IH. IT,] MATTER AND SPIRIT. 44» 



enormous progress achieved during the past forty years in 

 the analysis of both physical and psychical phenomena, has 

 been the final and irretrievable overthrow of the materialistic 

 hypothesis. Henceforth we may rogard materialism as ruled 

 out, and relegated to that limbo of crudities to which we 

 some time since consigned the hypothesis of special creations. 

 The latest results of scientific inquiry, whether in the region 

 of objective psychology or in that of molecular physics, leave 

 the gulf between Mind and Matter quite as wide as il was 

 judged to be in the time of Descartes. It still remains as 

 true as then, that between that of which the differential 

 attribute is Thought and that of which tlie differential attri- 

 bute is Extension, there can be nothing like identity or 

 similarity. Although we have come to see that between 

 the manifestations of the two there is such an unfailing 

 parallelism that the one group of phenomena can be correctly 

 described by formulas originally invented for describing the 

 other group, yet all that has been established is this paral- 

 lelism. When it comes to the task of making the parallels 

 meet, we are no better off than Malebranche with his Occa- 

 sional Causes, or Leibnitz with his Pre-establislied Harmony : 

 nay, we are no better off than the ancient Gnostics, with 

 their "aeons" and their "Demiurge." Eich as are the 

 harvests which science has obtained from these two fields, 

 the fence which divides them has never been broken down ; 

 and until the insuperable distinction between Subject and 

 Object, between the Conscious and the Unconscious, can be 

 transcended, it can never be broken down. 



But while the materialistic hypothesis is thus irretrievably 

 doomed, it is otherwise with the opposing spiritualistic hypo- 

 thesis. It is true that we cannot directly translate Matter in 

 terms of Spirit, any more than we can translate Spirit in 

 terms of ]\Iatter. But we have seen that the terui " matter " 

 does not stand for any real existence, but only for one of the 

 modes in which an Inscrutable Existence reveals itself to ua 



