212 MATERIALISM. 



But the questions in hand are mainly the same, and the 

 difference in dealing with them is chiefly that created 

 by the severer methods of inductive enquiry. Abstract 

 definitions of the soul and of matter are now submitted 

 to tests which go far to exclude them from the pale of 

 science. Aristotle's expression, that ' the soul may be 

 better said to contain the body than the -body the soul/ 

 defines nothing real save the impossibility of reaching 

 the truth by that faculty of reason, the nature of which 

 is a main part of the problem to be solved. A happier 

 phrase, and somewhat nearer to the point, is that of 

 Spinoza : ' Body is not terminated by thinking, nor 

 thinking by body.' Quotations on this subject might, 

 indeed, be endlessly multiplied from the classical writers 

 from the later Platonists, from the mediaeval schools, 

 and from the philosophy of our own time. But in 

 their totality they prove nothing more than the absence 

 of any conception congruous and common to the two 

 elements concerned in the question, and the fruitless 

 toil of language to redeem this incapacity of thought. 

 I have spoken of the little that has been done by 

 scientific discovery to furnish links between mind and 

 matter. In one sense, indeed, they may seem to be 

 farther dissociated by those attainments of physical 

 science which especially mark the mental capacity of 

 man. The genius and intellectual power which have 

 penetrated so deeply into the secrets of nature measur- 

 ing the distance of the stars and the velocity of light 

 predicting from the minute perturbations of one planet 

 the existence and place of another yet unknown de- 

 tecting the presence of known terrestrial elements in 



