ATERIAI4SM 
 HEOLOGY AND 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 FROM THE LIBRARY OF 
 
 DR. JOSEPH LECONTE. 
 
 GIFT OF MRS. LECONTE. 
 
 No. 
 
' 
 
r ' fc/^< 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM 
 
 IN ITS RELATIONS TO 
 
 KEUGION AND THEOLOGY 
 
 COMPRISING AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN MANCHESTER NEW COL- 
 LEGE, OCTOBER GTII, 1874, AND Two PAPERS REPRINTED 
 PROM " TUB CONTEMPORARY REVIEW" 
 
 JAMES MARTIXEAU, LL.D 
 \\ 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 
 
 HENRY W. BELLOWS, D.D 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF 
 
 ^ YORK 
 
 .G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
 No. 182 FIFTH AVENUE 
 
 1877 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 THE following Address, published by desire of 
 my College, was much curtailed in oral delivery. 
 As somewhat more patience may be hoped for in 
 a reader than in a hearer, it now appears in full. 
 The position assumed in it, of resistance to 
 some speculative tendencies of modern physical 
 research, is far from congenial to me: for it 
 seems to place me in the wrong camp. But the 
 exclusive pretension, long set up by Theology, 
 to dominate the whole field of knowledge, seems 
 now to have simply passed over to the material 
 Sciences ; with the effect of inverting, rather 
 than removing, a mischievous intellectual con- 
 fusion, and shifting the darkness from outward 
 Nature to Morals and Eeligion. I cannot admit 
 that these are conquered provinces : and to 
 re-affirm their independence, and protest against; 
 their absorption in a universal material empire, 
 appears to me a pressing need alike for true 
 philosophy and for the future of human char- 
 acter and society. 
 
 , Oct. 12, 1874. 
 
 186703 
 
mTKODTJOTKMr. 
 
 Is the mind of man only the last product of 
 the matter and force of our system of Nature, 
 having its origin in the blind or purposeless 
 chance which drifts into order and intelligence 
 under a self-executing mandate or necessity, 
 called the survival of the fittest ? The alleged 
 discovery and partial verification of the method 
 by which Nature works, has aroused sus- 
 picions in many leading scientific minds that 
 Nature is the only and the final reality ; that 
 we cannot get behind her phenomena or 
 rather, that there is nothing behind them ; that 
 matter and force are all we know or need to 
 know, and that they have answered so many 
 of our questions in regard to the origin of ani- 
 mal existence and instincts, and even human 
 intelligence, that they need only to be persist- 
 ently pressed in the same direction to tell us 
 
6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 all we can ever know and all we ought to 
 believe. 
 
 It is certain that a spirit older than matter, 
 an intelligence other than human, a will freer 
 than necessity, does not enter into the causes 
 of things contemplated by the new science. 
 It studies a mindless universe with the sharp- 
 ened instincts of brutes who have slowly grad- 
 uated into men themselves the most intelli- 
 gent essences in existence. Consciousness, 
 reason, purpose, will, are results of blind, 
 undesigning, unfeeling forces, inherent in mat- 
 ter. God is an unknown and unknowable 
 Being, if He exists; but He is a needless 
 hypothesis, and really only the reflection of 
 man's own God-like thoughts and feelings. 
 In its childhood humanity invented Him as 
 the hiding-place of its own ignorance ! It is 
 against this hypothesis that Mr. Martineau 
 directs his battery in the discourse which fol- 
 lows. 
 
 It is refreshing, in the midst of the crude 
 replies which alarmed religionists are hastily 
 hurling at the scientific assailants of faith in a 
 
INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 living God, to hear one thoroughly furnished 
 scholar, profound metaphysician, and earnest 
 Christian, entering his thoughtful and deeply- 
 considered protest against the tendencies or 
 conclusions of modern Materialism. Through- 
 out the whole discussion of tho last ten years, 
 between utilitarian philosophers and scientific 
 materialists, on one side, and believers in 
 intuitive morals and spiritual realities on the 
 other, Mr. Martineau has confessedly been the 
 leading champion of faith. No writer has ren- 
 dered, in this generation, such service to 
 Eeligion, assailed in its vital assumptions by 
 the arrogance -of science, drunk with the new 
 wine of its recent victories. Happily unham- 
 pered with theological anachronisms or ecclesi- 
 astical entanglements ; free to acknowledge all 
 that science and experience can justly allege 
 against dogmatic inventions or out-lived tra- 
 ditions; a frank confessor of whatever new 
 facts in the genesis of Nature modern science 
 has established ; tied to no creed and confess- 
 ing no intellectual accountableness to any 
 power less than the Eternal Keason Mr. 
 
8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Martineau, by his nature, culture, age, 
 position, and character, is, of all living men, 
 the best fitted to speak with the scientific 
 mind of the day in the interests of religious 
 faith, and more likely to be listened to by it 
 with respect than any other voice. It is not 
 as an enemy of science, much less as a friend 
 of superstition ; not as a disputer of the 
 method of the Evolutionists, far less as a 
 defender of bibliolatry or popular theology, 
 that Mr. Martineau appears, but as one who 
 hails and blesses all new truth derived from 
 scientific sources, and especially in its influ- 
 ence in dispelling theological assumptions and 
 time-hardened errors, himself a firm believer in 
 spiritual realities and in a personal God. 
 
 It is instructive to find the disowned leaders 
 in theological reform among the stoutest 
 defenders of the essential postulates of reli- 
 gious faith, and to recognize in the foremost 
 champions of spiritual realities against the 
 assaults of modern Materialism, the knights 
 who have swung the most ponderous battle- 
 axes at the errors and exaggerations of what 
 
INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 is called "orthodoxy." It must bo a great 
 puzzle to the English people to discover, in 
 the stoutest, keenest, and most competent 
 defender of essential Religion, openly assailed 
 by the most gifted scientific minds, the person 
 of a non-conformist Minister, representative 
 of a body more neglected, disfellowshiped, 
 and popularly associated with the enemies of 
 faith, than any other in Christendom. It is a 
 noble return to the church for the life-long 
 suspicion and alienation it has visited upon 
 one of its purest and most enlightened sons. 
 
 James Martineau needs no introduction to 
 American thinkers, and I have not the pre- 
 sumption, in writing at the request of the 
 American publishers this preface to his latest 
 work, to hope to add anything to the attention 
 this profound and brilliant paper will receive. 
 I seek rather to avail myself of its attraction 
 to ivin a little notice to suggestions that would 
 find small audience out of such company. 
 
RELIGION 
 
 AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 MODERN MATERIALISM. 
 
 THE College wliicli places me here to-day 
 professes to select and qualify suitable men 
 for the Nonconformist Ministry ; that is, the 
 headship of societies voluntarily formed for 
 the promotion of the Christian life. In car- 
 rying out its work, two rules have been 
 invariably observed : (1) the Special Studies 
 which deal with our sources of religious 
 faith whether in the scrutiny of nature or 
 in the interpretation of sacred books have 
 been left open to the play of all new lights of 
 thought and knowledge, and have promptly 
 reflected every well-grounded intellectual 
 change ; and (2) ihe General Studies which 
 give the balanced aptitudes of a cultivated 
 
12 RELIGION AS AFFECTED Y 
 
 mind have been made as extensive and 
 thorough as the years at disposal would allow. 
 In both these rules there is apparent a genuine 
 thirst for a right apprehension of things, a 
 contempt for the dangers of possible discovery, 
 a persuasion that in the mind most large and 
 luminous the springs of Religion have the 
 freshest and the fullest flow ; together with the 
 idea that the Preacher, instead of being 
 the organ of a given theology, should himself, 
 by the natural influence of mental superiority, 
 pass to the front and take the lead in a regu- 
 lated growth of opinion. 
 
 There have never been wanting prophets of 
 ill who distrusted this method as rash. So 
 much open air does not suit the closet divine ; 
 such liability to change disappoints the fixed 
 idea of the partisan ; and the " practical man" 
 does not' want his preacher's head made 
 heavy with too much learning, or his faith 
 attenuated in the vacuum of metaphysics. 
 At the present moment these partial distrusts 
 are superseded by a deeper and more com- 
 prehensive misgiving, affecting not the method 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. \ 
 
 simply, out the aim and function of our 
 Institution. Side by side with the literary 
 pursuits of the scholar, the study of external 
 nature has always had a place of honor in our 
 traditions and our estimates of a manly edu- 
 cation ; and there is scarcely a special science 
 which has not some brilliant names that 
 range not far from the lines of our history ; 
 and from the favorite shelf of all our libraries, 
 the Principia of Newton, the Essays of 
 Franklin, the Papers of Priestley and Dalton, 
 the " Principles " of Lyell, the Biological 
 Treatises of Southwood Smith and Carpenter, 
 and the records of Botanical research by Sir 
 James Smith and the Hookers, look down 
 upon us with something of a personal interest. 
 The successive enlargements given by these 
 skilled interpreters to our earlier picture of 
 the world the widening Space, the deepen- 
 ing vistas of Time, the new groups of chemi- 
 cal elements and the precision of their com- 
 binations, the detected marvels of physio- 
 logical structure, and the rapid filling-in of 
 missing links in the chain of organic life 
 
14. RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 have been eagerly welcomed as adding a 
 glory to the realities around, and, by the 
 erection of fresh shrines and cloisters, turning 
 the simple temple in which w r e once stood 
 into a clustered magnificence. Thus it was, 
 so long as discoveries came upon us one by 
 one ; nor did any biblical chronology or 
 Apocalypse interfere with their proper evi- 
 dence for an hour. But now must we not 
 confess it ? certain shadows of anxiety seem 
 to steal forth and mingle with the advancing 
 light of natural knowledge, and temper it to a 
 less genial warmth. It comes on, no longer 
 in the simple form of pulse after pulse of 
 positive and limited discovery, but with the 
 ambitious sweep of a universal theory, in 
 which facts given by observation, laws 
 gathered by induction, and conceptions fur- 
 nished by the mind itself, are all wrought up 
 together as if of homogeneous validity. A 
 report is thus framed of the Genesis of things, 
 made up, indeed, of many true chapters of 
 Science, but systematized by the terms and 
 assumptions of a questionable, if not an un- 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. J5 
 
 tenable, philosophy. To the inexpert reader 
 this report seems to be all of one piece ; and 
 he is disturbed to find an account apparently 
 complete of the "Whence and the "Whither" 
 of all things without recourse to aught that is 
 divine ; to see the refinements of organism 
 and exactitudes of adaptation disenchanted 
 of their wonder ; to watch the beauty of the 
 flower fade into a necessity ; to learn that 
 Man was never intended for his place upon 
 this scene, and has no commission to fulfill, 
 but is simply flung hither by the competitive 
 passions of the most gifted brutes ; and to be 
 assured that the elite beings that tenant the 
 earth tread each upon an infinite series of 
 failures, and survive as trophies of immeasur- 
 able misery and death. Thus an apprehension 
 has become widely spread, that Natural 
 History and Science are destined to give the 
 coup de grace to all theology, and discharge 
 the religious phenomena from human life ; 
 that churches and their symbols must disap- 
 pear like the witches' chamber and the 
 astrologists' tower ; and that, as everything 
 
16 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 above our nature is dark and void, those w 10 
 affect to lift it lead it nowhither, and must 
 take themselves away as " blind leaders of the 
 blind." Whether this 'apprehension is well 
 founded or not is a very grave question for 
 society in many relations; and is emphatically 
 urgent for those who educate men as spiritual 
 guides to others, and who can invest ther? 
 with no directing power except the native 
 force of a mind at one with the truth of 
 things and a heart of quickened sympathies. 
 Hitherto, they have been trained under the 
 assumptions that the Universe which includes 
 us and folds us round is the Life-dwelling of 
 an Eternal Mind ; that the World of our 
 abode is the scene of a Moral Government 
 incipient but not yet complete ; and that the 
 upper zones of Human Affection, above the 
 clouds of self and passion, take us into 
 the sphere of a Divine Communion. Into 
 this over-arching scene it is that growing 
 thought and enthusiasm have expanded to 
 catch their light and fire. And if " the new 
 faith '* is to carry in it the contradictories of 
 
31 ODERX MA TERIALIS1L J7 
 
 these positions if it leaves us to make what 
 we can of a simply molecular universe, and a 
 pessimist world, and an unappeasable battle 
 of life it will require another sort of Apos- 
 tolate, and would make such a difference in 
 the studies which it is reasonable to pursue, 
 that it might be wisest for us to disband, and 
 let the new Future preach its own gospel, and 
 devise, if it can, the means of making the tidings 
 " glad. 19 J3etter at once to own our occupa- 
 tion gone than to linger on sentimental 
 sufferance, and accept the indulgent assurance 
 that, though there is no longer any truth in 
 religion, there is some nice feeling in it ; and 
 that while, for all we have to teach, we 
 might shut up to-morrow, we may harmlessly 
 keep open still, as a nursery of "Emotion.'"* 
 I trust that, when " emotion " proves empty, 
 we shall stamp it out, and get rid of it. 
 
