'Superstition!' shriek the bigoted.
It is no more superstition than the belief in Bacteria, or in any other living thing invisible to the ordinary human eye.

'Spirit' is a misleading word, for, historically, it connotes immateriality and a supernatural kind of existence, and the Theosophist believes neither in the one nor the other.

With him all living things act in and through a material basis, and 'matter' and 'spirit' are not found dissociated.

But he alleges that matter exists in states other than those at present known to science.

To deny this is to be about as sensible as was the Hindu prince who denied the existence of ice because water, in his experience, never became solid.