Were this all, however, it would logically have on religion no effect at all.

It would supply us with nothing but the barren verbal proposition that the immaterial was not material, or that we could find no trace of it by merely studying matter.

Its whole force rests on the following suppressed premiss, that nothing exists but what the study of matter conceivably could reveal to us; or that, in other words, the immaterial equals the nonexistent.

The case stands thus.

The forces of thought and spirit were supposed formerly to be quite distinct from matter, and to be capable of acting without the least connection with it.