 Though, however, no partnership between 
 the physicist and the theologian can be formed 
 on these terms of assigning the intellect to 
 
 * See Professor TyndalFs Address before tlie British. 
 Association ; with Additions, p. 61. 
 
 2 
 
13 RELIGION AS AFFECTED 7 
 
 the one and the feelings to the other, may it not 
 be that, in the flurry of exultation and of 
 panic, they misconstrue their real position ? 
 and that their relations, when calmly sur- 
 veyed, may not be in such a state of tension 
 as each is ready to believe ? Looking on 
 their respective contentions from the external 
 position of logical observation, and without 
 presuming to call in question the received 
 inductions of the naturalist, I believe that 
 both parties mistake the bearing of those in- 
 ductions upon Religion ; and that, although 
 this bearing is in some aspects serious, it is 
 neither of the quality nor of the magnitude 
 frequently ascribed to it. I venture to affirm 
 that the essence of Religion, summed up in 
 the three assumptions already enumerated, 
 I is independent of any possible results of the 
 natural sciences, and stands fast through the 
 various readings of the Genesis of things. 
 / The unpracticed mind of simple times goes 
 / out, it is true, upon everything en masse, and 
 ) indeterminately feels and thinks about itself 
 and the field of its existence, the inner and 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. jg 
 
 the outer, the transient and the permanent, 
 the visible and the invisible : its knowledge 
 and its worship, the pictures of its fancy and 
 the intuition of its faith, are as yet a single 
 tissue, of which every broken thread rends and 
 deforms the whole. Hence the oldest sacred 
 traditions run into stories of world-building ; 
 and the earliest attempts at a systematic in- 
 terpretation of nature, in which physical ideas 
 were clothed in mythical garb, are regarded 
 by Aristotle as " theological." It must be ad- 
 mitted that our own age has not yet emerged 
 from this confusion. And in so far as Church 
 belief is still committed to a given cosmogony 
 and natural history of Man, it lies open to 
 scientific refutation, and has already received 
 from it many a wound under which it visibly 
 pines away. It is needless to say that the new 
 " book of Genesis," which resorts to Lucretius 
 for its "first beginnings," to protoplasm for its 
 fifth day, to " natural selection " for its Adam 
 and Eve, and to evolution for all the rest, con- 
 tradicts the old book at every point ; and inas- 
 much as it dissipates the dream of Paradise, 
 
20 RELIGION AS AFFECTED JST 
 
 and removes the tragedy of the Fall, cancels at 
 once the need and the scheme of Redemption, 
 and so leaves the historical churches of Europe 
 crumbling away from their very foundations. 
 If any one would know how utterly unpro- 
 ducible in modern daylight is the theology of 
 the symbolical books, how absolutely alien 
 from the real springs of our life, let him fol- 
 low for a few hours the newest movement of 
 ecclesiastical reform, and listen to tlie reported 
 conferences at Bonn on the remedies for a 
 divided Christendom. Scarcely could the 
 personal reappearance of Athanasius or Cyril 
 on the floor of the council-hall be more start- 
 ling, or the cries of anathema from the voices 
 of the ancient dead have a more wondrous 
 sound, than tha reproduction, as hopes of the 
 future, by men of Munich, of Chester, of Pitts- 
 burg, and of the Eastern Church, of formulas 
 without meaning for the present, the eager 
 discussion of subtle varieties of falsehood, and 
 the anxious masking of their differences by 
 opaque phrases under which everybody man- 
 ages to look. Such signs of strange intellectual 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 21 
 
 anachronism excuse the aversion 'with which 
 many a thoughtful man, with a heart still full 
 of reverence, turns away from all religious 
 association, and lives without a church. It 
 has been the infatuation of ecclesiastics to 
 miss the inner divine spirit that breathes \ 
 through the sources of their faith, and to 
 seize, as the materials of their system, the 
 perishable conceptions and unverified predic- 
 tions of more fervent but darker times ; so 
 that, in the structure they have raised, all that 
 is most questionable in the legacy of the 
 past obsolete Physics, mythical History, 
 Messianic Mythology, Apocalyptic prognosti- 
 cations have been built into the very walls, 
 if not made the corner-stone, and now by their 
 inevitable decay threaten the whole with ruin. 
 Why, indeed, should I charge this infatuation 
 on councils and divines alone ? It is not pro- 
 fessional, but human ; it is a delusion which 
 affects us all. We are forever shaping our ( 
 representations of invisible things, in com- 
 parison with other men's notions, into forms 
 of definite opinion, and throwing them to the 
 
22 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 front, as if they were the photographic equiv- 
 alent of our real faith. Yet somehow the 
 essence of our religion never finds its way into 
 these frames of theory : as we put them to- 
 gether it slips away, and, if we turn to pursue 
 it, still retreats behind;, ever ready to work 
 with the will, to unbind and sweeten the affec- 
 tions, and bathe the life with reverence ; but 
 refusing to be seen, or to pass from a divine 
 hue of thinking into a human pattern of 
 thought. The effects of this infatuation in 
 the founders of our civilization are disastrous 
 on both sides, not only to the Churches whose 
 system is undermined, but to the spirit of the 
 Science which undermines it. It turns out 
 that, with the sun and moon and stars, and in 
 and on the earth both before and after the 
 appearance of our race, quite other things' 
 have happened than those which the conse- 
 crated cosmogony recites : especially Man, 
 instead of falling from a higher state, has 
 risen from a lower, and inherits, instead of a 
 uniform corruption, a law of perpetual im- 
 provement; so that the real process has the 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. 23 
 
 effect, not only of an enormous magnifier, but 
 of an inverting mirror, on the theological 
 picture. Yet, notwithstanding the deplorable 
 appearance to which that picture is thus re- 
 duced, it is exhibited afresh every week to 
 millions still taught to regard it as divine. 
 This is the mischief on the theologic side. 
 On the other hand, Science, in executing this 
 merited punishment, has borrowed from its 
 opponents one of their worst errors, in identi- 
 fying the anomalous or lawless with the divine, ( 
 and assuming that whatever falls within the 
 province of nature drops thereby out of rela- 
 tion to God. As the old story of Creation 
 called in the Supreme Power only by way of 
 supernatural paroxysm, to gain some fresh 
 start beyond the resources of the natural 
 order, so the new inquirers, on getting rid of 
 these crises, fancy that the Agent who had 
 been invoked for them is gone, and proclaim 
 at once that Matter without Thought is com- 
 petent to all. In thus confounding the idea / 
 of the Divine Mind with that of miracle-tcorker, ^ * 
 they do but go over to the theological camp, 
 
24 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 and snatch tlience its oldest and bluntest 
 weapon, which in modern conflict can only 
 burden the hand that wields it. How runs 
 the history of their alleged negative discovery ? 
 The Naturalist was told in his youth that at 
 certain intervals at the joints, for instance, 
 between successive species of organisms acts 
 of sudden creation summoned fresh groups of 
 creatures out of nothing. These epochs he 
 attacks with riper knowledge ; he finds a series 
 of intermediary forms, and fragmentary lines 
 of suggestion for others ; and when the affin- 
 ities are fairly complete, and the chasm in the 
 order of production is filled up, he turns upon 
 us, and says, " See, there is no break in the 
 chain of origination, however far back you 
 ( trace it; we no more want a Divine Agent 
 [ there and then, than here and now" Be it so ; 
 but it is precisely here and now that He is 
 needed, to be the fountain of orderly power, 
 and to render the tissue of laws intelligible 
 by his presence : his witness is found not only 
 in the gaps, but in the continuity of being 
 not in the suspense, but in the everlasting flow 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM, 25 
 
 of change ; for the universe as known, being 
 throughout a system of Thought-relations, can 
 subsist only in an eternal Mind that thinks it. 
 In the whole history of the Genesis of things 
 Keligion must unconditionally surrender to 
 the Sciences. Not indeed that it is without 
 share in the great question of Causality ; but 
 its concern with it is totally different from 
 theirs ; for it asks only about the " Whence" } 
 of all phenomena, while they concentrate 
 their scrutiny upon the " How :" by which I J 
 mean that their end is accomplished as soon 
 as it has been found in what groups phenom- 
 ena regularly cluster, and on what threads of 
 succession they are strung, and into what 
 classification their resemblances throw them. 
 These are matters of fact, directly or circu- 
 itously ascertainable by perception, and re- 
 maining the same, be their originating power 
 what it may. On that ulterior question the 
 Sciences have nothing to say. And, on the 
 other hand, when Beligion here takes up her 
 word and insists that the phenomena thus re- 
 duced to system are the product of Mind, she 
 
20 KELIGIOX AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 in no way prejudges the modus operand^ but 
 is ready to accept whatever affinities of aspect, 
 whatever adjustments of order, the skill of ob- 
 servers may reveal. On these investigations 
 ^ she has nothing to say. If indeed you could 
 ever show that the method of the universe is 
 one along which no Mind could move that it 
 is absolutely incoherent and unideal you 
 would destroy the possibility of Religion as 
 a doctrine of Causality: only, however, by 
 simultaneously discovering the impossibility 
 of Science which wholly consists in organ- 
 izing the phenomena of the world into an in- 
 tellectual scheme reflecting the structure of its 
 archetype. That those who labor to render 
 the universe !nfcUi</il)1e should call in question 
 ( its relation to intelligence) is one of those curi- 
 1 ous inconsistencies to which the ablest special- 
 \ ists are often the most liable when meditating 
 in foreign fields. If it takes Mind to construe 
 ( the worlcl/liow can the negation of Mind suf- 
 fice to constitute it ? 
 
 It is not in the history of Superstition alone 
 that the human mind may be found struggling 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. 27 
 
 in tlie grasp of some mere nightmare of its 
 own creation : a philosophical hypothesis may 
 sit upon the breast with a weight not less op- 
 pressive and not more real; till a frieiully 
 touch or a dawning light breaks the spell, and 
 reveals the quiet morning and the bed of rest. 
 Is there, for instance, no logical illusion in the 
 Materialist doctrine which in our time is pro- 
 claimed with so much pomp and resisted with 
 so much passion ? " Matter is all I want," 
 says the Physicist : " give me its atoms alone, 
 and I will explain the universe." " Good ; take 
 as many of them as you please : see, they have 
 all that is requisite to Body, being homogene- 
 ous extended solids." " That is not enough," 
 he replies ; " it might do for Democritus and 
 the mathematicians, but I must have some- 
 what more : the atoms must be not only in 
 
 
 
 motion and of various shapes, but also of as 
 many kinds as there may be chemical ele- 
 ments ; for how could I ever get water, if % I 
 had only hydrogen molecules to work with? " 
 " So be it," we shall say ; " only this is a con- 
 siderable enlargement of your specified datum, 
 
 
28 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 * in fact, a conversion of it into several ; yet, 
 even at the cost of its monism, your scheme 
 seems hardly to gain its end ; for by what 
 manipulation of your resources will you, for 
 example, educe consciousness ? No organism 
 can ever show you more than Matter moved ; 
 and, as Dubois-Beymond observes, there is an 
 impassable chasm ' between definite move- 
 ments of definite cerebral atoms and the pri- 
 mary facts which I can neither define nor 
 deny I feel pain or pleasure, I taste a sweet- 
 ness, smell a rose-scent, hear an organ tone, see 
 red, together with the no less immediate as- 
 surance they give, therefore I exist:' ' it re- 
 mains.' he adds, ' entirely and forever incon- 
 ceivable that it should signify a jot to a 
 number of carbon and hydrogen and nitrogen 
 and oxygen and other atoms how they lie and 
 move;' ' in no way can one see how from 
 their concurrence consciousness can arise. '* 
 
 * " Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens," p. 29. 
 Compare p. 20. " I will now prove, as I believe in a 
 very cogent way, not only that, in the present state of 
 our knowledge, Consciousness cannot be explained by 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. 29 
 
 What say you to this problem ? " " It does not 
 daunt me at all," lie declares : " of course you 
 understand that my atoms have all along been 
 affected by gravitation and polarity ; and now 
 I have only to insist, with Fechner,* on a dif- 
 ference among molecules ; there are the inor- 
 fftinic, which can change only their place, like 
 the particles in an undulation ; and there are 
 the organic, which can change their order, as 
 in a globule that turns itself inside out. With 
 an adequate number of these, our problem 
 will be manageable." "Likely enough," we 
 may say, " seeing how careful you are to pro- 
 vide for ah 1 emergencies ; and if any hitch 
 should occur at the next step, where you will 
 have to pass from mere seritiency to Thought 
 and Will, you can again look in upon your 
 atoms, and fling among them, a handful of 
 Leibnitz's monads, to serve as souls in little, 
 
 its material conditions, which perhaps every one allows, 
 but that from the very nature of things it never wilJ 
 admit of explanation by these conditions/' 
 
 * Einige Ideen zur Schopf ungs- und Entwickelungsge- 
 schichte der Organismeu, g i. ii. 
 
