na in endless persistence. Of course, the manifestation of
the mind through the senses must cease when the senses no longer
remain. The essence of the controversy, then, is exactly this: Is
the mind an entity? or is it a collection of functions? If the
soul be a substantial force, it is immortal. If it be a phenomenal
resultant, it ceases at death.

A reductio ad absurdum immediately occurs. If the psychical
totality of man consists of states of feeling, modes of volition,
and powers of thought, not necessitating any spiritual entity in
which they inhere, then, by parity of reasoning, the physical
totality of man consists of states of nutrition, modes of
absorption, and powers of change, implying no body in which these
processes are effectuated! Qualities cannot exist without a
subject: and just as physical attributes involve a body, spiritual
attributes involve a mind. And, if a mental entity be admitted,
its death or cessation with that of its outer dress or case is not
a fair inference, but needs appropriate evidence.

The soul of a man has been defined as the sum of his ideas, an
idea being a state of the consciousness. But the essence of mind
must be the common ground and element of all

17 Moleschott, Licht and Leben.

different states of consciousness. What is that common ground and
element but the presence of a percipient volitional force, whether
manifested or unmanifested, still there? That is the germinal core
of our mental being, integrating and holding in continuous
identity all the phenomenal fluctuations of consciousness. It is
clear that any other representation seems inconsistent with the
most central and vivid facts of our knowledge. In illustration of
this, let us see how every materialistic exposition omits utterly,
or fails to account for, the most essential element, the solitary
and crowning peculiarity, of the case. For example, it is said
that thought or consciousness is a phenomenal process of changes
sustained in the brain by a correlation of forces, just as the
rainbow appears, but has no ontological subsistence of its own:
the continuous spectrum hangs steady on the ceaselessly renewed
substratum of the moving mist rack and the falling rain. But the
comparison is absolutely inapplicable, because the deepest ground
principle of the mind is wanting in the rainbow, namely, conscious
and continuous identity holding in each present moment all the
changes of the past moments. If the rainbow