James F. Ferrier: (Institutes of Metaphysics.) In vain does the Spiritualist found an argument for the existence of a separate immaterial substance on the alleged incompatibility of the intellectual and physical phenomena to co-inhere in the same sub-stratum. Materiality may very well stand the brunt of that unshotted broadside. This mild artifice can scarcely expect to be treated as a serious observation. Such a hypothesis cannot be meant to be in earnest. Who is to dictate to nature what phenomena, or what qualities inhere in what substances; what effects may result from what causes? Matter is already in the field as an acknowledged entity--this both parties admit. Mind, considered as an independent entity, is not so unmistakably in the field. Therefore as entities are not to be multiplied without necessity, we are not entitled to postulate a new cause, so long as it is possible to account for the phenomena by a cause already in existence; which possibility has never yet been disproved. Draper: (John William.) Chemistry furnishes us with a striking example of the doctrine of Diogenes of Apollonia, that the air is actually a spiritual being; for, on the discovery of several of the gases by the early experimenters, they were not only regarded as of a spiritual nature, but actually received the name under which they pass to this day, gheist or gas, from a belief that they were ghosts. ("Int. Dev.," p. 103, v. 1.) W. R. Grove: ("Correlation and Conservation of Forces," p. 103.) The ancients when they witnessed natural phenomenon, removed from ordinary analogies, and unexplained by any mechanical action known to them, referred it to a soul, a spiritual or preternatural power: thus amber and the magnet were supposed by Thales to have a soul; the functions of digestion, assimilation, etc., were supposed by Paracelsus to be effected by a spirit (the Archæus). Air and gases were also at first deemed spiritual, but subsequently became invested with a more material character, and the word gas, from geist, a ghost or spirit, affords us an instance of the gradual transmission of a spiritual into a physical conception. Buchner: Now, in the same manner as the steam engine produces motion, so does the organic complication of force-endowed materials produce in the animal body a sum of effects, so interwoven as to become a unit, and is then by us called spirit, soul, thought. Taylor: Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in Keeling Island, who had a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll. This spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively like a table or a hat at a modern spirit-seance. ("Early History of Mankind," p. 139, v. 2.) Savages believe that their pots, kettles, pans, etc., have souls. His knives, tobacco-pipes, the winds, water, fire, storm, etc., have souls.