16 SIR M. MONIER WILLIAMS ON THE MONISM, PANTHEISM, AND 
him I cannot determine that fact. I might live for a month with 
such a person, and never know what passes in his mind, if he has 
one. HowamItoknow? The only possible way for him to give 
some evidence of it is by speaking or writing, 7.e, he must appeal 
to our external sense of hearing, or our external sense of seeing; 
but how can the man so appeal? In this manner. Let us take, 
for example, the eye. If you wish me to know what is passing 
in your mind, you write something that I can read, i.e., you reduce 
the ideas in your mind to certain symbols of a purely conventional 
character, which have no resemblance to the ideas which they 
convey, but which symbols you place on paper before me. As soon 
as the eye of the mind recognizes those symbols, it is able to 
deduce from them the mental conceptions you have placed therein, 
and thus a communication is effected between mind and mind; and 
so also in speaking, the same thing is done in appealing to the ear. 
Certain sounds are produced bearing no identity whatever with 
the mental conception which they convey to the mind; but those 
sounds are capable of being reconstructed and returned again by 
the same process, so that we are then said to be able to correspond 
with each other, because the two symbols of writing and speaking 
and the mental processes which they convey are in exact corre- 
spondence with one another. Hence, when we write to a distant 
friend we place our ideas on paper and communicate with him, 
because when he gets our paper he can see and read what we say, 
and he is thus able to reproduce the ideas that we wish to convey, 
and we so correspond with him. Let us now adapt this principle 
to the idea of the creation. It was said, and very properly, not 
only by the ancient Greeks, but by the more ancient Hindis, 
Ex nihilo nihil fit. I believe that is a perfectly sound principle, 
that ‘‘out of nothing nothing can be made.” Now we are asked 
to believe, and the Bible tells us, and we believe it as Christians 
(without desiring to introduce theological matters into the discus- 
sion), that God is Spirit. If God is Spirit, and we are dwellers 
in the world, there can be no question which of those two is ante- 
rior. Evidently the Creator must be anterior to the created, and 
Spirit must be anterior to Matter. Therefore God, who is 
Spirit, created that material world which we see around us, of 
Matter. Buthow? Thusthen, God being a Spirit, being anterior 
to Matter, it may explain by analogy what was the process by which 
it is possible to believe such a creation was effected. We possess, 
it is true, a Spirit, but it is hidden away in a material body. In 
