rmed matter or an individual object may be regarded as mere
material for something else which it helps to constitute, as wheat is
matter for flour, and flour for bread. Thus the dialectical and
non-demonstrative use of the term to indicate one aspect of everything
could glide into its vulgar acceptation, to indicate one class of
things.]

[Footnote C: It has been suggested--what will not party spirit
contrive?--that these variations, called spontaneous by Darwin because
not predetermined by heredity, might be spontaneous in a metaphysical
sense, free acts with no material basis or cause whatsoever. Being free,
these acts might deflect evolution--like Descartes' soul acting on the
pineal gland--into wonderful new courses, prevent dissolution, and
gradually bring on the kingdom of Heaven, all as the necessary
implication of the latest science and the most atheistic philosophy. It
may not be needless to observe that if the variations were absolutely
free, _i.e.,_ intrusions of pure chance, they would tend every which way
quite as much as if they were mechanically caused; while if they were
kept miraculously in line with some far-off divine event, they would not
be free at all, but would be due to metaphysical attraction and a magic
destiny prepared in the eternal; and so we should be brought round to
Aristotelian physics again.]

[Footnote D: The monads of Leibniz could justly be called minds, because
they had a dramatic destiny, and the most complex experience imaginable
was the state of but one monad, not an aggregate view or effect of a
multitude in fusion. But the recent improvements on that system take the
latter turn. Mind-stuff, or the material of mind, is supposed to be
contained in large quantities within any known feeling. Mind-stuff, we
are given to understand, is diffused in a medium corresponding to
apparent space (what else would a real space be?); it forms quantitative
aggregates, its transformations or aggregations are mechanically
governed, it endures when personal consciousness perishes, it is the
substance of bodies and, when duly organised, the potentiality of
thought. One might go far for a better description of matter. That any
material must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but our
idealists, in their eagerness to show that _Gefuehl ist Alles_, have
thought to do honour to feeling by forgetting that it is an expression
and wishing to make it a stuff.

There is a further circumstance