Now, all these branches of study, however various in detail, agree in this, that they exclude the conception of a true self-directive power from the field of thought. They offer for consideration nothing but figures, movements, and laws. And thus they tend to form the popular mind to the habit of looking for figures, movements, and laws everywhere, and for rejecting all other conceptions as intruders. But of all such other conceptions, there is nothing so difficult and so intractable, under physical modes of investigation, as self-directive power. It therefore runs a great risk of being rejected, and thus the mind, from its first training, having been in physics, carrying out here, as it usually does everywhere, its first love into all its after thoughts, shuts up the student surreptitiously with materialism as his philosophy. Thus it is easy to see how materialism should come to be a current opinion, when the popular education runs all in favour of physical pursuits. But if philosophy must yield to the demands of the logical faculty for an extreme simplicity, unity, identity, at the fountain-head of nature, it were more logical to regard those phenomena and laws named physical, such as the laws of motion, elasticity, gravitation, etc., as manifestations, when existing under certain limiting conditions, of substances or beings which have also in them, when not so limited, and when existing under certain conditions, ability to manifest self-directive power. That every body is compounded, constituted, or made up of molecules, is universally agreed. Every body is therefore a fit subject for analysis. But when any body is submitted to analysis in reference to its mere corporeity or bodily nature, that is, its extension and impenetrability, what do we ultimately arrive at? Do we not, in reference to the attribute of extension, arrive at particles, of which the physical limit is that they have at least ceased to be extended, and are but mere points in space? And as to the attribute of impenetrability, what do we in the last analysis arrive at, but the idea of a substance that can resist the intrusion into its place of other similar substances, and, therefore, ultimately, a centre of force. And thus, under a logical analysis, which must be admitted to be legitimate, it may be maintained that a body or chemical element resolves itself into a system of centres of force balancing each other at certain distances, and thus rendering the whole molecule or mass extended, as body is known to be. The elements of body, therefore, are things of which these attributes are to be affirmed in the first instance, that they possess unextended substance and extensive power. But, if so, do they not touch upon the confines of the spiritual world to say the least? asks Macvicar; and the Newton whom he anticipated would give a mécanique céleste to mankind, solves the problem, answers the question by his discovery of the cerebellic stream or will-flow.