To such a common frame of mind ideas, truths, forces are vacant, ghostly forms, devoid of true life and reality: to get such they need blood and flesh to clothe them, to give them substance and power. Now Hegel, no less than those who offer this criticism, regards ideas (in the ordinary sense of that term), truths and forces, also as abstractions which need something to make them powers in the real world of nature and the ideal world of mind. Hegel, like Schelling, has a sublime contempt for mere universals. But as to the something else, there is a divergence of view. Two well-known answers are given by the popular philosophy known as materialism or spiritualism: two systems which are probably not so wide apart as the contrast of their names might imply. According to the former, thinking, ideas, truths, goodness and beauty are special functions (the grosser materialists say secretions) of a special kind of matter--of something which is accessible to ordinary mechanical and chemical tests, but which exhibits also, in certain cases, the exceptional phenomena of consciousness. Here the essential reality is a something, permanent and essentially indestructible,--something which no man has seen, nor indeed can see,--but which is called Matter. The spiritualistic philosopher (as distinguished from the _idealist_) regards as the essential realities in the universe what he calls spirits. What these are, also, nobody has as yet (any more than in Kant's time[5]) given any very authoritative account, but so far as the quasi-scientific expositions in regard to them throw any general light on the subject, we may say that they suggest only a differently-constituted matter, a matter e. g. of less or more dimensions than that we are most familiar with.