This is a very old question.  Some, from time immemorial, have tried to get rid of matter by reducing it to a mere concept of the mind, and their followers have arrived at conclusions that may be logically irrefragable, but are as far removed from common sense as they are in accord with logic; at any rate they have failed to satisfy, and matter is no nearer being got rid of now than it was when the discussion first began.  Others, again, have tried materialism, have declared the causative action of both thought and feeling to be deceptive, and posit matter obeying fixed laws of which thought and feeling must be admitted as concomitants, but with which they have no causal connection.  The same thing has happened to these men as to their opponents; they made out an excellent case on paper, but thought and feeling still remain the mainsprings of action that they have been always held to be.  We still say, “I gave him 5 pounds because I felt pleased with him, and thought he would like it;” or, “I knocked him down because I felt angry, and thought I would teach him better manners.”  Omnipresent life and mind with appearances of brute non-livingness—­which appearances are deceptive; this is one view.  Omnipresent non-livingness or mechanism with appearances as though the mechanism were guided and controlled by thought—­which appearances are deceptive; this is the other.  Between these two views the slaves of logic have oscillated for centuries, and to all appearance will continue to oscillate for centuries more.

People who think—­as against those who feel and act—­want hard and fast lines—­without which, indeed, they cannot think at all; these lines are as it were steps cut on a slope of ice without which there would be no descending it.  When we have begun to travel the downward path of thought, we ask ourselves questions about life and death, ego and non ego, object and subject, necessity and free will, and other kindred subjects.  We want to know where we are, and in the hope of simplifying matters, strip, as it were, each subject to the skin, and finding that even this has not freed it from all extraneous matter, flay it alive in the hope that if we grub down deep enough we shall come upon it in its pure unalloyed state free from all inconvenient complication through intermixture with anything alien to itself.  Then, indeed, we can docket it, and pigeon-hole it for what it is; but what can we do with it till we have got it pure?  We want to account for things, which means that we want to know to which of the various accounts opened in our mental ledger we ought to carry them—­and how can we do this if we admit a phenomenon to be neither one thing nor the other, but to belong to half-a-dozen different accounts in proportions which often cannot even approximately be determined?  If we are to keep accounts we must keep them in reasonable compass; and if keeping them within reasonable compass involves something of a Procrustean arrangement, we may regret it, but