30 RELIGION AS AFFECTED JBT 
 
 and be ready, in a latent form, with that Fbr- 
 stettungsfahigkeit which our picturesque inter- 
 preters of nature so much prize. But surely 
 you must observe how this ' Matter' of yours 
 alters its style with every change of service : 
 starting as a beggar, with scarce a rag of 
 ' property ' to cover its bones, it turns up as 
 a Prince, when large undertakings are wanted, 
 loaded with investments, and within an inch 
 of a plenipotentiary. In short, you give it 
 precisely what you require to take from it ; 
 and when your definition has made it ' preg- 
 nant with all the future,' there is no wonder 
 if from it all the future might be born." 
 
 " We must radically change our notions of 
 Matter," says Professor Tyndall ; and then, 
 he ventures to believe, it will answer all de- 
 mands, carrying " the promise and potency of 
 all terrestrial life."* If the measure of the 
 required " change in our notions " had been 
 
 * Address before the British Association ; with Addi- 
 tions, pp. 54, 55. Compare the statement, by Dubois- 
 Reyinond, of the opposite opinion, quoted supra, p. 28, 
 note. 
 
MODERN MATERIALISE. 3J 
 
 specified, the proposition would liave Lad a 
 real meaning, and been susceptible of a test. 
 Without this precision, it only tells us, " Charge 
 the word potentially with your quaesita, and I 
 will promise to elicit them explicitly." It is 
 easy traveling through the stages of such an 
 hypothesis ; you deposit at your bank a round 
 sum ere you start ; and, drawing on it piece- 
 meal at every pause, complete your grand tour 
 without a debt. Words, however, ere they 
 Can hold such richness of prerogative, will be 
 found to have emerged from their physical 
 meaning, and to be truly Seocpopa ovo^ara^ 
 terms that bear God in them, and thus dis- 
 solve the very theory which they represent. 
 Such extremely clever Matter Matter that is 
 up to everything, even to writing Hamlet, and 
 finding out its own. evolution, and substituting 
 a molecular plebiscite for a divine monarchy 
 of the world, may fairly be regarded as a little 
 too modest in its disclaimer of the attributes 
 of Mind. 
 
 Nor is the fallacy escaped by splitting our 
 datum into two, and instead of crowding all 
 
32 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 requisites into Matter, leaving it on its old 
 slender footing, and assuming along with it 
 Force as a distinct entity. The two postulates 
 will perform their promise, just like the one, 
 on condition that you secrete within them 
 in the germ all that you are to develop from 
 them as their fruit ; and in this case the word 
 "Force " is the magical seed-vessel which is to 
 surprise us with the affluence of its contents. 
 The surprise is due to one or two nimble- 
 witted substitutions, of which a conjuror 
 might be proud, whereby unequals are shown 
 to be equals, and out of an acorn you hatch a 
 chicken. First, the noun Force is sent into 
 the plural (which of course is only itself in 
 another form), and so we get provided with 
 several of them. Next, as there is now a 
 class, the members must be distinguishable ; 
 and, as they are all of them activities, they 
 will be known one from another by the sort 
 of work they do : one will be a mechanician 
 another a chemist a third will be a swift 
 runner along the tracks of life a fourth will 
 find out all the rest will do our reasoning 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 33 
 
 about them, and get up all our examinations 
 for us. The last of these, every one must own 
 at feast every one who has been graduated 
 is much more dignified than the others ; and all 
 through we rise, at every step, from ruder to 
 more refined accomplishment. With things 
 thus settled, we seem to have found Plato's 
 ideal State, in which every order minds its 
 own business, and no element presumes to 
 cross the line and become something else. 
 Not so, however ; for, after thus differencing 
 the forces and keeping them under separate 
 covers, the next step is to unify them, and 
 show them all as the homogeneous contents 
 of a single receptacle. The forces, we are 
 assured, are interchangeable, and relieve each 
 other ; when one has carried its message, it 
 hands the torch to another, and the light is 
 never quenched or the race arrested, but runs 
 an eternal round. But why then, you will 
 say, divide them first, only to unite them 
 afterwards? Follow our logical wonder- 
 worker one move further, and you will see. 
 
 He has now, we may say, his four vessels 
 3 
 
34 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 standing on the table ; the contents of the 
 whole are to be whisked into one ; having 
 them all, he has more ways than one of 
 working out their equivalence ; and it remains 
 at his option, which he shall lift to let the 
 mouse run out. For some reason, best known 
 to himself, he never thinks of choosing the 
 last ; indeed it is pretty much to avoid this, 
 and obtain other receptacles empty of thought, 
 that he broke down the original unity. If he 
 be a circumspect physiologist, he will probably 
 prefer the third, and exhibit the universal 
 principle as in some sense living ; if he be a 
 daring physicist, he will lay hold of the first, 
 and pronounce mechanical dynamics good 
 enough for the cosmos. 
 
 Am I asked to indicate the precise seat of 
 fallacy in the hypothesis which I have ven- 
 tured to criticise ? The alleged division of 
 forces, considered as something over and 
 above the phenomena ascribed to them, is abso- 
 lutely without ground ; each of them, as apart 
 from any other, has a purely ideal existence, 
 without the slightest claim to objective reality. 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. 35 
 
 Science, dividing its labors, has to break down 
 phenomena into sets, according to their resem- 
 blances and the affinities of their conditions ; 
 it disposes them thus into natural provinces, 
 the laws of which, when ascertained, give us 
 the rules by which the phenomena assort them- 
 selves or successively arise but nothing more. 
 But whatever field we survey, we carry into it 
 the belief, inherent in the constitution of the 
 intellect itself, of a Causal Power as the source 
 of every change : we believe it for each, we 
 believe it for all : it repeats itself identically 
 with every instance ; and when a multitude 
 of instances are tied up together in virtue of 
 their similarity and made into a class, this con- 
 stantly recurring reference, this identity of 
 relation to a power behind, is marked by giv- 
 ing that power a singular name ; as the phe- 
 nomena of weight are labeled with the title 
 Gravitation, expressing unity in their causal 
 relation. Were we closeted with this group 
 of facts alone, this unity would live in our 
 minds without a rival, and we should have no 
 numerical distinction in our account of force. 
 
36 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 But, meanwhile, other observers have been 
 going through a like experience in some sep- 
 arate field; have gleaned and bound into a 
 sheaf its scattered mass of homogeneous 
 growths, and denoted them by another name 
 say, Electricity carrying in it the same 
 haunting reference to a source for them ah 1 . 
 Now, why is this a new name? Is it that we 
 have found a new power ? Have we carried 
 our observation behind the phenomena, so as, in 
 either instance, to find any power at all? 
 Are the two cases differenced by anything else 
 than the dissimilarity of their phenomena? 
 Run over these distinctions, and, when you 
 have exhausted them, is there anything left by 
 which you can compare and set apart from 
 each other the respective producing forces: 
 All these questions must be answered in the 
 negative; the differentiations lie only in the 
 effects; the causal power is not observed, but 
 thought ; and that thought is the same, not 
 only from instance to instance, but from field 
 to field ; and by this sameness it cancels plu- 
 rality from Force, and reduces the story of 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 3 7 
 
 their transmigration into a scientific mythol- 
 ogy. The distinctive names, therefore, mark 
 only differences in the sets of phenomena ; they 
 are simply instruments of classification for 
 noticeable changes in nature, and carry no 
 partitions into the mysterious depths behind 
 the scenes. The dynamic catalogue being thus 
 left empty and cut down to a single term; do 
 we talk nonsense when we attach qualifying 
 epithets to the word Force, and speak of " elec- 
 tric force" of " nerve force" of "polar force" 
 etc. ? Not so ; provided we mean by those 
 phrases simply, force, quantum sufficit, now for 
 one set of phenomena, now for another, without 
 implication of other difference than that of the 
 seat and conditions and aspect of the manifes- 
 tations. But the moment we step across this 
 restriction, we are in the land of myths. 
 
 Power, then, is one and undivided. As exter- 
 nal causality, it is not an object of knowledge, 
 but an element given in the relations of knowl- 
 edge, a condition of our thinking of phenomena 
 at all. "Were this all, our necessary belief in 
 it would be unattended by any representation 
 
38 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 of it ; it would remain an intellectual notion 
 (BegrifF), and we could no more bring it before 
 the mind under any definite type than we can 
 the meaning of such words as " substance " and 
 "possibility." In one field, however, and no 
 more, it falls into coincidence with our experi- 
 ence ; for we ourselves put forth power in the 
 exercise of Will and are personally conscious of 
 Causality; and this sample of immediate 
 knowledge because self-knowledge supplies us 
 with the means of representing to ourselves 
 what else we should have to think without a 
 type. Here, accordingly, we reach, I venture 
 to affirm, what we really mean, and what alone 
 saves us from the mere empty form of mean- 
 ing, whenever we assent to the axiom of Cau- 
 sality. It is very true that the exercise of Will, 
 having more or less of complication, itself 
 admits of analysis ; intention may play a larger 
 or smaller part, may leave less or more for the 
 share of automatic or impulsive activity ; and 
 by letting the former withdraw into the back- 
 ground of our conception, we may come to 
 think of causation apart from purpose which, 
 
MODERN MA TEMIALISM. 39 
 
 I suppose, is the idea of Force. But this is a 
 bare fiction of abstraction, shamming an inte- 
 gral reality ; an old soldier pensioned off from 
 actual duty, but allowed to wear his uniform 
 and look like what he was. Since we have to 
 assume causality for all things, and the only 
 causality we know is that of living mind, that 
 type has no legitimate competitor. Even if it 
 had, its sole adequacy would leave it in pos- 
 session of the field. For among the products 
 to be accounted for is the whole class and 
 hierarchy of minds ; and unless there is to be 
 more in the effect than in the cause, nothing 
 less than Mind is competent to realize a 
 scheme of being whose ranks ascend so high. 
 As for the plea which has unhappily passed 
 into a common-place that, even if it be so, 
 that transcendent object is beyond all cogni- 
 zance I will only say that this doctrine of 
 Nescience stands in exactly the same relation 
 to causal power, whether you construe it as 
 Material Force or as Divine Agency. Neither 
 can be observed; one or the other must be 
 assumed. If you admit to the category of 
 
4-Q RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 f knowledge only what we learn by observation, 
 
 particular or generalized, then is Force un- 
 
 / known ; if you extend the word to what is irn- 
 
 j, / ported by the intellect itself into our cognitive 
 
 acts, to make them such, then is God known. 
 
