ch noises, or commit such
vagaries as shall make us say that it feels? Can it achieve its ends,
and fail of achieving them through mistake? If it cannot, how has it a
soul more than a dead man has a soul, out of whom we say that the soul
has departed, and whose body we conceive of as returning to dead earth,
inasmuch as it is now soulless? Is there any unnatural violence which
can be done to our thoughts by which we can bring the ideas of a soul
and of water, or of a stone into combination, and keep them there for
long together? The ancients, indeed, said they believed their rivers to
be gods, and carved likenesses of them under the forms of men; but even
supposing this to have been their real mind, can it by any conceivable
means become our own? Granted that a stone is kept from falling to dust
by an energy which compels its particles to cohere, which energy can be
taken out of it and converted into some other form of energy; granted
(which may or may not be true) also, that the life of a living body is
only the energy which keeps the particles which compose it in a certain
disposition; and granted that the energy of the stone may be convertible
into the energy of a living form, and that thus, after a long journey
a tired idea may lag after the sound of such words as "the soul of the
world." Granted all the above, nevertheless to speak of the world as
having a soul is not sufficiently in harmony with our common notions,
nor does it go sufficiently with the grain of our thoughts to render the
expression a meaning one, or one that can be now used with any propriety
or fitness, except by those who do not know their own meaninglessness.
Vigorous minds will harbour [sic] vigorous thoughts only, or such as bid
fair to become so; and vigorous thoughts are always simple, definite,
and in harmony with everyday ideas.

We can imagine a soul as living in the lowest slime that moves, feeds,
reproduces itself, remembers, and dies. The amoeba wants things, knows
it wants them, alters itself so as to try and alter them, thus preparing
for an intended modification of outside matter by a preliminary
modification of itself. It thrives if the modification from within is
followed by the desired modification in the external object; it knows
that it is well, and breeds more freely in consequence. If it cannot
get hold of outside matter, or cannot proselytise [sic] that matter and
persuade it to see things through its own (the amoeba's) spect