The intelligence of the soul, however, is not even as yet the form in which feeling structures combine; it originates with the representative faculty of the feeling structures. The soul is the organised totality of a set of images and abstract mental symbols representing the qualities, the influences, and the interactions of the different objects of the surrounding world, the thinking subject included. Says Mr. Edison: “Every atom has an intelligent power of selection, and is always striving to get into harmonious relation with other atoms.” The latter is true; the former is an error. Every atom “is always striving to get into harmonious relation with other atoms”; this is its nature; and its nature being stable, consisting of certain inalienable and intrinsic qualities, the atom acts with consistency. Certain atoms, say atoms of hydrogen, are of such a nature as to combine with certain other atoms, say atoms of oxygen, into molecules that form a certain substance of peculiar properties, which, if each atom of oxygen combines with two atoms of hydrogen, would be _H₂O_, or water. This substance again, having certain definite qualities, will in a temperature below freezing point crystallise at a definite angle. The angle of crystallisation being the same for all molecules _H₂O_, the result will necessarily be one of most marvellous regularity. And not being able to observe the atoms in their secret activity, not knowing all the details of nature’s marvellous laboratory, we are astonished to find such a wonderfully harmonious relation. And yet, considering the nature of things, we are urged to confess that it is the result of an inevitable necessity, which takes place according to strict mathematical laws. Although every atom strives, according to its nature, to get into harmonious relation with other atoms, we do not see any “intelligent power of selection” in the province of inorganic nature. Every atom of inorganic substances acts according to its nature in one and the same way throughout. There is no choice, no selection, allowed. Choice and selection are faculties that are reserved for the higher domains of psychical life, which originates in the domain of animal existence when meaning, conditioned by the presence of sentiency, rises into being and creates the soul. Supposing that through some combination of atoms their subjectivity be combined in such a form as to produce sentiency or feeling, we can very easily understand how this feeling will in time become representative of the conditions by which it is affected. The soul does not consist of the atoms of its organism, nor of the sum of the qualities of the atoms. The soul consists of something more subtle than matter: the soul consists of the meaning that is attached to the different forms of the feelings which obtain in living organisms. THE PROBLEM OF THEISM.