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Great scientists are now boldly asserting not only that the atom is energy rather than matter, but that atomic energy is essentially mind-stuff. The shadow of my elbow rests on the shadow table as the shadow ink flows over the shadow paper. It is all symbolic, and as a symbol the physicist leaves it.
All three philosophers, however, seem to generally agree in the main upon the Mind Principle, which they hold to be beneath Soul or Spirit, and to be in the nature of Mind-Stuff, which is of a semi-material nature Kapila and Patanjali even going so far as to hold that it is a manifestation of Prakriti or the Universal Energy, rather than a distinct principle.
The lineal descendant of the long line of ancestral philosophies is the monism which sees no difference between the living and lifeless worlds save that of varying combinations of ultimate elements which are conceived as uniform "mind-stuff" everywhere. Whether or not this universal conception of totality is true, remains for the future to show.
According to some thinkers, Spencer, for example, or Taine, these resolve themselves at last into little elementary psychic particles or atoms of 'mind-stuff, out of which all the more immediately known mental states are said to be built up. Locke introduced this theory in a somewhat vague form.
Mind-stuff, or the material of mind, is supposed to be contained in large quantities within any known feeling. One might go far for a better description of matter.
That any material must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but our idealists, in their eagerness to show that Gefuehl ist Alles, have thought to do honour to feeling by forgetting that it is an expression and wishing to make it a stuff. There is a further circumstance showing that mind-stuff is but a bashful name for matter.
In the whole field of symbolic thought we are universally held both to intend, to speak of, and to reach conclusions about to know in short particular realities, without having in our subjective consciousness any mind-stuff that resembles them even in a remote degree.
So stated, the position is unscientific; but as for the conclusion reached, we may remember that Mr. Wallace has stated almost exactly the same thing, and that there are not a few modern preachers of the doctrine of a "universe of mind-stuff." The hypothesis is "unthinkable."
To do this, he is forced to make several very startling assumptions: We have seen that there is evidence that there is consciousness somewhere it is revealed by certain bodies. Clifford assumes consciousness, or rather its raw material, mind-stuff, to be everywhere. For this assumption we have not a whit of evidence.
Philosophy, noting actual differences in their perceptions points out the duality of these latter, and interpolates something between them as a more real terminus first, organs, viscera, etc.; next, cells; then, ultimate atoms; lastly, mind-stuff perhaps.
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