I don't know whether Matter is anything distinct from Force. I don't know that atoms are anything but pure myths. Cogito, ergo sum is to my mind a ridiculous piece of bad logic, all I can say at any time being "Cogito." The Latin form I hold to be preferable to the English "I think," because the latter asserts the existence of an Ego--about which the bundle of phenomena at present addressing you knows nothing. In fact, if I am pushed, metaphysical speculation lands me exactly where your friend Raphael was when his bitch pupped. In other words, I believe in Hamilton, Mansell and Herbert Spencer so long as they are destructive, and I laugh at their beards as soon as they try to spin their own cobwebs. Is this basis of ignorance broad enough for you? If you, theologian, can find as firm footing as I, man of science, do on this foundation of minus nought--there will be nought to fear for our ever diverging. For you see I am quite as ready to admit your doctrine that souls secrete bodies as I am the opposite one that bodies secrete souls--simply because I deny the possibility of obtaining any evidence as to the truth and falsehood of either hypothesis. My fundamental axiom of speculative philosophy is that MATERIALISM AND SPIRITUALISM ARE OPPOSITE POLES OF THE SAME ABSURDITY--the absurdity of imagining that we know anything about either spirit or matter. Cabanis and Berkeley (I speak of them simply as types of schools) are both asses, the only difference being that one is a black donkey and the other a white one. This universe is, I conceive, like to a great game being played out, and we poor mortals are allowed to take a hand. By great good fortune the wiser among us have made out some few of the rules of the game, as at present played. We call them "Laws of Nature," and honour them because we find that if we obey them we win something for our pains. The cards are our theories and hypotheses, the tricks our experimental verifications. But what sane man would endeavour to solve this problem: given the rules of a game and the winnings, to find whether the cards are made of pasteboard or goldleaf? Yet the problem of the metaphysicians is to my mind no saner. If you tell me that an Ape differs from a Man because the latter has a soul and the ape has not, I can only say it may be so; but I should uncommonly like to know how either that the ape has not one or that the man has. And until you satisfy me as to the soundness of your method of investigation, I must adhere to what seems to my mind a simpler form of notation--i.e. to suppose that all phenomena have the same substratum (if they have any), and that soul and body, or mental and physical phenomena, are merely diverse manifestations of that hypothetical substratum. In this way, it seems to me, I obey the rule which works so well in practice, of always making the simplest possible suppositions.