 This comment on current hypotheses refers 
 to them only so far as they overstep the limits 
 of Science, and aspire to the seat of judgment 
 on ulterior questions of philosophy. So long 
 as they simply descend upon this or that realm 
 of nature, and try their strength there in sim- 
 plifying its laws or rendering them deducible 
 or, passing from province to province, labor 
 to formulate equations available for several or 
 for all they must be respectfully left to pur- 
 sue their work ; and whenever their authors 
 present their demonstrated " system of the 
 world," all reasonable men will learn it from 
 them, whatever it may be, as scholars from a 
 ' master. In the investigation of the genetic 
 , order of things, Theology is an intruder, and 
 must stand aside. Religion first reaches its 
 true ground, when, leaving the problem of 
 V ( what lias hcqjpened, it takes its stand on what 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 41 
 
 forever is. * I do not say that it is indifferent 
 to us how antecedent ages have been filled, 
 and have brought up the march with which 
 we fall into step to-day ; for we are beings of 
 large perspective, concentrating in us many 
 lines of distance and images that lie between 
 
 * This statement has been pronounced by a friendly 
 critic (Spectator, Oct. 17, p. 1293) "not only questionable, 
 but gravely misleading ; " as implying " that if history 
 and science showed us constant degradation instead of 
 evolution of higher forms, and tilled us with anticipa- 
 tions from which reasonable hope hope, that is, 
 measured by experience was utterly excluded, the 
 religion of the Soul would just as certainly assert the 
 supremacy of righteousness and the love of God, as she 
 does with the united voices of revelation and experience 
 to help her out." 
 
 If I had said that Religion has no interest in the his- 
 tory of nature and the world, this criticism would have 
 been just. But 1 cannot see how it applies to the posi- 
 tions which the text aims to make good, viz. : that Re- 
 ligion has no locus standi in investigations about the 
 order of phenomena in the past, but must make what it 
 can of that order as determined by scientific evidence : 
 and that Religion has a locus standi, where Science has 
 not, in the quest and cognition of the Cause that is be- 
 hind all phenomena. To reach that Cause, there is no 
 need to go into the past, as though, being missed here, 
 He could be found there. But when once He has been 
 discerned through the proper organs of divine apprehen- 
 sion, the whole life of humanity is recognized as the 
 
42 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 the eye and the horizon ; and what we see at 
 hand borrows a portion of its aspect from re- 
 lation to remoter zones behind. But still, if 
 the light were all turned off from the Past, 
 and on facing it we looked only into the Night, 
 the reality for us is not there, but here, where 
 it is Day. However the present may have 
 come about, I find myself in it : in whatever 
 way my faculties may have been determined, 
 faculties they are, and they give me insight 
 into my duty and outlook on my position : 
 however the world, of Nature and of Society, 
 may have grown to what it is, its scene con- 
 tains me, its relations twine around me, its 
 physiognomy appeals to me with a meaning 
 from behind itself. If these data do not 
 suffice to show me my kinship with what is 
 above, below, around me, and find my moral 
 and spiritual place, I shall not be greatly 
 
 scene of His agency, and the past, no less tlian the pres- 
 ent, lias to be embraced in the religious interpretation of 
 the world, and becomes an object of sacred interest. 
 Though Religion, in taking its stand on what forever 
 is, first reaches its true ground, it does not follow that it 
 must always remain there. 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 43 
 
 helped by discovering how many ages my con- 
 stitution has been upon the stocks, and its 
 antecedents been upon the way. The beings 
 that touch me with their look and draw me 
 out of myself, the duties that press upon my / 
 heart and hand, are on the spot, speaking to I 
 me while the clock ticks ; and to love thein/ 
 aright, to serve them faithfully, and construct) 
 with them a true harmony of life, is the saineN 
 task, whether I bear within me the inheritance < 
 of a million years, or, with all my surround- .' 
 ings, issued this morning from the dark. 
 
 Eemaining then at home, and consulting 
 the nature which we have and which we see, 
 we find that, far from being self-inclosed, or 
 related only to its visible dependencies, it 
 turns a face, on more than one side, right 
 towards the Infinite, and, often to the disre- . 
 gard of nearer things, moves hither or thither 
 as if shrinking from a shadow advancing 
 thence, or drawn by a light that wins it for- 
 ward. We are constantly even the most 
 practical of us seeing what is invisible and 
 hearing what is inaudible, and permitting them 
 
44 RELIGION AS AFFECTED B Y 
 
 to send us on our way. Not left, like the mere 
 animal, to be the passive resultant of forces 
 without and instincts within, but invested with 
 an alternative power, we are conscious partners 
 in the architecture of our own character, and 
 know ourselves to be the bearers of a trust ; 
 and this fiduciary life takes us at once across 
 the boundary which separates nature from 
 what transcends it. Seducing appetites and 
 turbulent passions and ignoble ease never gain 
 our imdivided ear ; while we bend to them, 
 there are pleading voices which distract us, 
 and which, if they do not save us, follow us 
 with an expostulating shame. Nor, if ever we 
 wake up and kindle at the appeal of misery 
 and the cry of wrong, or with the spontaneous 
 fire of disinterested affection or devotion to 
 the true and good, can we construe them into 
 anything less than a Divine claim upon us : 
 we know their right over us at a glance ; we 
 feel on us their look of authority in reply ; if, 
 to our careless fancy, we were ever our own, 
 we can be so no more. Once stirred by the 
 higher springs of character, and possessed by 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 45 
 
 the yearning for the perfect mind, we are 
 aware that to live out of these is our supreme 
 obligation, and that for us nothing short of 
 this is holy. To have seen the vision of the 
 best and possible and not to pursue it, is to 
 mar the true idea of our nature, and to fall 
 from its heaven as a rebel and an outcast. 
 This inner life of Conscience and ideal aspira- 
 tion supplies the elements and sphere of 
 Eeligion ; and the discovery of Duty is as dis^j 
 tinctly relative to an Objective Righteousness i 
 as the perception of Form to an external ) 
 Space : it is a bondage, with superficial re^ 
 luctance, but with deeper consent, to an 
 invisible Highest ; and both moral Fear and 
 moral Love stand before the face of an 
 authority which is the eternal reality of 
 the holy, just, and true. On the first view, 
 you might expect that the stronger the en- 
 thusiasm for goodness, and the surer the 
 recoil from ill, so much the fitter would . the 
 mind be to stand alone in its self-adequacy ; 
 yet it is precisely at such elevation that it- 
 most trusts in a Supreme Perfection to which 
 
46 RELIGION AS AFFECTED B Y 
 
 it only faintly responds, and leans for support 
 on that everlasting stay. The life of aspira- 
 tion, attempting to nurse itself, soon pines 
 and dies ; it must breathe a diviner air, and 
 take its thirst to unwasting springs ; and 
 wherever it settles into a quiet tension of 
 the will, and an upturned look of the affec- 
 tions, it is sustained by habitual access to 
 the Fountain of sanctity, and by the con- 
 sciousness of an Infinite sympathy. Are not 
 both the need and the existence of this 
 objective sustaining power acknowledged by 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold himself, when he insists 
 on that strange entity, " That, not ourselves, 
 which makes for righteousness " ? By an ab- 
 straction, however, such a function cannot be 
 discharged ; nothing ever " makes for righteous- 
 ness " but One who is righteous. To support 
 and raise the less, there must be a greater; and 
 that which does not think and will and love, 
 whatever the' drift of its blind power, may 
 indeed be larger, but is not greater, than the 
 sinning soul that longs for purity. 
 
 Now, so long as the devotee of Goodness is 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. tf 
 
 possessed by a faith, not only in his own as- 
 pirations, but in an Infinite Mind which fos- 
 ters and secures them as counterparts of the 
 highest reality, it is of little moment ethically 
 what theory he adopts of their mode of origin 
 within him. Whether he takes them, as in- 
 tuitive data of his understanding, or, with 
 Hartley, as a transfiguration of sensible inter- 
 ests into a disinterested glory, or, with Dar- 
 win and Spencer, as the latest refinement of 
 animal instinct and discipline after percola- 
 ting through uncounted generations, that 
 which he has reached be it first or last is 
 at all events the truth of things, the primordial 
 and everlasting certainty, in comparison with 
 which all prior stages of training, if such there 
 were, give but dim gropings and transient 
 illusions. In Hartley himself, accordingly, a 
 doctrine essentially materialistic and carrying 
 in it the whole principle of Evolution, so far 
 as it could be epitomized in the individual's 
 life, easily blended with moral fervor and 
 even a mystic piety ; and, in Priestley, with a 
 noble heroism of veracity and an unswerving 
 
48 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 confidence in the perfect government of the 
 universe. But what if the process of atomic 
 development be taken as the Substitute for 
 God, not as His method? if you withdraw 
 from the beginning all Idea of what is to come 
 out at the end all Model or Archetype to 
 control and direct the procedure, and restrain 
 the possible from running off indefinitely into 
 the false and wrong ? Do you suppose that 
 the ethical results can be still the same ? The 
 inevitable difference, I think, few considerate 
 persons will deny ; and without attempt to 
 measure its amount, its chief feature may be 
 readily defined. 
 
 It was often said by both James and John 
 Stuart Mill, that you do not alter, much less 
 destroy, a feeling or sentiment by giving its 
 history : from whatever unexpected sources 
 its constituents may be gathered, when once 
 their confluence is complete the current they 
 form, runs on the same, whether you know 
 them or not. How true this may be is exem- 
 plified by the younger Mill himself; who, 
 while resolving the moral sentiments into 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 49 
 
 simple pleasure and pain, and moral obliga- 
 tion into a balance of happiness, yet nobly 
 protested that lie would rather plunge into 
 eternal anguish than falsely bend before an 
 unrighteous power. If so it be, then one in 
 whom benevolence, honor, purity, had reached 
 their greatest refinement and most decisive 
 clearness would suffer no change of moral 
 consciousness, on becoming convinced that it 
 is a "poetic thrill" of his "ganglia"* in- 
 duced by the long brealdng-in through which 
 his progenitors have passed, in conformity 
 with the system of organic modification that 
 has deprived him of his fur and his tail. In 
 spite of the apparent incongruity, let us grant 
 that his higher affections will speak to him 
 exactly as before, and make their claims felt 
 by the same tones of sacred authority, so that 
 they continue to subdue him in reverence or 
 lift him as with inspiration. The surrender to 
 them of heart and will under these conditions, 
 the vow to abide by them and live in them, 
 
 Professor Tyndall's Address, p. 49. 
 4 
 
50 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 may still deserve acknowledgment as Religion 
 but, inasmuch as they have shrunk into mere 
 unaccredited subjective susceptibilities, they 
 have lost all support from Omniscient ap- 
 proval, and all presumable accordance with 
 the reality of things. For what are these 
 moral intensities of his nature, seen under his 
 new lights ? Whence is their message ? With 
 what light do they deliver it to him in that 
 imperative voice ? and, if it be slighted, pros- 
 trate him with unspeakable compunction ? 
 Are they an influx of Eighteousness and Love 
 from the life of the universe ? Do they report 
 the insight of beings more august and pure ? 
 No ; they are capitalized " experiences of util- 
 ity" and social coercion, the record of ances- 
 tral fears and satisfaction stored in his brain, 
 and reappearing with divine pretensions, only 
 because their animal origin is forgotten ; or, 
 under another aspect, they are the newest 
 advantage won by gregarious creatures in " the 
 struggle for existence." From such an origin 
 it is impossible to extract credentials for any 
 elevated claim ; so that although low begin- 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 51 
 
 nings may lead, in the natural order, to what 
 is better than themselves as a Julia may be 
 the mother of an Agrippina yet in such case 
 the superiority lies in new endowment, which 
 is not contained in the inheritance. For such 
 new endowment as we gain in the ascent from 
 interest to conscience the theory of trans- 
 mission cannot provide. If the coarse and tur- 
 bid springs of barbarous life, filtered through 
 innumerable organisms, flow limpid and spark- 
 ling at last, the element is still the same, 
 though the sediment is left behind ; and as it 
 would need a diviner power to turn the water 
 into wine, so Prudence, run however fine, social 
 Conformity, however swift and spontaneous, 
 can never convert themselves into Obligation. 
 Hence arises, I think, an inevitable contra- 
 diction between the scientific hypothesis and 
 the personal characteristics of a high-souled. 
 disciple of the modern negative doctrine. For 
 his supreme affections no adequate object 
 and no corresponding source is offered in the 
 universe ; if they look back for their cradle, 
 they see through the forest the cabin of the 
 
52 RELIGION AS AFFECTED J3T 
 
 savage or the lair of the brute ; if they look 
 forth for their justifying reality and end, they 
 fling vain arms aloft and embrace a vacancy. 
 They cannot defend, yet cannot relinquish, 
 their own enthusiasm : they bear him forward 
 upon heroic lines that sweep wide of his own 
 theory ; and, transcending their own reputed 
 origin and environment, they float upon vapors 
 and are empty, self-poised by their own heat. 
 One or two instances will illustrate the way in 
 which what is best in our humanity is left, in 
 the current doctrine, unsupported by the real 
 constitution of the world. 
 
