Physical Substance Quotes

There is a great difference between mind and body insomuch as body is by nature always divisible, and the mind is entirely indivisible.

The nature of matter, or body considered in general, consists not in its being something which is hard or heavy or coloured, or which affects the senses in any way, but simply in its being something which is extended in length, breadth and depth.

The body cannot be the soul.

We must no more ask whether the soul and body are one than ask whether the wax and the figure impressed on it are one.

Matter is a term contrary to soul. But nonsoul is its contradictory. Whatever is not soul is nonsoul.

Every corporeal substance, so far forth as it is corporeal, has a natural fitness for resting in every place where it may be situated by itself beyond the sphere of influence of a body cognate with it.

In the first place, Descartes stands for the most explicit and uncompromising dualism between mind and matter.

Order is to arrangement what the soul is to the body, and what mind is to matter.

What is matter? Never mind.

In the American Metaphysical, reality is always material reality, hard, resistant, unformed, impenetrable, and unpleasant.

In fact, whenever energy is transmitted from one body to another in time, there must be a medium or substance in which the energy exists after it leaves one body and before it reaches the other ... and if we admit this medium as an hypothesis, I think it ought to occupy a prominent place in our investigations, and that we ought to endeavour to construct a mental representation of all the details of its action, and this has been my constant aim in this treatise.