MATTER AND SPIRIT 



Thus we were fully justified in stating that 

 through no imaginable future advance in mo- 

 lecular physics can the materialists ever be en- 

 abled to realize their desideratum of translating 

 mental phenomena in terms of matter and mo- 

 tion. We were right in hinting that one grand 

 result of the enormous progress achieved dur- 

 ing the past forty years in the analysis of both 

 physical and psychical phenomena has been 

 the final and irretrievable overthrow of the ma- 

 terialistic hypothesis. Henceforth we may re- 

 gard materialism as ruled out, and relegated to 

 that limbo of crudities to which we some time 

 since consigned the hypothesis of special crea- 

 tions. 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 it 

 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 the differential attribute 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 



See also Spencer's final statement of his position in the sixth 

 edition of the First Principles (1900), §§ 71, 71a., 71 b., 



a8i 