 Compassion the instinctive response to the 
 spectacle of misery has a twofold express- 
 iveness : it is in us a protesting vote against 
 the sufferings we see, and a sign of faith 
 that they are not ultimate, but remediable. 
 Its singularity is, to be not one of these alone, 
 but both. "Were it a simple repugnance, it 
 would drive us from its object ; but it is an 
 aversion ivliicli attracts: it snatches us with a 
 bound to the very thing we hate, arid not with 
 hostile rush, but with softened tread and 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. 53 
 
 gentle words and uplifting hand. And what 
 is the secret of this transfiguration of horror 
 into love ? It could never be but for the im- 
 plicit assurance that for these wounds there 
 is healing possible, if the nursing care does 
 not delay. Should we not say then, if wo 
 trusted its own word about itself, that this 
 principle, so deep and intense in our unfolded 
 nature, is an evident provision for a world of 
 hopeful sorrow ? It is distinctly relative to 
 pain, and would be out of place in a scene 
 laid out for happiness alone ; yet treats that 
 pain as transient, and on passing into the 
 cloud already sees the opening through. It 
 enters the infirmary of human ills with the 
 tender and cheerful trust of the young Sister 
 of mercy, who binds herself to the perpetual 
 presence of human maladies, that she may be 
 forever giving them their discharge. Com- 
 passion institutes a strange order of servitude : 
 it sets the strong to obey the weak, the man and 
 woman to wait upon the child, and youth and 
 beauty to kneel and bend before decrepitude 
 and deformity. How then do the drift and 
 
54 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 faith of this instinct agree with the method of 
 the outer world as now interpreted ? Do they 
 copy it exactly, and find encouragement from 
 the great example ? On the contrary, Nature, 
 it is customary to say, is pitiless, and, while 
 ever moving on, makes no step but by crush- 
 ing a thousand-fold more sentient life than 
 she ultimately sets up, and sets up none that 
 does not devour what is already there. The 
 battle of existence rages through all time and 
 in every field ; and its rule is to give no 
 quarter to dispatch the maimed, to overtake 
 the halt, to trip up the blind, and drive the 
 fugitive host over the precipice into the sea. 
 Nature is fond of the mighty, and kicks 
 the feeble ; and, while forever multiplying 
 wretchedness, has no patience with it when it 
 looks up and moans. And so all-pervading is 
 this rule, that evil, we are told, cannot really 
 be put down, but only masked and diverted ; 
 if you suppress it here, it will break out there. ; 
 the fire of anguish still rolls below and has 
 alternate vents ; when you stop up JStna, it 
 will blot out Sodom and Gomorrah, and bury 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 55 
 
 the cities of the plain. "Who can deny that 
 such teachings as these set the outer universe 7 
 and our inner nature at its best at hopeless 7 ~r 
 variance with one another? Do they not / 
 depress the moral power to which we owe the 
 most humanizing features of our civilization ? 
 We have not to go far for a practical answer. 
 Within a few weeks the question has been 
 raised whether the recent flow of commisera- 
 tion towards the famine-stricken districts of 
 India does not offend against the Law of 
 Nature for reducing a superfluous population ; 
 and whether there were not advantages in the 
 old method of taking no notice of these 
 things, and letting Death pass freely over his 
 threshing-floor and bury the human chaff 
 quietly out of the way. Moral enthusiasm 
 makes many a mischievous mistake in its 
 haste and blindness, and greatly needs the 
 guidance of wiser thought ; but this tone of 
 moral skepticism, which disparages the very 
 springs of generous labor, and treats them as 
 follies laughed at by the cynicism of Nature, 
 is a thousand-fold more desolating. For it 
 
56 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 carries poison to the very roots of good. It 
 is as the bursting-out of salt-springs in the 
 valley of fruits ; it soaks through the prolific 
 soil of all the virtues, and turns the promise of 
 Eden into a Dead Sea shore. 
 
 Beyond the range of the merely com- 
 passionate impulse, Self-forgetfulness in love 
 for others has a foremost place in our 
 ideal of character, and our deep homage 
 as representing the true end of our human- 
 ity. "We exact it from ourselves, and the 
 poor answer we make to the demand costs us 
 many a sigh ; and till we can break the bonds 
 that hold us to our own center, and lose our 
 self-care in constant sacrifice, a shadow of 
 silent reproach lies upon our heart. "Who is 
 so faultless, or so obtuse, as to be ignorant 
 what shame there is, not only in snatched ad- 
 vantages and ease retained to others' loss, but 
 in ungentle words, in wronging judgment 
 within our private thoughts alone ; nay, in 
 simple blindness to what is passing in an- 
 other's mind? Who does not upbraid him- 
 self for his slowness in those sympathies which 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. 57 
 
 are as a multiplying mirror to the joys of life, 
 reflecting them in endless play ? And the 
 grace so imperfect in ourselves wins our in- 
 stant veneration when realized in others. The 
 historical admirations of men are often, in- 
 deed, drawn to a very different type of charac- 
 ter : for Genius and Will have their magnifi 
 cence as well as Goodness its beauty : but 
 before the eye of a purified reverence, neither 
 the giants of force nor the recluses of saintly 
 austerity stand on so high a pedestal as the 
 devoted benefactors of mankind. The heroes 
 of honor are great ; but the heroes of service 
 are greater ; nor does any appeal speak more 
 home to us than a true story of life risked, of 
 ambitions dropped, of repose surrendered, of 
 temper molded, of all things serenely en- 
 dured perhaps unnoticed and in exile at 
 some call of sweet or high affection. Is then 
 this religion of Self-sacrifice the counterpart 
 of the behavior of the objective world? Is 
 the same principle to be found dominating on 
 that great scale? Far from it. There, we 
 are informed, the only rule is self-assertion : 
 
58 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 the all-determining Law is relentless compe- 
 tition for superior advantage ; the condition 
 of obeying which is* that you are to forego 
 nothing, and never to miss an opportunity of 
 pushing a rival over, and seizing the prey be- 
 fore he is on his feet again. "We look with- 
 out, and see the irresistible fact of selfish 
 scramble : we look within, and find the irre- 
 sistible faith of unselfish abnegation. So 
 here, again, Morals are unnatural, and Nature 
 is unmoral : and if, beyond Nature, there is 
 nothing supreme in both relations to deter- 
 mine the subordination and resolve the con- 
 tradiction, he who would be loyal to the 
 higher cah 1 must be so without ground of 
 trust ; if he will not betray his secret ideal, he 
 must follow it unverified, as a mystic enchant- 
 ment of his own mind. 
 
 Once more : the Sense of Duty enforces the 
 suggestions of these and other affections by 
 an authority which we recognize as at once 
 within us and over us, and making them more 
 than impulses, more than ideals, and establish- 
 ing them in binding relations with our "Will. 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. 59 
 
 The rudest self-knowledge must own tliat tlie 
 consciousness of Moral Obligation is an expe- 
 rience sui generis, separated by deep distinc- 
 tions from outward necessity on the one hand, 
 and inward desire upon the other ; and the 
 only psychology which can bridge over these 
 distinctions is that which escapes with its 
 analysis into prehistoric ages, and finds it 
 easy to grow vision out of touch, and read 
 back all differentiation into sameness. No one 
 would carry off the problem into that dark- 
 ness who could deal with it in the present 
 daylight : so, we may take it as confessed, 
 that to us the suasion of Right speaks with a 
 voice which no charming of pleasure and no 
 chorus of opinion can ever learn to mimic. 
 To disregard them is a simple matter of cour- 
 age ; we defy them, and are free : but if from 
 it we turn away, we hear pursuing feet be- 
 hind : and should we stop our ears, we feel 
 upon us the grasp of an awful hand. Moral 
 good would, in our apprehension, cease to be 
 what it is, were it constituted by any natural 
 good, or related to it otherwise than as its su- 
 
gO RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 perior. It is not a personal end one among the 
 many satisfactions assigned to the separate 
 activities of our constitution : else, it would 
 be at our disposal, and we might forego it. 
 Others are our partners in it : for it sets up 
 Eights as counterparts to Duties, and widens 
 by its reciprocity into a common element of 
 Humanity. Is that then its native home? 
 Have men created it, as an expression of their 
 general wish a concentrated code of civic 
 police ? We cannot rest in this : for no ag- 
 gregate of wills, no public meeting of man- 
 kind, though it got together all generations 
 and all contemporary tribes, could by vote 
 make perfidy a virtue and turn pity into 
 a crime. Moral Eight is thus no local essence ; 
 but by its centrifugal force, relatively to our 
 abode, slips off the earth and assumes an 
 absolute universality as the law of all free 
 agency. That it should present itself to us in 
 this transcendent aspect is intelligible enough, 
 if it be identified with the Universal Mind, 
 and thence imparted to dependent natures 
 permitted to be like Him : for, in that case, 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. Q\ 
 
 the related feelings and convictions are true ; 
 in. the order of reality, Righteousness is prior 
 to the pains and pleasures of our particular 
 faculties and the natural exigencies of our 
 collective life ; and our allegiance is due to an 
 eternal Perfection which penetrates the moral 
 structure of all worlds. How, then, does this 
 intuitive faith of our responsible will, this 
 worship of an eternally Holy, stand with the 
 cosmical conceptions now tyrannizing over 
 the imaginations of men ? It encounters the 
 shock of contemptuous contradiction. Ethic- 
 ally, we are assured, the known world cul- 
 minates in us. Before us, there was nothing 
 morally good : over us, there is nothing mor- 
 ally better : Man himself is here the supreme 
 being in the universe. In the just, the benefi- 
 cent, the true, there is no pre-existence : they 
 are not the roots of reality, but the last 
 blossoms of the human phenomena. And 
 even there, the fair show which gives them 
 their repute of an ethereal beauty is but the 
 play of an ideal light upon coarse materials ; 
 rude pleasures and ruder constraints are all 
 
62 RELIGION AS AFFECTED JBT 
 
 that remain when the increments of fancy 
 have fallen away. The real world provides 
 interests alone ; which, when adequately 
 masked, call themselves virtues and pass 
 for something new : and, duped by this illu- 
 sion, we dream of a realm of authoritative 
 Duty, in which the earth is but a province of 
 a supramundane moral empire. And so, we 
 must conclude, the conscience which lives on 
 ] this sublime but empty vision has transcended 
 the tuition of Nature, and, in growing wiser 
 than its teacher, has lost its foothold on 
 reality, only to lean on a phantom of Divine 
 support. 
 
