RELATIONS BETWEEN MIND AND MATTER. 97 



somewhere ; and so they have asserted that the body is but a 

 temporary habitat for the mind, or soul, as it is often called, 

 and that the soul could and did exist independent of matter 

 in any of its embodiments, so the conscious being has been 

 imagined as an immaterial something, very much as heat and 

 light and electricity have been supposed to be immaterial 

 somethings. By and by heat and light and electricity were 

 each shown to be no such kind of things, and as having no 

 existence apart from ordinary matter. After that, vital force 

 as differing from chemical and physical forces was dispensed 

 with, and next both biologist and physicist agree that life is, in 

 all probability, but a function of ordinary matter; and lastly 

 the psychologist brings in as his return that mind and matter 

 are but the two sides of the same reality. This does not mean 

 what it has generally been taken to mean, but exactly the 

 opposite. It has been held and taught by many that to asso- 

 ciate either life or mind with matter as a necessary adjunct 

 was pure materialism. Some have thought that if the doctrine 

 of the conservation of energy were true or were admitted to be 

 true, then life would be correlated with the other forces as 

 they are correlated with each other, so that whenever one 

 appeared it was at the expense of and destruction of some 

 other, — as when heat energy is changed into work or into 

 electrical energy. But the analogy is wrong. It would be 

 nearer correct to liken it to, say magnetism of a piece of iron. 

 For convenience we say we magnetize a piece of iron. In 

 reality we do nothing of the sort, — the iron is already as mag- 

 netic as it can be ; all we do is to arrange its molecules so that 

 the inherent magnetism of each one will act in the same direc- 

 tion as all the rest. There is as much magnetism in a piece of 

 iron at one time as at another ; we cannot change that. To 

 carry out the analogy, if one would suppose that when the 

 atoms and molecules of matter are of proper sort and arranged 

 in a proper way, as they are in the substance called protoplasm, 

 then the individual living characteristics of each could manifest 

 themselves in the way exhibited by a living thing, not because 

 there was a new force or being or entity not there before, but 

 because all could work in concert to the same end, while they 



