90 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 



Thus Sir Oliver Lodge comes into direct conflict with our 

 biologists and psychologists. They may not think their 

 research is as yet complete enough to justify them in 

 defining life and mind as mechanical, but they are not at 

 all willing to see those realities airily thrust into a spectral 

 world beyond their reach. What, indeed, would the average 

 reader, who has no system to defend, gain by the adoption 

 of Sir Oliver Lodge's desperate resource ? Nothing what- 

 ever. He may find Haeckel's theories of life and mind 

 inadequate, but assuredly he will get little intellectual satis- 

 faction in admitting that they are " spirit." What is 

 " spirit " ? No spiritist will give you any consistent defini- 

 tion. In earlier days there was a very clear distinction 

 drawn between matter and spirit. Matter was extended or 

 quantitative substance substance occupying space; spirit 

 was substance without parts or spatial extension. Sir Oliver 

 Lodge ridicules this old antithesis (p, 129, where a know- 

 ledge of the historical distinction would again have spared 

 him the strain on his courtesy), but nowhere suggests a 

 better. He says that the fundamental property of matter is 

 inertia. The " immaterial," which is the essence of his 

 theory, he nowhere attempts to define. If it is to be some- 

 thing devoid of even the quality of inertia, it becomes 

 totally unthinkable a far more profound enigma than any 

 of those biological difficulties which it is brought in to 

 unravel. In one place Sir Oliver Lodge seems to look to 

 "ether" for an intelligible idea of spirit (p. in), as many 

 spiritists do. But he has elsewhere explained that ether 

 retains inertia, and that therefore to speak of it as immaterial 



