metaphysics starts from psychology, psychology itself depends greatly
upon physiology; current theories need reconsideration. This paper
was the starting-point for his larger essay on "Animals as Automata,"
delivered as an address before the British Association in 1874.

The third paper (1876) was on "The Evidence of the Miracle of the
Resurrection," as to which he, so to say, moved the previous question,
arguing that there was no valid evidence of actual death having taken
place. The paper was the result of an invitation on the part of some
of his metaphysical opponents. As he rejected the miraculous, they
asked him to write on a definite miracle, and explain his reasons for
not accepting it. He chose this subject because, in the first place,
it was a cardinal instance; and, in the second, that as it was a
miracle not worked by Christ himself, a discussion of its genuineness
could not possibly suggest personal fraud and so inflict gratuitous
pain upon believers in it. The question of the fundamentals of
Christian evidences had long been in his mind; it was no new subject
to him when in the eighties, debarred by his health from physiological
researches, he extended his work on Biblical studies.

If the Metaphysical Society effected nothing else, it brought about
a personal _rapprochement_ between the representatives of opposing
schools of thought. It became clear to the older school that the new
thinkers had by no means failed, as they suspected, to examine the
older doctrines. Theirs was not dishonest doubt, but a strong demand
for better evidence. If the Society itself "died of too much love," it
may well have contributed to the greater amenity of public discussion
as the years passed, and the diminution of the former rabid
denunciations which waned as the new doctrines spread, and were even
absorbed and digested by their former antagonists.