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."