MIND-STUFF 281 



It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept 

 the view that the substratum of everything is of mental 

 character. But no one can deny that mind is the first 

 and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is 

 remote inference — inference either intuitive or deli- 

 berate. Probably it would never have occurred to us 

 (as a serious hypothesis) that the world could be based 

 on anything else, had we not been under the impression 

 that there was a rival stuff with a more comfortable kind 

 of "concrete" reality — something too inert and stupid 

 to be capable of forging an illusion. The rival turns 

 out to be a schedule of pointer readings; and though a 

 world of symbolic character can well be constructed from 

 it, this is a mere shelving of the inquiry into the nature 

 of the world of experience. 



This view of the relation of the material to the 

 spiritual world perhaps relieves to some extent a tension 

 between science and religion. Physical science has 

 seemed to occupy a domain of reality which is self- 

 sufficient, pursuing its course independently of and 

 indifferent to that which a voice within us asserts to be 

 a higher reality. We are jealous of such independence. 

 We are uneasy that there should be an apparently self- 

 contained world in which God becomes an unnecessary 

 hypothesis. We acknowledge that the ways of God are 

 inscrutable; but is there not still in the religious mind 

 something of that feeling of the prophets of old, who 

 called on God to assert his kingship and by sign or 

 miracle proclaim that the forces of Nature are subject 

 to his command? And yet if the scientist were to repent 

 and admit that it was necessary to include among 

 the agents controlling the stars and the electrons an omni- 

 present spirit to whom we trace the sacred things of con- 

 sciousness, would there not be even graver apprehension ? 