 On the hypothesis of a Mindless universe, 
 such is the fatal breach between the highest 
 inward, life of man and his picture of the outer 
 world. All that is subjectively noblest turns 
 out to be the objectively hollowest ; and the 
 ideal, whether in life and character, or in the 
 beauty of the earth and heaven, which he had 
 taken to be the secret meaning of the Real, 
 is repudiated by it, and floats through space 
 as a homeless outcast. Even in this its 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. 63 
 
 desolation a devoted disciple will say, " I will 
 follow thee whithersoever thou goest ;" but 
 how heavy the cross which he will have to 
 bear ! Beligion, under such conditions, is a 
 defiance of inexorable material laws in favor 
 of a better which they have created but 
 cannot sustain a reaction of man against 
 Nature, which he has transcended a with- 
 drawal of the Self which a resistless force 
 pushes to the front a preservation of the 
 weak whom Necessity crushes, a sympathy 
 with sufferings which life relentlessly sets up 
 a recognition of authoritative Duty which can- 
 not be. Or will you perhaps insist that, in this 
 contrariety between thought and fact, Religion 
 must take the other side, discharge the S'f ia 
 oveipara as illusory, and in her homage hold 
 fast to the solid world ? This might perhaps 
 in some sense be, if you only gave us a world 
 which it was possible to respect. But, by a 
 curious though intelligible affinity, the modern 
 doctrine allies itself with an unflinching pes- 
 simism ; it plays the cynic to the universe - 
 penetrates behind its grand and gracious airs, 
 
64 RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 and detects its manifold blunders and impos- 
 tures : what skill it has it cannot help ; and 
 the only faults and horrors that are not in it 
 are those which are too bad to live. Human 
 life, which is the summit that has been won, is 
 pronounced but a poor affair at best ; and the 
 scene which spreads below and around is but 
 as a battle-field at night-fall, with a few victors 
 taking their faint shout away, and leaving the 
 plain crowded with wounds and vocal with 
 agony. Existence itself, insists Hartmann, is 
 an evil, in proportion as its range is larger 
 and you know it more, and that of cultivated 
 men is worst of all ; * and the constitution of 
 the world (so stupidly does it work) would be 
 an unpardonable crime, did it issue from a 
 power that knew what it was about, t How 
 can these malcontents find any Religion in 
 obeying such a power ? Can they approach 
 it with contumely at one moment, and with 
 devotion at the next ? If they think so ill of 
 Nature, there can be no reverence, in their ser- 
 
 * Philosophic des Unbewussten, c. xii., p. 598. 
 
 f Ap. Strauss : der alte und der neue Glaube, p. 223. 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. 55 
 
 vice of her laws : on the contrary, they aban- 
 don what they .revere, to bend before what 
 they revile. To this humiliation the more 
 magnanimous spirits will never stoop; they 
 will find some excuse for still clinging to the 
 ideal forms they cannot verify ; will go apart 
 with them with a high-toned love which stops 
 short of faith, but is full of 'faithfulness ; will 
 linger near the springs of poetry and art, and 
 there forget awhile the disenchanted Actual ; 
 and will wonder, perhaps, whether this half- 
 consecrated ground may not suffice, when the 
 temples are gone, to give an asylum to the 
 worshipers. Such loyalty of heart towards 
 the harmonies that ought to prevail, with dis- 
 affection towards the discords that do prevail, 
 may indeed lift the character of a man to an 
 elevation half divine; and in his presence, 
 Nature, were she not blind, might start to see 
 that she had produced a god. But, for all 
 that, she is not going to succumb to him ; she 
 can call up her lower brood to suppress him, 
 or monsters to chain him to her rock. He 
 contends with the lower forces, believing them 
 5 
 
gg RELIGION AS AFFECTED BY 
 
 to be the stronger, and fights his losing battle 
 against hordes of inferiors ever swarming to 
 overwhelm what is too good for the world. 
 Such religion as remains to him is a religion 
 of despair a pathetic defiance of an eternal 
 baser power. And if there be anything tragic 
 in earth or heaven, it is the proud desolation 
 of a mind which has to regard itself as 
 highest, to know itself the seat of some love 
 and justice and devotion to the good, and to 
 look upon the system of the universe as cruel, 
 ugly, stupid, and mean. The most touching 
 episodes of history are perhaps those which 
 disclose the life of genius and virtue under 
 some capricious and ignoble tyranny assert- 
 ing itself in the ostracism of an Aristides, the 
 hemlock-cup of Socrates, the blood-bath of 
 Thrasea ; and no other than this is the life of 
 every man who, walking only by his purest 
 inner lights, finds that they illumine no nature 
 but his own, and are baffled and quenched by 
 the outer darkness. 
 
 It cannot be denied that there does exist 
 this contrariety between the modern materi- 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM. 67 
 
 alistic philosophy and religious faith. It 
 cannot be believed that this contrariety is 
 chargeable on any mutual contradiction 
 among the human faculties themselves. 
 Were we really placed between two in- 
 formants that said " Yes " at the right ear, 
 and " No" at the left, we should simply be 
 without cognitive endowment at all, and all 
 the pulsations of thought would cancel each 
 other and die. Can we end the strife by 
 separating the provinces of the two opposites, 
 and saying that the function of the one is to 
 know, of the other to create ? * Certainly 
 " creative " power is something grand, and 
 Theology should perhaps feel honored to be 
 invested with it. But, alas ! a known 
 materialism and a created God presents a 
 combination which thought repudiates and 
 reverence abhors ; and the suggestion of 
 which must be met with the counter-affirma- 
 tions, that the atomic hypothesis is a thing not 
 known, but created; while God is not created, but 
 
 * Professor Tyndall's Address, p. 64. 
 
68 MODERN MATERIALISM. 
 
 known. The only passible basis for a treaty 
 of alliance between the tendencies now in 
 conflict is not in lodging the one in the 
 Keason, and the other in the Imagination, 
 in order to keep them from quarreling, but 
 in recognizing a duality in the functions of 
 Reason itself, according as it deals with 
 phenomena or their ground, with law or 
 with causality, with material consecution or 
 with moral alternatives, with the definite re- 
 lations of space and time and motion, or with 
 the indefinite intensities of beauty and values 
 of affection which bear us to the infinitely 
 Good. When once this adjustment of func- 
 tions has been considerately made, the dis- 
 turbed equilibrium of minds will be reinstated, 
 the panic and the arrogance of our time will 
 disappear, and the progress of the intellect 
 will no longer shake the soul from her ever- 
 lasting rest. 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY 
 
 BY JAMES MARTINEAU, LL.D. 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: ITS ATTI- 
 TUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 AT the beginning of October, 1874, it was 
 my duty, as Principal of a Theological Col- 
 lege, to open a new session with an address, 
 which was afterwards published under the 
 title "Religion as affected by Modern Ma- 
 terialism." It raises the question whether 
 the free and scientific methods of study 
 insisted on in the college involved results at 
 variance with its theological design. It 
 states accordingly three assumptions hitherto 
 implied in that design : " That the universe 
 which includes us and folds us round is the 
 life-dwelling of an Eternal Mind ; that the 
 world of our abode is the scene of a Moral 
 Government incipient but not yet complete ; 
 
7 2 MODERN MA TERIA LISM : 
 
 and that the upper zones of human affection, 
 above the clouds of self and passion, take us 
 into the sphere of a Divine Communion." 
 With regard to these assumptions the thesis 
 is maintained that they are beyond the con- 
 tradiction, because not within the logical 
 range, of the natural sciences. In support of 
 this thesis the mischiefs are shown, both to 
 science and to theology, of confusing their 
 boundaries, and treating the discovery of 
 law as the negation of God ; and the separa- 
 ting line is drawn, that in their iptcitectual 
 dealings with phenomena, science investigates 
 the " how "and theology the "whence." 
 Tempted on by two of its indispensable con- 
 ceptions, matter and force, science, overstep- 
 ping this boundary, has of late affected to 
 know not only the order but the origin of 
 things ; in the one case starting them from 
 atoms as their source, in the other from 
 mechanical energy. I try to show that 
 neither datum will work out its result except 
 by the aid of logical illusions. You will get 
 out of your atoms by " evolution," exactly 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 73 
 
 so much and no more as you have put into 
 them by hypothesis. And, with regard to 
 force, it is contended that observation and 
 induction do not carry us to it at all, but 
 stop with movements ; that the so-called 
 kinds of force are only classes of phenomena, 
 with the constant belief of causality behind ; 
 that of causality we have no cognition but 
 as Will, from which the idea of " physical 
 force " is simply cut down by artificial 
 abstraction to the needs of phenomenal in- 
 vestigation and grouping ; and that, in con- 
 ceiving of the single power hid in every 
 group, we must revert to the intuitive type 
 because the only authorized, and to the 
 highest, because alone covering the highest 
 phenomena. The attempt, under shelter of 
 the unity of energy behind all its' masks, to 
 make the lowest phase, besides playing its 
 own part, stand for the whole, is described as 
 a logical sleight of hand by which a heedless 
 reasoner may impose upon himself and others. 
 After this defensive argument to show 
 that the religious positions are not displaced 
 
74 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 by natural science, they are traced to their 
 real seat in human nature, and treated as 
 postulates involved in the very existence 
 and life of the reason and conscience. In 
 support of their natural claim to our entire 
 trust, it is contended that, for their ethical 
 power, they are absolutely dependent on 
 their objective truth ; and further, that our 
 nature in respect of its higher affections, 
 compassion, self-forgetfulness, moral obliga- 
 tion, is constructed in harmony with a world 
 Divinely ruled, and in utter conflict with the 
 Pessimist's picture of nature. 
 
 The address thus epitomized has brought 
 upon ine the honor and the danger of a 
 critique by Professor Tyndall,* marked by 
 all his literary skill, and rendered persuasive 
 by happy sarcasm and brilliant description. 
 One fault at least he brings home to me 
 with irresistible conviction. He blames my 
 mode of writing as deficient in precision and 
 
 * Fragments of Science: "Materialism" and its 
 Opponents ; and, previously, Fortnightly Review, 
 November 1, 1875. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 75 
 
 lucidity. And I cannot deny the justice of 
 the censure when I observe that my main 
 line of argument has left no trace upon his 
 memory, that its estimate of scientific doc- 
 trines is misconstrued, that my feeling 
 towards the order of nature is exhibited in 
 reverse, that I am cross-questioned about an 
 hypothesis of which I never dreamt, and am 
 answered by a charming " alternative " ex- 
 position of ascending natural processes which 
 I follow with assent till it changes its voice 
 from physics to metaphysics, and from its 
 premisses of positive phenomena proclaims a 
 negative ontological conclusion. That at 
 every turn I should have put so acute a 
 reader upon a totally false scent rebukes me 
 more severely than any of his direct and 
 pertinent criticisms ; for, smartly as these 
 may hit me, they fall chiefly on incidental 
 and parenthetical remarks which might have 
 been absent, or on mere literary form which 
 might have been different, without affecting 
 the purport of my address. Whether the 
 force of these minor thrusts is really dis- 
 
76 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 abling, or is only a by-play telling mainly on 
 the fancy of the observer, a brief scrutiny 
 will determine. 
 
 (1.) In saying that the college which I 
 represent leaves open to all new lights of 
 knowledge " the special studies which deal 
 with our sources of religious faith," I expand- 
 ed this phrase by the words, " whether in the 
 scrutiny of nature or in the interpretation of 
 sacred books." This innocent parenthesis, 
 which simply summarizes the growing-grounds 
 of all actual theology, produces in my critic 
 an effect out of all proportion to its signifi- 
 cance. Twice he challenges me to show how 
 any " religious faith" can be drawn from 
 "nature," which. I regard, he says, as "base 
 and cruel." It suffices to say that " scrutiny 
 of nature " does not exclude " human nature," 
 wherein the springs of religion are afterwards 
 traced to their intuitive seats ; and that, in 
 what are called my " tirades against nature," 
 as "base and cruel," I am describing, not my 
 own view of the order of the world, but one 
 which I repudiate as utterly sickly and per- 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 77 
 
 verse. Then again, I am asked how, after 
 giving up the Old Testament cosmogony, I 
 can any longer speak of " sacred books," 
 without informing my readers where to find 
 them. I have occasionally met with scientific 
 men whose ideas about the Bible, if going 
 further than the Creation, came to an end at 
 the Flood, and who thought it only loyal to 
 Laplace and Lyell thenceforth to shelve 
 " Moses and the prophets : " but a judgment 
 so borne I should not expect from Professor 
 Tyndall. Can a literature then have noth- 
 ing " sacred," unless it be infallible ! Has 
 the religion of the present no roots in the soil 
 of the past, so that nothing is gained for our 
 spiritual culture by exploring its history and 
 reproducing its poetry, and ascending to the 
 tributary waters of its life ? The real mod- 
 ern discovery, far from saying there is no sa- 
 cred literature, because none oracular, assures 
 us that there are several ; and, notwithstand- 
 ing a deepened because purified attachment 
 to our own " Origines " in the Jewish and 
 Christian Scriptures, persuades us to look 
 
78 MODERN MA TERIALISM: 
 
 with an open reverence into all writings that 
 have embodied and sustained the greater 
 pieties of the world. But to my censor it ap- 
 pears a thing incredible that I should find a 
 sanctity in anything human ; or deem it pos- 
 sible to approach religion in its truth by in- 
 tercepting its errors as it percolates through 
 history, and letting it flow clearer and clear- 
 er, till it brings a purifying baptism to the 
 conscience of our time. 
 
