Matter and spirit / read by Mr. Serjeant Cox.

  • Edward William Cox
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Matter and spirit / read by Mr. Serjeant Cox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    r> O reports of facts and phenomena, and to base science upon them by discussion. If two or more speakers submit to us their inferences from those facts, it will be impossible for the members to form a judgment of the relative nature of the views submitted to them if the words in the argu- ment of one are employed in a different sense from the same words in the other argument. The Society may therefore properly say to its own members, “ In our own proceedings these terms shall carry with them the meaning we assign to them. In that sense only you must use them here, and in that sense only will they be accepted and understood by us.” These doubtful terms are not very numerous. There will be no practical difficulty in resolving how they shall be used by the Society. Thus a list may gradually be formed, as experience discovers them, and circulated for common use. But there are two terms of immediate importance because of their daily recurrence. “ Matter ” and “ Spirit” Already we have found some who say, in effect, “ I mean by matter the same as you mean by spirit/'’ and others who say, “ I mean by spirit the same as you me; 1 by matter.” In the recent debates here on Materialism., speakers on one side contended that spirit was matter, auu speakers on the other side that matter was spirit. They may be so in fact—but certainly the terms as used, or as they are supposed to be used, do not intend the same thing, nor can it be reasonably supposed that they are designed to bear the same meaniug. At all events it must be the care of the Society, not only to see that in their proceedings these tenns are not substituted one for the other, but to have it clearly under- stood that they are not synonymous, that they have essentially different meanings, and indicate different thii gs, [125]