the world as it is, any hypothesis of a Divine Mind at its roots is a violation of the Law of Parsimony. As we know nothing of force but through our experience of muscular action, or of the qualities of matter but through the senses aided by the tests which science has brought to enlarge their scope, we supposed our statement of the author's view to be correct. We cannot even now conjecture with any certainty to which chapter of his work he refers, as that which proves our statement inaccurate.—ED. Spectator.]
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