P. Is not God spirit?

V. While I was awake I knew what you meant by “spirit,” but now it seems only a word — such for instance as truth, beauty — a quality, I mean.

    P. Is not God immaterial?

V. There is no immateriality — it is a mere word.  That which is not matter, is not at all — unless qualities are things.

    P. Is God, then, material?

    V. No. [This reply startled me very much.]

    P. What then is he?

V. [After a long pause, and mutteringly.] I see — but it is a thing difficult to tell. [Another long pause.] He is not spirit, for he exists.  Nor is he matter, as you understand it.  But there are gradations of matter of which man knows nothing; the grosser impelling the finer, the finer pervading the grosser.  The atmosphere, for example, impels the electric principle, while the electric principle permeates the atmosphere.  These gradations of matter increase in rarity or fineness, until we arrive at a matter unparticled — without particles — indivisible — one and here the law of impulsion and permeation is modified.  The ultimate, or unparticled matter, not only permeates all things but impels all things — and thus is all things within itself.  This matter is God.  What men attempt to embody in the word “thought,” is this matter in motion.

P. The metaphysicians maintain that all action is reducible to motion and thinking, and that the latter is the origin of the former.

V. Yes; and I now see the confusion of idea.  Motion is the action of mind — not of thinking.  The unparticled matter, or God, in quiescence, is (as nearly as we can conceive it) what men call mind.  And the power of self-movement (equivalent in effect to human volition) is, in the unparticled matter, the result of its unity and omniprevalence; how I know not, and now clearly see that I shall never know.  But the unparticled matter, set in motion by a law, or quality, existing within itself, is thinking.

P. Can you give me no more precise idea of what you term the unparticled matter?

V. The matters of which man is cognizant, escape the senses in gradation.  We have, for example, a metal, a piece of wood, a drop of water, the atmosphere, a gas, caloric, electricity, the luminiferous ether.  Now we call all these things matter, and embrace all matter in one general definition; but in spite of this, there can be no two ideas more essentially distinct than that which we attach to a metal, and that which we attach to the luminiferous ether.  When we reach the latter, we feel an almost irresistible inclination to class it with spirit, or with nihility.  The only consideration which restrains us is our conception of its atomic constitution; and here,