"The unripe grape, the ripe and the dried: all things are changes
not into nothing, but into that which is not at present." This is
one of the _monstruosa opinionum portenta_ mentioned by the XIXth
General Council, alias the First Council of the Vatican. But he
only accepts it with a limitation. He cleaves to the ethical, not
to the intellectual, worship of "Nature," which moderns define to
be an "unscientific and imaginary synonym for the sum total of
observed phenomena." Consequently he holds to the "dark and
degrading doctrines of the Materialist," the "Hylotheist"; in
opposition to the spiritualist, a distinction far more marked in
the West than in the East. Europe draws a hard, dry line between
Spirit and Matter: Asia does not.

Among us the Idealist objects to the Materialists that the latter
cannot agree upon fundamental points; that they cannot define
what is an atom; that they cannot account for the transformation
of physical action and molecular motion into consciousness; and
_vice versa_, that they cannot say what matter is; and, lastly,
that Berkeley and his school have proved the existence of spirit
while denying that of matter.

The Materialists reply that the want of agreement shows only a
study insufficiently advanced; that man cannot describe an atom,
because he is still an infant in science, yet there is no reason
why his mature manhood should not pass through error and
incapacity to truth and knowledge; that consciousness becomes a
property of matter when certain conditions are present; that Hyle
({Greek: hylae}) or Matter may be provisionally defined as
"phenomena with a substructure of their own, transcendental and
eternal, subject to the action, direct or indirect, of the five