The most interesting result of the attempt to treat the discussions at Dundee as a newspaper "sensation," comparable to the reports relating to motor-car bandits or the pronouncements of political factions, has been its complete failure. Serious thinkers of all schools seem to have adjusted themselves to the more modern way of regarding natural processes even when these relate to matters of such age-long interest to mankind as the inception of "living" organisms and of conscious humanity itself. There are fewer now than there were forty years ago who insist on the older barbaric "explanations" of these marvels. Few indeed venture to assert the existence of "spirits"--ghostly essences of various grades and capacities which enter the bodies of living things and escape from them like so much gas when they die.[10] The vegetable soul, the animal soul and the human soul are no longer imagined and described to us as definite "things" supposed to "explain" the complex processes which go on respectively in plants, animals and men. Seventy years ago the facts which were known as to that changing state of material substances which we describe by the words "hot" and "cold," were held to be "explained" by the existence of a ghostly thing called "caloric," which was believed to enter various bodies and make them hot and then to escape from them and so make them cold. Primitive man multiplied such ways of explaining each and every process going on in the world around him and in himself. Mere words or names lost their first simple signification and acquired permanent association with imaginary spirits, demons, and haunting intangible ghosts, by reference to which our ancestors in their earliest "reasoning" explained to their own satisfaction the strange and sudden events fraught to them with the daily experience of pain or pleasure. The whole world was held by them to be "bewitched," and it was only by slow and painful steps that some knowledge of the persistent order of Nature was obtained, whilst the phantastic imagery which had served in its place, bit by bit disappeared. "Caloric" was a late lingerer, and was only got rid of when what had been so called was shown to be a vibration of particles--a mode or kind of motion--a "state," and not a mysterious fluid existing as a thing in itself.