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A figure did certainly present itself, but one of sufficient bulk to convince me of its substantiality. This was the captain of the 'Diana, a cheery-looking personage of a thoroughly nautical type, who, approaching me, lifted his cap and said: "That's a wonderfully fine yacht that has just dropped anchor behind us. She's illuminated, too. Have you seen her?"

Sometimes, after reading a story of thrilling plot, we find that we do not readily recall the appearance or the names of the characters; we recall only what happened to them. This is true of the women of James Fenimore Cooper's stories. They have no substantiality, but move like veiled figures through the most exciting adventures.

"Yet I have been with good people; far better than you: a hundred times better people; possessed of ideas and views you never entertained in your life: quite more refined and exalted." "Who the deuce have you been with?" "If you twist in that way you will make me pull the hair out of your head; and then I think you will cease to entertain doubts of my substantiality."

From all this it results that action alone, as an empirical criterion, is a sufficient proof of the presence of substantiality, without any necessity on my part of endeavouring to discover the permanence of substance by a comparison. Besides, by this mode of induction we could not attain to the completeness which the magnitude and strict universality of the conception requires.

As the sensations of light and heat are projected upward together to become attributes of his body, so the feelings of pleasure, safety, and hope which he brings into the soul are projected into his spirit; and to this spirit, more than to anything else, energy, independence, and substantiality are originally attributed.

To gain an idea of his character, know that he out-Herods his master; and Fichte is to Kant what Kant is to the unenlightened vulgar. You can now form a slight conception of the spiritual nature of our friend who is stuffing kalte schale. The first principle of his school is to reject all expressions which incline in the slightest degree to substantiality.

It would be more exact to call it the conception of substantiality. God is first determined as substance only. The absolute subject spirit is also substance; but it is determined rather as subject. This is the difference generally ignored by those who assert that speculative philosophy is pantheism. As usual, they miss the essential point and disparage philosophy by falsifying it.

Save for some such old associations as these, why should it be supposed that matter becomes "spriritualized" as it diminishes in apparent substantiality? Why should matter be pronounced respectable in the inverse ratio of its density or ponderability? Why is a diamond any more chargeable with "grossness" than a cubic centimetre of hydrogen?

The question concerning the substantiality of mind and matter in relation to God, is involved from the very beginning in this latter problem, "How is the appearance of interaction between the two to be explained without detriment to their substantiality in relation to each other?"

Multiplicity, the self-dependence of particular things, free choice, ends, development, all this is illusion and error. Why, then, only one and why infinite? With Spinoza as with Descartes independence is the essence of substantiality.