MATTER AND SPIRIT 



Repeating Mr. Spencer's words, we may say 

 that " the general relation between mental mani- 

 festations and material structure traced out [in 

 this work], has implications identical with, and 

 no wider than, those which familiar experiences 

 thrust upon us/* In objective psychology, as 

 in other departments of inquiry, science is but 

 an extension of common knowledge. " That 

 drowsiness impedes thinking, that wine excites 

 or stupefies according to amount and circum- 

 stances, that great loss of blood produces tem- 

 porary unconsciousness, — are facts admitted by 

 every one, be his theory of things what it may. 

 That you cannot get out of the undeveloped 

 child thoughts and feelings like those you get 

 out of the developed man ; that the idiot, with 

 brain permanently arrested in its growth, re- 

 mains permanently incapable of any but the 

 simplest mental actions, are propositions not 

 denied by the most intemperate reviler of phy- 

 siological psychology. But one who recognizes 

 such facts and propositions is just as much charge- 

 able with materialism as one who puts together 

 facts and propositions like those which consti- 

 tute the exposition [of psychical phenomena 

 contained in this work]. Whoever grants that 

 from the rudimentary consciousness implied 

 by the vacant stare of the infant, up to the 

 quickly apprehensive, far-seeing, and variously 

 feeling consciousness of the adult, the transition 

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