 (2.) In order to give distinctness to that 
 " religion " in relation to which I proposed 
 to treat of " Modern Materialism," I speci- 
 fied " three assumptions " involved in it, of 
 which the first and chief is the existence of 
 the " Living God." I am reproached with 
 making 110 attempt to verify them, but per- 
 mitting them to " remain assumptions" "to 
 the end." Be it so, though the statement is 
 not quite exact : still in every reasoned dis- 
 course assumptions have their proper place, 
 as well as proofs ; and the right selection of 
 propositions to stand in the one position or 
 the other depends on the speaker's thesis and 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 79 
 
 the hearer's needs. My thesis was, that nat- 
 ural science did not displace these assump- 
 tions, because they lay beyond its range ; and 
 the proof is complete if it is shown that the 
 logical limit of inductive knowledge stops 
 short of their realm, and is illegitimately 
 overstepped by every physical maxim which 
 contradicts them. To turn aside from this 
 line of argument in order to "verify" the 
 primary matter of the whole discussion would 
 have been to set out for Exeter and arrive at 
 York. My hearers consisted of the teachers, 
 supporters, and alumni of a Theological Col- 
 lege ; and to treat them as a body of atheists, 
 and offer proofs of the being of a God, would 
 have been as impertinent as for Professor 
 Tyndall to open the sessions of a Geological 
 society with a demonstration of the existence 
 of the earth. 
 
 (3.) A few reluctant words must suffice 
 in answer to the charge of " scorning the 
 emotions." I say "reluctant words;" for to 
 this side of our nature it is given to speak 
 without being much spoken of; to live and 
 
80 MODERN MA TERIALISM: 
 
 be, rather than be seen and known ; and 
 when dragged from its retreat it is so hurt 
 as to change its face and become something 
 else. Here, however, little more is needed 
 than to repeat the words which are pro- 
 nounced to be so rash and even " petulant " 
 " I trust that when 'emotion, proves empty, 
 we shall stamp it out and get rid of it." Do I 
 then " scorn " the " emotion " of any mind 
 stirred by natural vicissitudes or moving 
 realities the cry of Andromache, d /k/>, ^ 
 '3<rnyvo?, at the first sight of her hero's dishon- 
 ored corpse; the covered face and silent 
 sobs of Phaedon, when Socrates had drained 
 the cup ; the tears of Peter at the cock-crow- 
 ing ; or any of the fervent forms of mental 
 lifethe mysticism of Eckhart, the intellectual 
 enthusiasm of Bruno, the patriotic passion 
 of Yane ? Not so ; for none of these are 
 44 empty," but carry a meaning adequate to 
 their intensity. It is for " emotion " with a 
 vacuum within, and floating in vacua without, 
 charged with no thought and directed to no 
 object, that I avow distrust ; and if there be 
 
12^ ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. g]_ 
 
 an " over-shadowing awe " from the mere 
 sense of a blank consciousness and an envel- 
 oping darkness, I can see in it no more than 
 the negative condition of a religion yet to 
 come. In human psychology, feeling, when 
 it transcends sensation, is not without idea, 
 but is a type of idea ; and to suppose " an 
 inward hue and temperature," apart from 
 any " object of thought," is to feign the im- 
 possible. Color must lie upon form; and 
 heat must spring from a focus, and declare 
 itself upon a surface. If by " referring reli- 
 gion to the region of emotion" is meant 
 withdrawing it from the region of truth, and 
 letting it pass into an undulation in no medium 
 and with no direction, I must decline the 
 surrender. 
 
 In thus refusing support from " empty 
 emotion," I am said to "kick away the only 
 philosophic foundation on which it is possible 
 to build religion." Professor Tyndall is cer- 
 tainly not exacting from his builders about 
 the solidity of his "foundation ; " and it can 
 
 be only a very light and airy architecture, 
 6 
 
82 MODERN MATERIALISM : 
 
 not to say an imaginary one, that can spring 
 from such base ; and perhaps it does not 
 matter that it should be unable to face the 
 winds. Nor is the inconsistency involved in 
 this statement less surprising than its levity. 
 Religion, it appears, has a " philosophical 
 foundation." But u philosophy " investi- 
 gates the ultimate ground of cognition and 
 the organic unity of what the several sciences 
 assume. And a "philosophical foundation" 
 is a legitimated first principle for some one 
 of these ; it is a cognitive beginning a da- 
 tum of ulterior qucesita and nothing but a 
 science can have it. Religion then must be 
 an organism of thought. Yet it is precisely 
 in denial of this that my censor invents his 
 new " foundation." Here, ha tells us, we 
 know nothing, we can think nothing; the in- 
 tellectual life is dumtand blank; we do but 
 blindly feel. How can a structure without 
 truth repose on philosophy in its founda- 
 tion ? 
 
 But do I not myself carry religious ques- 
 tions, in the last appeal, to the inward con- 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. go 
 
 sciousness of man, whether intellectual for 
 the interpretation of causality, or moral for 
 the interpretation of duty? Undoubted- 
 ly ; and Professor Tyndall thinks it " highly 
 instructive " that I " should have lived so 
 long, thought so much, and, failed to recog- 
 nize the entirely subjective character of this 
 creed." If I may omit the word " entirely " 
 (which implies a gratuitous exclusion of 
 " objective truth "), I not only recognize it, 
 but everywhere insist upon it. The funda- 
 mental religious conceptions have no deeper 
 validity than belongs to the very frame of 
 our faculties and the postulates of our think- 
 ing. But as this equally holds of the funda- 
 mental scientific conceptions, as matter and 
 force have also to retire to consciousness 
 for their witnesses, nay, as objectivity itself 
 is but an interpretation by the subject of its 
 own experience, is it not " highly instruct- 
 ive " that a critic so compassionate of my 
 " subjective" position should be unaware of 
 the ideality of his own ? Or, has he, perhaps, 
 found some " objective knowledge " which 
 
84 MODERN MA TERIALISM : 
 
 has not to fall back upon a "subjective" 
 guarantee ? 
 
 If, as I suspect, Professor Tyndall uses the 
 word " subjective not in its strict sense, for 
 what belongs to the human subject at large, 
 but to denote what is special to the feeling 
 of this or that individual, the question will 
 then be whether I mistake an exceptional 
 personal experience for a universal form of 
 thought. This question is not settled by 
 saying that many able men find in themselves 
 no such inner experience. The eye for cor- 
 rect psychological reading is not secured by 
 great intellect or noble character, but, like 
 the organ of any other art, must be trained 
 to quickness and delicacy of insight ; and, 
 while false or over-culture exposes it to the 
 danger of seeing what is not there, a failure 
 of culture may prevent its seeing what there 
 is. Right interrogation and careful compar- 
 ison alone can sift out the essential from the 
 accidental. Doubtless many a principle 
 once advanced as self-evident and universal 
 survives only in the grotesque museum of 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 85 
 
 philosophers' fancies. But, on the other 
 hand, whatever laws of thought are now ad- 
 mitted as universal were at first propounded, 
 and often long resisted, as the expressions 
 of individual reflection. 
 
 (4.) On one point more a personal eclair- 
 cissement is needed as a condition of any prof- 
 itable argument. I am said to be " imper- 
 fectly informed regarding the position I as- 
 sail." If I am sensitive to this remark, it is 
 not that I cannot bear to be reminded of my 
 ignorance, the sense of which is a shadow 
 that never quits my life, but that, as no man 
 has a right to attack doctrines which he has 
 not taken the pains to understand, the state- 
 ment carries in it a moral imputation, and 
 calls on me either to clear it away or to con- 
 fess a wrong. What then is the " position " 
 which, under the name of " materialism," I 
 intended to assail, and ought, perhaps, to 
 have fixed by exact definition? Professor 
 Tyndall supposes it to be his position, regard- 
 ing which undoubtedly I am very imperfect- 
 ly informed ; for the indications of it, though 
 
86 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 clear enough for assent or criticism when 
 taken one by one, appear to me so shifting 
 and indeterminate in their combination, as 
 to afford no means of testing it. Except in 
 the two or three 'passages where it is quoted, 
 the Belfast Address was no more in my view 
 than the writings to which it referred and 
 others belonging to the literature of the sub- 
 ject ; and did not supply the form of doc- 
 trine to which my argument was addressed. 
 The only question, therefore, is whether that 
 form of doctrine really exists. If it can be 
 shown that I have misconceived the materi- 
 alists' position, and fastened upon them any 
 thesis which is without eminent representative 
 in their school, I must accept my rebuke. But 
 if no part of my sketch is unsupported by ade- 
 quate authority, it will remain true, though 
 it should conflict with sentences in the " Frag- 
 ments of Science." 
 
 Probably the chief instance of " imperfect 
 information" is this that I suppose the 
 materialist doctrine to be offered as an ex- 
 planation of the order of things ; for my censor 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 7 
 
 contrasts with this " travesty " of the scheme 
 his own statement, that the materialists' 
 "molecular groupings and movements in 
 reality explain nothing," and that " the ut- 
 most he can affirm is the association of two 
 classes of phenomena, of whose real bond of 
 union he is in absolute ignorance. But surely, 
 if this is all that he can affirm, he gives his 
 materialism nothing to do, and is as well off 
 without it as with it : in order simply to see 
 that two series of phenomena run parallel, 
 and correspond term for term, he needs no 
 more than methodized observation, possible 
 and identical on every theory or no theory 
 about the substratum of the phenomena. If 
 the human mind could be content with this 
 spectacle of unexplained concomitance, the 
 very impulse would be wanting from which 
 materialism has sprung. Its fundamental 
 proposition, common, as Lange remarks, to 
 all its forms, ancient and* modern, "that 
 the universe consists of atoms and empty 
 space " * is an hypothesis devised for the 
 
 * Geschichte des Materialismus, 2tes Buch, p. 181. 
 
88 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 express purpose of establishing a "bond of 
 union " between lines of succession previously 
 "detached i.e., of giving the mind a bridge of 
 passage other than that of "association" 
 from the one to the other i.e., of explaining 
 the second by the first. An hypothesis 
 commends itself tS us when (inter alia) it 
 offers a higher conception from which, as 
 an assumption, we can deduce loth sets of 
 previously separate facts ; and so far as it 
 fails to do this, it is self-condemned. There 
 may be other defects in hypotheses ; but if 
 their data do not logically lead to the qucesita* 
 they break their primary promise ; and to see 
 whether they are water-tight throughout, or 
 are leaky at the joints, is an efficient test of 
 their pretensions. A materialist who knows 
 what he is about would not disown the words 
 which I put into his mouth, " Matter is all 
 I want; give me its atoms alone, and I will 
 explain the universe," but would assuredly 
 be offended were he told, and that by a 
 " candid friend," that his doctrine " explains 
 nothing." 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 89 
 
 As it is impossible to come to close quarters 
 with a see-saw doctrine, which now touches 
 solid ground and now escapes it, I naturally 
 addressed myself to thorough-going material- 
 ists, without presuming to commit Professor 
 Tyndall to their consistency. That there 
 have been and are such persons persons 
 who have undertaken, by defining the essence 
 of matter and fixing it in atoms, " to explain 
 the enigmatical by the clear, the intricate by 
 the simple, the unknown by the known " * 
 he cannot deny, after having himself intro- 
 duced us to the thesis of Democritus,f the 
 
 * Lange, Geschichte des Materialismus, Ites Buch, 
 pp. 8, 9. 
 
 f In connection with this name there is an historical 
 error in tire Belfast Address which I should hardly 
 notice were it not likely to be perpetuated by the just 
 reputation of the author, and did it not apparently 
 fall back for support upon Lange. This writer, 
 noticing that Democritus makes no attempt to explain 
 the appearances of adaptation out of the blind power 
 of natural necessity, adds, " Whether this gap lay in 
 his system itself, or only in the tradition of it, we do 
 not know ; but we do know that the source of even 
 this last principle of all materialism rudely shaped, 
 it is true, yet with perfect precision of idea is to be 
 
90 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 reasonings of Lucretius, and the method of 
 GassendL* The " atomists," says Lange, 
 " attributed to matter only. the simplest of the 
 various properties of things those, namely, 
 
 found in the philosophic thought of the Hellenic race. 
 What Darwin, with the support of vast stores of 
 positive knowledge, has effected for the present time, 
 Empedocles offered to the thinkers of antiquity the 
 simple and penetrating .thought that if adaptations 
 preponderate in the world, it is because it lies in their 
 very nature to maintain themselves ; while that which 
 fails of adaptation has perished long ago." (I. pp. 
 22, 23.) Misled by the order of this passage, which 
 gives the missing thought after naming the " gap " 
 which it might have filled, Dr. Tyndall has described 
 Empedocles as intentionally making good a defect in 
 Democritus " Noticing this gap in the doctrine of 
 Democritus, he (Empedocles) struck in with the 
 penetrative thought," &c. This is an inversion of the 
 chronology. Empedocles preceded Democritus by at 
 least a generation, being born about B.C. 490, and 
 dying B.C. 430 ; whilst Democritus, whom we find at 
 Thurii shortly after the foundation of the colony in 
 B.C. 443, died at a very advanced age, B.C. 357. Diog. 
 Laert. viii. 52, 56, ix. 41. Comp. Arist. Met. A. 4, p. 
 985, b. 4. 
 
