( 242 ) 
[April, 
CORRESPONDENCE. 
* T1 ?e Editor does not hold himself responsible for statements of fails or 
opinions expressed in Correspondence, or in Articles bearing the signature 
of their respective authors. 
HYLO-IDEALISM. 
Permit me to thank you for your admirable review of Captain 
McTaggart’s very ingenious “ Examination of Hylo-Idealism,” 
and at the same time to offer a few remarks which may tend further 
to clarify the subject. The last sentence which you quote may 
possibly becloud, for uninitiated readers, the stridtly Monistic 
charadter of the thesis maintained by Dr. Lewins. Captain 
McTaggart states that “ Matter is affedted by spirit (force), spirit 
by matter.” This seems at first sight to re-admit Dualism ; but 
from other passages we gather that the mysterious “ Spirit ” is 
merely the noumenon or proplasm of physical and psychical phe- 
nomena. Now it is surely far simpler and better to speak of this 
proplasm as “ Matter,” and thus to avoid the very equivocal term 
“ Spirit,” which is irrevocably committed to Dualistic associa- 
tions, and really is itself material, as it means nothing but 
“ breath ” or “ wind.” The word “ Matter,” on the other hand, 
being identical with “ mater,” the mother or producer, is espe- 
cially applicable to the fons et origo of the phenomenal world. 
The sentence “ What is matter, or what is spirit, we cannot 
know, and what their point of contadt is we may not even 
imagine,” when taken in conjundtion with the statement that 
spirit is “ an unknown * underlying force and matter,” can 
scarcely fail to suggest reminiscences of the Athanasian Creed, 
with its “ three incomprehensibles,” which yet, in the end, are not 
Three, but One incomprehensible. 
C. A. 
THE DETECTION OF BACTERIA AND THE 
SEWAGE QUESTION. 
It might have saved Dr. P. Frankland some trouble if, in his 
alarmist paper read before the Society of Arts on the 13th ult., 
he had remembered that badferia, &c., are precipitated from 
