When Tyndall, therefore, asserts that he discerns in matter the promise and potency of every form and quality of life, he uses the word "matter" in a new sense. He does not mean by it the underlying subject of sensible phenomena. It is not the matter which we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. What is it then? It is something beyond the limits of observation and experiment; for he says that in order to discover it we must "prolong the vision backward across the boundary of the experimental evidence." In short, it is something which we know nothing about. It is a conjecture, an opinion, a theoretical matter. In another place he calls this imaginary substance "a cosmical life." This something, which shall be the common basis of the phenomena of sense and soul, not only is not known, but apparently is not knowable. For he assures us that the very attempt to understand this cosmical life which makes the connection between physical and mental phenomena, is "to soar in a vacuum," or "to try to lift one's self by his own waistband." Of course, then, the contents of the famous sentence are not _science_. It is not the great scientist, the profound observer of nature, the distinguished experimentalist, who speaks to us in that sentence, but one who is theorizing, as we all have a right to theorize. We also, if we choose, may imagine some "cosmical life" behind both matter and soul, as the common origin of both, and call this life _spirit_. We shall then be thinking of exactly the same substance that Tyndall is thinking of, only we give it another name. He has merely given another name to the great Being behind all the phenomena of body and soul, out of which or whom all proceed. But to give another name to a fact is not to tell us anything more about it. All meaning having evaporated from the word "matter," the sentence loses its whole significance, and it appears that the alarming declaration asserts nothing at all! In "abandoning all disguise" Tyndall has run little risk, for our analysis shows that he has not asserted anything except, perhaps, this, that there is, in his judgment, some unknown common basis in which matter and mind both inhere. This assertion is not alarming nor dangerous, for it is only what has always been believed.