STATEMENT OF THE QUESTION AT ISSUE. 79 



attendant or consequent, however limited, to be tlip 

 interaction of those states which for want of better 

 terms we call mind and matter. Action may be 

 regarded as a kind of middle term between mind and 

 matter; it is the throe of thought and thing, the 

 quivering clash and union of body and soul ; common- 

 place enough in practice; miraculous, as violating 

 every canon on which thought and reason are founded, 

 if we theorise about it, put it under the microscope, 

 and vivisect it. It is here, if anywhere, that body 

 or substance is guilty of the contradiction in terms of 

 combining with that which is without material sub- 

 stance and cannot, therefore, be conceived by us as 

 passing in and out with matter, till the two become 3, 

 body ensouled and a soul embodied. 



All ;body is more or less ensouled. As it gets 

 farther and : farther from ourselves, indeed, we sym- 

 pathise less with it ; nothing, we say to ourselves, can 

 have intelligence unless we understand all about it 

 — as though intelligence in all except ourselves meant 

 the power of being understood rather than of under- 

 standing. We are intelligent, and no intelligence, so 

 different from our own as to bafiie our powers of 

 comprehension deserves to be called intelligence at 

 all. The more a thing resejables ourselves, the more 

 it thinks as we do — and thus by implication tells us 

 that we are right, the more intelligent we think it ; and 

 the less it thinks as we do, the greater fool it must 

 be ; if a substance does not succeed in making it clear 

 that it understands our business, we conclude that 

 it cannot have any business pf its own, much less 



