To such spiritualism as this there is an easy answer, and Mr. Spencer makes it effectively.  In some well-written pages at the end of the first volume of his Psychology he shows us that a ‘matter’ so infinitely subtile, and performing motions as inconceivably quick and fine as those which modern science postulates in her explanations, has no trace of grossness left.  He shows that the conception of spirit, as we mortals hitherto have framed it, is itself too gross to cover the exquisite tenuity of nature’s facts.  Both terms, he says, are but symbols, pointing to that one unknowable reality in which their oppositions cease.

To an abstract objection an abstract rejoinder suffices; and so far as one’s opposition to materialism springs from one’s disdain of matter as something ‘crass,’ Mr. Spencer cuts the ground from under one.  Matter is indeed infinitely and incredibly refined.  To anyone who has ever looked on the face of a dead child or parent the mere fact that matter could have taken for a time that precious form, ought to make matter sacred ever after.  It makes no difference what the principle of life may be, material or immaterial, matter at any rate co-operates, lends itself to all life’s purposes.  That beloved incarnation was among matter’s possibilities.

But now, instead of resting in principles after this stagnant intellectualist fashion, let us apply the pragmatic method to the question.  What do we mean by matter?  What practical difference can it make now that the world should be run by matter or by spirit?  I think we find that the problem takes with this a rather different character.

And first of all I call your attention to a curious fact.  It makes not a single jot of difference so far as the past of the world goes, whether we deem it to have been the work of matter or whether we think a divine spirit was its author.

Imagine, in fact, the entire contents of the world to be once for all irrevocably given.  Imagine it to end this very moment, and to have no future; and then let a theist and a materialist apply their rival explanations to its history.  The theist shows how a God made it; the materialist shows, and we will suppose with equal success, how it resulted from blind physical forces.  Then let the pragmatist be asked to choose between their theories.  How can he apply his test if the world is already completed?  Concepts for him are things to come back into experience with, things to make us look for differences.  But by hypothesis there is to be no more experience and no possible differences can now be looked for.  Both theories have shown all their consequences and, by the hypothesis we are adopting, these are identical.  The pragmatist must consequently say that the two theories, in spite of their different-sounding names, mean exactly the same thing, and that the dispute is purely verbal. [I am opposing, of course, that the theories have been equally successful in their explanations of what is.]