288 MAN AND THE WORLD. 



the Inside of the same fact : the material is but the 

 outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual 

 state. No other theory of their relations can possibly 

 be drawn from our premisses : for if the phenomenal 

 world is a stress between the Deity and the Ego, 

 the soul is but the reaction of the Ego upon the 

 divine action which encases it as the body. But 

 this very analysis of a stress, this very distinction 

 between force and resistance, action and reaction is 

 a logical and not a real one, and so it is not surprising 

 that they should be distinguishable In thought but 

 inseparable in reality. 



§ 27. And this close connection of the material 

 and the spiritual will enable us to understand why 

 the single process of Evolution is a correlated 

 development of both, why the development of a 

 spirit is naturally accompanied by a growth in the 

 complexity of its material reflex. 



Of this fact Materialism gives an explanation 

 which Is not only plausible In itself, but persuasive 

 by its favourable contrast with all the other meta- 

 physical explanations hitherto offered. It is all 

 very well, a materialist may urge, to give meta- 

 physical explanations of Matter In the lofty region 

 of vague generalities, but when we come down to 

 humble but solid facts, and require a specific ex- 

 planation of this or that, the courage and the meta- 

 physics of the opponents of Materialism evaporate, 

 and shedding around them a " divine mist " of 

 mystical verbiage they hasten to regain the cloudy 

 peaks of metaphysics. Granted, therefore, that It is 

 hard to conceive the constitution of Matter as an 

 ultimate fact, that Matter may quite well be an 

 immediate activity of the Divine Energy, that the 

 conception of the universe as a stress between the 



