sense-perceptions. In thus marking off the "Unseen World" from
the objective universe of which we have knowledge, our line of
demarcation would at least be drawn in the right place. The
distinction between psychical and material phenomena is a
distinction of a different order from all other distinctions
known to philosophy, and it immeasurably transcends all others.
The progress of modern discovery has in no respect weakened the
force of Descartes's remark, that between that of which the
differential attribute is Thought and that of which the
differential attribute is Extension, there can be no similarity,
no community of nature whatever. By no scientific cunning of
experiment or deduction can Thought be weighed or measured or in
any way assimilated to such things as may be made the actual or
possible objects of sense-perception. Modern discovery, so far
from bridging over the chasm between Mind and Matter, tends
rather to exhibit the distinction between them as absolute. It
has, indeed, been rendered highly probable that every act of
consciousness is accompanied by a molecular motion in the cells
and fibres of the brain; and materialists have found great
comfort in this fact, while theologians and persons of little
faith have been very much frightened by it. But since no one ever
pretended that thought can go on, under the conditions of the
present life, without a brain, one finds it rather hard to
sympathize either with the self-congratulations of Dr. Buchner's
disciples[8] or with the terrors of their opponents. But what has
been less commonly remarked is the fact that when the thought and
the molecular movement thus occur simultaneously, in no
scientific sense is the thought the product of the molecular
movement. The sun-derived energy of motion latent in the food we
eat is variously transformed within the organism, until some of