Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III IMPLICATION OF THE CONCEPT OF THE SPIRITUAL The investigation into the source of this concept has led to its definition: Spirit is that which is not made up of constituent parts nor, in itself, dependent on matter. It is thus opposed to the corporeal, the material, as the supersensible. Such is the widest signification of the term "spiritual"—signification universally recognized in the ancient, the mediaeval and the modern world. Anaxagoras gives, practically, a definition in the following: Poos 5f ten airtipov Ko.i ainoKpa-ef Ko.l /i£/uktu ovScvl xpi)iMTi, dXa fioi1vos auTos p' iuvrov fart" And Aristotle emphasizes the fact that the earlier philosopher had correctly understood the meaning of the /6os.38 Today we find the "spiritual" defined as that which "consists of spirit, as a spiritual substance; the incorporeal, the non-material." Thus, for over two thousand years the content of this concept has remained unchanged. There were men in the days of Anaxagoras who denied the reality of the vovs, and their type has probably never failed since: sceptics, sincere and otherwise, prolong the echo in every age. What was questioned, however, was the existence of the vovs, not its meaning. Violent discussions have raged concerning the nature of the First Principle of all things: verdicts have been given for or against the spiritual, but nowhere do we find a discussion as to what the spiritual stands for. Materialists do not argue about the implication of the term: they deny the reality of what it implies. Even the Monists, who sought to unite matter and mind in some im-definable third have not offered us a new view of the spiritual, though their attempt might have been at least more intelligible if they had. It is therefore something novel, and well-nigh startling... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.