The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science

Troward opens with the most ordinary contrast there is: living spirit and dead matter. He does not tell you the contrast is foolish. A table looks dead because, for every practical purpose, it is.

In fact he goes out of his way to defend your eyes. The senses of a healthy body report accurately, he says, and any system that asks people to distrust them will never take root in a sane community.

The mistake comes one step later, when we decide what the report means. We judge by appearances and by the narrow meanings we have attached to words. Question the words and the old picture starts to slide. His method fits in one phrase: to think honestly for ourselves instead of "endeavouring to get our thinking done for us."

So what is livingness? The first answer most of us reach for is movement. Living things move; dead things lie still.

Troward knocks this down with the object on his lecture table, a solid lump of steel. It lies there inert, yet by the science of his day every particle inside it is in ceaseless motion, rebounding and circling at a speed that makes an express train look slow. If motion were life, the steel would be very much alive.

So motion is not the test. Nor, he adds, will comparing life with deadness ever get us there. The useful comparison is between one degree of livingness and another.

Troward begins by arguing that our senses mislead us about spirit and matter, so their evidence should be set aside.

False✓Correct answer

He says the opposite: mankind is right to trust the evidence of healthy senses. Error creeps in only when we judge what that evidence means, so his quarrel is with our conclusions, not with our eyes.

Take a plant, a goldfish, a fox-terrier and a boy. All four are alive, and in the plain sense of the word none is more alive than the others. Yet nobody doubts there is a difference in the quality of their living. Troward asks what boy would not rather have the terrier than the goldfish for a pet, and why the boy himself is an advance on the dog.

His answer is intelligence. Turn the subject any way you like, he says, and the livingness of any life is measured by its intelligence.

This is the move that matters. Life stops being a switch that is simply on or off and becomes a scale, and what the scale measures is the power of thought.

In Lecture I, what does Troward say the "livingness" of any life is ultimately measured by?

• How much it moves of its own accord
• Its degree of intelligence✓Correct answer
• How much living substance it holds
• How keenly it can feel pain

The plant, the fish, the dog and the boy are equally alive, yet their livingness differs by intelligence. Motion fails as a test because even the atoms of steel are moving, and sheer bulk tells you nothing about how alive something is.

If livingness is intelligence, and intelligence is the power of thought, Troward can lay down his first proposition: spirit is Thought, matter is Form. He calls it "a radical distinction from which important consequences follow."

Why form? Because matter, to be matter at all, has to occupy some space, and occupying a particular space means having a shape. That shape may be too fine for any eye to see, but some form there must be.

Notice what he has not said. He has not called matter bad, or false, or less real than spirit. He has given each its defining mark, the way a lawyer fixes the meaning of his terms before a single argument is heard.