(Men are) dragged along the physiological history, because easy to conceive, and baffled by the spiritual, because it has no pictures to help it.
J. Martineau (Hours of Thought, I, 100).
As psychology comprises all our sensibilities, pleasures, affections, aspirations, capacities, it is thought on that ground to have a special nobility and greatness, and a special power of evoking in the student the feelings themselves. The mathematician, dealing with conic sections, spirals, and differential equations, is in danger of being ultimately resolved into a function or a co-efficient: the metaphysician, by investigating conscience, must become conscientious; driving fat oxen is the way to grow fat.
Alexander Bain (1818-1903) (Contemporary Review, April 1877).
There is a crude absurd materialism abroad which hasn’t yet learned the fundamental difference between Mind and Matter. It is altogether incomprehensible how any material processes can beget sensations and feelings and thoughts; it is altogether incomprehensible how you arose or I arose. Listen to Spencer:—“Were we compelled to choose between the alternatives of translating mental phenomena into physical phenomena, or of translating physical phenomena into mental phenomena, the latter alternative would seem the more preferable of the two.... Hence though of the two it seems easier to translate so-called Matter into so-called Spirit, than to translate so-called Spirit into so-called Matter (which latter is, indeed, wholly impossible), yet no translation can carry us beyond our symbols.”
Richard Hodgson (Letter, March 21, 1880).