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ONE:We are now in a position to understand how far Epicurus was justified in regarding the expectation of immortality as a source of dread rather than of consolation. In this respect also, the survival of the fittest has determined that human92 nature shall not look forward with satisfaction to the termination of its earthly existence. Were any race of men once persuaded that death is the passage to a happier world, it would speedily be replaced by competitors holding a belief better adapted to the conditions of terrestrial duration. Hence, practically speaking, the effect of religious dogmas has been to make death rather more dreaded than it would have been without their aid; and, as already observed, their natural tendency has been powerfully stimulated by the cupidity of their professional expositors. The hope of heaven, to exist at all, must be checked by a considerably stronger apprehension of hell. There is a saying in America that the immortality of the soul is too good to be true. We suspect that the immortality in which most religious Americans still believe hardly deserves such a compliment; but it accurately expresses the incredulity with which a genuine message of salvation would be received by most men; and this explains why Universalism, with the few who have accepted it, is but the transition stage to a total rejection of any life beyond the grave. No doubt, in the first flush of fanaticism, the assurance of an easy admission to paradise may do much to win acceptance for the religion which offers it; but when such a religion ceases to make new conquests, its followers must either modify their convictions, or die out under the competition of others by whom mortal life is not held so cheap.Sir A. Grant is on stronger, or rather on more inaccessible ground, when he uses the distinction between the two reasons as involving a sort of idealistic theory, because here Aristotle��s meaning is much less clearly expressed. Yet, if our interpretation be the correct one, if the creative Nous simply means the forms of things acting through the imagination on the possibilities of subjective conception, Aristotle��s view will be exactly the reverse of that contended for by Sir Alexander; thought, instead of moulding, will itself be moulded by external reality. In no case have we a right to set an obscure and disputed passage against Aristotle��s distinct, emphatic, and reiterated declarations, that sensation and ideation are373 substantially analogous processes, taken together with his equally distinct declaration, that the objects of sensation are independent of our feelings. We think, indeed, that Sir A. Grant will find, on reconsideration, that he is proving too much. For, if the things which reason creates were external to the mind, then Aristotle would go at least as far as those ��extreme German idealists�� from whom his expositor is anxious to separate him. Finally, we would observe that to set up Aristotle��s distinction between form and matter in opposition to the materialistic theories of the present day, shows a profound misconception of its meaning. Form and matter are nowhere distinguished from one another as subject and object. Form simply means the attributes of a thing, the entire aggregate of its differential characteristics. But that this does not of itself amount to conscious reason we are told by Aristotle himself.269 On the other hand, the ��matter�� to which ��some philosophers�� attribute ��an independent existence,�� is not his ��matter�� at all, but just the sum of things minus consciousness. The Stagirite did not, it is true, believe in the possibility of such a universe, but only (as we have shown) because he was not acquainted with the highest laws of motion. Yet, even taking ��matter�� in his own technical sense, Aristotle would have agreed with Prof. Tyndall, that it contained the promise and the potency of all future life, reason alone excepted. He tells us very clearly that the sensitive soul is a somatic function, something which, although not body, belongs to body; and this we conceive is all that any materialist would now contend for.270 And having gone so far, there really was nothing to prevent him from going a step farther, had he only been acquainted with the dependence of all intelligence on nervous action. At any rate, the tendency is now to obliterate the distinction where he drew it, and to substitute for it another distinction which he neglected. While all functions of consciousness, from the most elementary374 sensation to the most complex reasoning, seem to pass into one another by imperceptible gradations, consciousness in general is still separated from objective existence by an impassable chasm; and if there is any hope of reconciling them it lies in the absolute idealism which he so summarily rejected. What we have had occasion repeatedly to point out in other departments of his system, is verified once more in his psychology. The progress of thought has resulted from a reunion of the principles between which he drew a rigid demarcation. We have found that perception can only be understood as a process essentially homogeneous with the highest thought, and neither more nor less immaterial than it is. On the objective side, both may be resolved into sensori-motor actions; on the subjective side, into groups of related feelings. And here, also, we have to note that when Aristotle anticipates modern thought, it is through his one great mediating, synthetic conception. He observes incidentally that our knowledge of size and shape is acquired, not through the special senses, but by motion��an aper?u much in advance of Locke.271

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