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| Used in broadest and least tendentious sense, "the spiritual" denotes that dimension human consciousness which senses the meaning, inner essence, or transcendent significance of the world and of our life within in it. |
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| In its metaphysically neutral sense, this word denotes some aspect or activity of consciousness, of "the mind." |
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| The putative seat of consciousness, perception, thought and emotion. Its metaphysical status has been hotly disputed. Of late, the cognoscenti identify it with the brain or its states and functions. Most have asserted that, while it may reside in the body, it is separate from the body. This idea philosophers call "Dualism." |
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| Dualism is the belief that there are two modes of substance that comprise reality: material or physical substance, and a substance, immaterial and nonphysical, that comprises minds or spirits. |
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| Monism is the position, contradictory to dualism, which asserts that reality is comprised of one substance only. |
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| Metaphysics denotes those ideas concerning the nature and constitution of reality and its things. Metaphysical theories seek to identify and classify modes of being, i.e. the ways in which things exist and the properties they may have. |
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| This is a branch of metaphysical inquiry that attends the essence of mental phenomenon, classifying various states of mind and articulating their relation with matter and its states. |
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| This is the idea that all things are composed of one substance, and that substance is matter. Materialist would insist that while mental states seem categorically different from states of matter, everything mental is "really" an aspect or activity of matter. |
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| This monistic doctrine asserts that the one substance of which everything is made is the substance of which ideas are made, something mental and nonphysical. Idealists would insist that while there would seem to be physical objects, they are "really" ideas in some mind. |
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| Just as dualists assert that there are two different categories of substances, monists assert that there are two kinds of monism corresponding to these two kinds of substances. This testifies that the material and the mental, the physical and the spiritual, are concepts natural to our ordinary understanding of our affairs. |
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| Philosophy and religion are two enterprises of human thought that ponder these two categories of our existence and attempt to reconcile them each other. |
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| Reason, the faculty of rational thought, is the manner in which philosophers have addressed these questions, seeking knowledge through observation, logical inference and rational debate. Religion typically relies on faith in the conduct of its inquiries, which is variously understood as the authority of sacred tradition or a faculty of passionate commitment and mystical insight. |
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