The words 'matter' and 'spirit' wield a very considerable influence among us; what do they mean to most of those who use them? Physical science ascribes either extension alone, or extension and weight, to physical substances. Non-material forces are, then, according to science, both spaceless and weightless. I will venture to affirm that not one educated person in a thousand is acquainted with this distinction. Most of the few who have known it have forgotten it. So that the words 'matter' and 'spirit' mean different things to the philosopher and to the layman. In the popular mind, if spirits are not perceptible it is because the senses are not sufficiently acute. Spirits are here or there, diffused over wide areas or concentrated in narrow spaces. The average Christian, whatever he may say to the contrary, is, theoretically speaking, a materialist, and, I might add, a polytheist. Whatever matter and spirit mean to him, and they certainly have a substantial meaning, the distinction made by the philosopher is for him non-existent. The following facts may be of some interest in this connection. A few years ago, in a conversation with a shop-clerk, I happened to mention a lead coffin made hermetic with solder. He was shocked, and objected to a dead body being shut up in a coffin of that description because it prevented the escape of the soul. This man had had an ordinary grammar-school education. Here are two quotations taken from answers of American College students to questions requesting a description of their idea of God. It should be added that the questions were given only to classes which had not yet taken up, or were just beginning the study of philosophy. 'God, to me, is a being of flesh and blood, for without this form he would seem unnatural and unsympathetic as our leader.' (Female, twenty years old.)--'I think of God as real, actual flesh and blood and bones, something we shall all see with our eyes some day.' (Male, twenty-one years old.) Together with these, and from the same classes of students, came a great number of very different answers; for instance this, 'God is an impersonal being.... I think of him as the embodiment of natural laws.' Descartes' conception may serve as a point of comparison: 'What the soul itself was, I either did not stay to consider, or, if I did, I imagined that it was something extremely rare and subtle, like wind or flame, or ether, spread through my grosser parts.'[7] If the philosophical distinction between matter and spirit is not ordinarily made, these terms express none the less a very definite practical meaning of prime importance: they mark the difference between forces that are not responsive to psychic influences (desire and emotion, ethical and æsthetic considerations) and those that are. * * * * *