But by this necessary sympathy between the spiritual and the material is not meant a mere parallelism so called. Thinkers, present and past, have tried to be satisfied with such a meaning. To be quite real, however, sympathy must be substantial even to the point of unity, not formal. Some friends, and even some married people, are parallel, life matching life at each and every point, but not positively and vitally sympathetic. Still, in parallelism, the very name for which is fairly indicative of its import, there is a convenient approach to the meaning here intended. Moreover, our Cartesian philosophers were much given to a theory of parallelism in their views of the relation of the two spheres of mind and matter; their specific doctrine of continuous creation, already referred to, was parallelistic; and they found the human mind and [p.205] the human body, though distinctly two, still "parallel." Then, too, in more recent times, parallelism has been in evidence, figuring conspicuously at least as a working standpoint in the psychological laboratory, and figuring also, I venture to add, as an important assumption in philanthropic work. Accordingly, although the term itself does convey a good deal of its meaning, I shall try, in words as simple as possible, to show exactly what the theory of parallelism is. This done, we shall be able to see, or think through parallelism to sympathy of a more genuine and a more vital sort. As was said, the doctrine of continuous creation, holding as it does that the mental and spiritual life of God and the constant changes in the natural world, the world said to be of his creation, are always in accord, God in his relation to the world being, so to speak, always up to date and having his attention on every place and part, is distinctly a parallelistic doctrine; but, quite apart from any theological reference, parallelism asserts that all states, or events, in the two spheres of body and mind, of spirit and matter, are (1) equally real and substantial, and (2) perfectly harmonious and consistent, in just the sense that always in connection with any condition or change in one realm there is an accompanying condition or change in the other, although (3) between the two there exists and can exist no causal connection whatever. Obviously to make either, whether by what is known as causation or in any other way, the producing and wholly determining condition of the other, or of anything in the other, would be at once to unsettle the equivalence or balance of their reality, and _equally real_ [p.206] _they must be_. Thus, in more detail, mind is denied any independent part in the production or determination of anything in the material realm, and matter is in no way the source of what transpires in mind. Each is, so far as the other is concerned, quite its own master. Each is absolutely without any arbitrary influence, any influence not natural or sympathetic or co-operative, upon the other. So to speak,