10. But whatever operates to produce a life-manifestation must precede it
as an operating cause.

11. Life, therefore, whether as a blind or intelligent force or agency,
must precede its own manifestation; that is, must exist as an operating
cause before there is any produced effect.

12. And this is true both as regards physical and moral effects.

13. Our intuitions, as the final arbiters of judgment, demand this or some
equivalent order as the only one embraced in a logical praxis.

And since there can be no sound without an ear to appreciate it, so there
be can no matter without an existing _ego_, in some state of consciousness
in the universe, to apprehend it--to ascribe to it attributes.[2] On what,
therefore, are we to predicate the existence of either matter or motion,
except it be these intuitions of consciousness whose validity, so far as
we have any knowledge whatever on the subject, rests exclusively on that
"breath of life," which was breathed into man when he became a living
soul? But if our intuitions are not realities, then nothing is a reality.
All is as unsubstantial, as vague and shadowy, as Coleridge's "image of a
rock," or Bishop Berkeley's "ghost of a departed quantity," as he once
defined a fluxion. We may, therefore, retort upon Professor Bastian:--The
"materialists," must give up their last stronghold--we cannot even grant
them a right to assume the existence of either matter or motion, since
both manifestly depend, for their slightest manifestation, upon the more
potent agency of "vital force," as expressed in thought, volition, and
consciousness--that triumvirate of the intellectual faculties without
which neither matter nor motion could have so much as a hypothetical
existence.