 * Starting from the fundamental assumption, 
 " Principle ergo Universum ex corpore et inani constat, 
 neque enim tertia natura concipi mente praeterea 
 potest.*' Phil. Epicur. Syntagma, Op. T. iii. 11. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. Ql 
 
 which are indispensable for the presentation 
 of a something in space and time ; and their 
 aim was to evolve from these alone the whole 
 assemblage of phenomena." " They it was," 
 he adds, "who gave the first perfectly clear 
 notion of what we are to understand by 
 matter as the basis of all phenomena. With 
 the positing of this notion materialism stood 
 complete, as the first perfectly clear and 
 consequent theory of all phenomena."* If 
 there is any difference between this statement 
 of the problem and my " travesty " of it, I 
 cannot discern it. 
 
 The indistinctness of which I ventured to 
 complain in Dr. Tyndall's account of his 
 "primordial" datum I do not find removed 
 by my pleasant journey with him to the 
 Caribbean Sea and the Alpine snows, or his 
 graceful pictures of Cingalese ferns, and of 
 nascent infant life. The whole exposition 
 appears to be dominated by the tacit maxim, 
 " No matter without force, 110 force without 
 
 * Geschichte des Materialismus, i. pp. 8, 9. 
 
92 MODFRX M 
 
 matter"' a maxim wliieh may be true in 
 fact, but does not dispense with the necessity 
 of investigating the relation between two 
 fundamental ideas which are not identical or 
 interchangeable. In the natural sciences no 
 harm is done by running them both together, 
 or resorting in varying proportions to the 
 one and to the other. Experimental research 
 and mathematical deduction may go on un- 
 disturbed, by mere use of them as provisional 
 conceptions, and without even suspecting 
 that they carry in them any ulterior problem. 
 But it is not by thus picking them up in 
 mecliis rebus, and taking them as they happen 
 to come, that we can reach any philosophical 
 view of the world, or estimate the theories 
 which strive to interpret its unity and mean- 
 ing. In spite of the cheap wit expended in 
 derision of metaphysics, and the brave pref 
 erence avowed for terra firma, you can 
 escape them only by not knowing where you 
 are. In their embrace you live and move 
 and have your being; and, however fast 
 
 * Buchuer : Kraft mid Stoff, p. 2 (Aufl. 4). 
 
ITX ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 93 
 
 your foot may cling to the earth, none the 
 less do you swim with it through the infinite 
 space which even in its emptiness, is yet the 
 condition of all solidity. 
 
 At the first glance, nothing looks more 
 hopeful to the enthusiast for simplification 
 than the reduction of "matter" to '"force." 
 Two or three easy equations will carry him 
 through the problem. Matter is known to us 
 only by its "properties," and, relatively to us, 
 is tantamount to them. Its properties, again, 
 are only its ways of affecting ourselves, 
 either directly or through operations on other 
 portions of matter. That is, it is represented 
 to us wholly by the effects which it has 
 power to produce, arid resolves itself into an 
 aggregate of forces. Make its essence what 
 you will, extension with Descartes ; or pal- 
 pableness with Fechner, it is still as acting 
 on the eye or the touch or the muscles that 
 this essence reaches our apprehension ; it is 
 the cause of sensations to us, and anything 
 that should cause such sensations would be 
 identical with it. . Is it not plain, therefore. 
 
94 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 that matter is simply power locally lodged? 
 and that when pursued to its smallest con- 
 ceivable elements, it merges into dynamic 
 points, unextended centres of attraction and 
 repulsion ? Such a course of thought lias 
 again and again led to theories of dynamic 
 idealism, like Boscovich's, Ampere's and Cau- 
 chy's, in which the dimensions of the atoms 
 whence the molecular actionproceeds notsim- 
 ply are small relatively to the distances which 
 separate them, but absolutely vanish. Such 
 theories, by isolating the elements needed for 
 calculation, offer advantages for mathematical 
 physics. But there will always be found an 
 irresolvable residue which declines to melt 
 away into force. When you have construed 
 the atom's solidity into repulsion, and reduced 
 its extension to nothing, here remains its posi- 
 tion, and this " whereabouts " of a power is 
 other than the power itself; and secure? to it a 
 _Z)a-seyn or objective existence in space. Nor 
 is the conception of motion adequately pro- 
 vided for in these schemes of abstraction. 
 As geometrical points themselves cannot be 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 95 
 
 moved, the phenomenon becomes a transla- 
 tion of a cluster of attractions and repulsions 
 to new centres. But attraction with nothing 
 to be attracted ; repulsion with nothing to be 
 repelled, motion with nothing to be moved, are 
 presentable in language only, not in thought. 
 The running of one eddy round another or into 
 another is intelligible so long as there is a 
 medium, be it of ether, however rare ; but in 
 vacua, not so. A material nidus is indispen- 
 sable as the seat of every motory change. 
 The reason of this lies in the very structure 
 of the human understanding, which supplies 
 us with the category of Attribute or Prop- 
 erty only in combination with that of Sub- 
 stance or Thing as its abiding base. The 
 relation between the attribute which speaks 
 to you phenomenally, and the substance 
 which is given intellectually, is indissoluble : 
 and analyze the phenomena as you may, so 
 as to turn them from one type of predicate 
 to another, you cannot cut them off from 
 their persistent and unyielding seat, so as to 
 have left on your hands a set of predicates 
 
96 MODERN MA TERIALISM : 
 
 without any subject. Thus the idea of " mat- 
 ter " vindicates itself against every attempt 
 to get rid of it by transformation. 
 
 The simplification has also been attempted 
 by the inverse method of dispensing with 
 " force," and making " matter " do all the ' 
 work. In physics, it is said, we know what 
 we perceive or generalize from perception : 
 " we observe what our senses, armed with the 
 aids furnished by science, enable us to ob- 
 serve nothing more." * Movements, how- 
 ever, are all that we perceive, and if at first 
 this fact escapes us when we hear and see, it 
 is because our organs are not fine enough to 
 read the undulations which deliver to them 
 tones and tints. Submit their sensibility to 
 adequate magnifying power, and all that is 
 observable would resolve itself into local 
 changes molecular or molar. It is the same 
 in the celestial mechanics as in the scene of 
 daily experience. We say that the moon goes 
 through its lunations, -and upheaves the tidal 
 
 * " Materialism and its Opponents/' Fortnightly 
 Review, p. 595. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 97 
 
 wave on the earth spinning beneath it, by the 
 constant force of gravitation. But the real 
 facts noticed are simply the presence now 
 here, now there, of two visible and solid 
 globes, and of some piled-up water upon one 
 of them and a certain rule according to 
 which these changes recur. Were these the 
 only phenomena within our ken, this rule 
 would be all that we mean by the " force " of 
 which we speak. But as there are countless 
 others which we have found to follow the 
 same rule, we cannot speak of it without 
 tacit reference to these, so that the word 
 covers indefinitely more than the facts imme- 
 diately in view. Still, it takes in nothing in 
 any part of its field but movements and their 
 law. And nothing moves but matter. The 
 natural sciences would thus resolve them- 
 selves into a register of co-existent and 
 sequent positions of bodies expressed in for- 
 mulas as comprehensive as the state of analy- 
 sis allowed ; and in this form, as Comfote and Ik 
 Mill justly insist, they would fulfil all the con- 
 ditions of phenomenal knowledge, and secure 
 
98 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 that power of prevision which, is the crown 
 and reward of scientific labor. 
 
 This reduction of everything to matter, 
 motion, and law would be unimpeachable, 
 were our intelligence somewhat differently 
 constructed. Matter as these expositors 
 set out by observing speaks to our perceptive 
 senses alone; and we should still know it, 
 had we no more than these, and the ability 
 to retain their vestiges and set them in order. 
 Let us only see how things like and unlike 
 lie and move in place and time, and the his- 
 tory of matter is all before us. For this 
 purpose we need not go beyond the relations 
 of objectivity, succession, and resemblance 
 among the forms or data of the understand- 
 ing. But over and above these we are subject 
 to another determinate condition of thought 
 the principle of causality in virtue of 
 which there can be no cognition of phenomenon, 
 except as relative to power that issues it, any 
 more than there can be a cognition of a here, 
 without a there, or a before without an after. 
 This intellectual law leaves us unsatisfied 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 99 
 
 with merely reading the order of occurrence 
 among the changes we perceive ; it obliges 
 us to refer movement to a motor, to look be- 
 yond the matter stirred to a force that stirs 
 it, be the force without, as in the expansive 
 energy which propels a loaded shell, OT within 
 as in that which ultimately bursts it. In any 
 case, you have here a clear dynamic addition 
 to that scheme of regimented and marshalled 
 phenomena which results from the lonely con- 
 ception of matter. Will you rid yourself of 
 the dualism by insisting, while you concede 
 the power, that it is only a property of the 
 matter ? 
 
 " See," says Lange, " whether here you are not in 
 danger of a logical circle. A 'thing ' is known to us 
 through its properties, a subject, is determined by its 
 predicates. But the ' thing ' is in fact only the resting- 
 point demanded by our thought. We know nothing 
 but the properties and their concurrence in an unknown 
 object, the assumption of which is a figment of our 
 mind (Gemiith)^ a necessary one it seems, rendered imper- 
 ative by our organization. 1 "* 
 
 Another answer may be given thus; "You 
 may make anything a predicate of matter 
 
 * Geschichte des Materialismus, ii. p. 214. 
 
100 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 which you can observe in it i. 0., all its move- 
 ments ; but not what you cannot observe, there- 
 fore not the power which issues the movements 
 for this is not seen in the phenomenon ; it is 
 supplied by a necessity of thought, riot as an 
 element in it, but as a condition of it." 
 
 Inasmuch then as both " matter " and 
 " force " are intellectual data (no-amend)^ in- 
 volved respectively in the principle of Objec- 
 tivity and in that of Causality, neither can 
 be substituted for the other. For ages each 
 has been trying to end the divided sway ; but 
 the rival, though often driven from the front, 
 has always found at last an impregnable re- 
 treat, whence its rights return to recognition 
 when the usurping rage is past. The present 
 tendency in natural science is so strongly in 
 favor of force as the better known term that, 
 according to Lange, " the untrue element in 
 materialism, viz., the erecting of matter into 
 the principle of all that exists, is completely, 
 and it would seem definitely, set aside." 5 * 
 
 From these two roots have arisen two forms 
 * Geschichte des Mater ialismus, ii. p. 215. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 of naturalism, capable no doubt of a bal- 
 anced co-existence in the same mind, but of- 
 ten unharmonized, and expressing themselves 
 in doctrines doubtfully related to each other. 
 The material theory works out the conception 
 of Atoms. The dynamic relies on that of the 
 Conservation of energy. As a means of in- 
 tellectually organizing ascertained facts, and 
 holding them together in a tissue of conceiva- 
 ble relations, these conceptions possess a high 
 value, and are indispensable to the reaching 
 of any generalizations yet higher. In the 
 one, the multiple proportions of chemistry 
 and the laws of elastic diffusion find an 
 adequate vehicle of expression and computa- 
 tion. In the other, a common measure is set 
 up for variations of heat and mechanical 
 work and chemical decomposition and elec- 
 trical intensity, bringing several special prov- 
 inces into a federal affinity. Dr. Tyndall 
 misconstrues me when he imputes to me any 
 disparagement of these conceptions in their 
 scientific use, for formulating, linking, and an- 
 ticipating phenonema. It is not till they 
 
102 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 break these bounds, and mistaking their own 
 logical character, set up philosophical preten- 
 sions as adequate data for the deductive con- 
 struction of a universe without mind, that I 
 venture to resist their absolutism, and set 
 them back within their constitutional rights. 
 Ifc is no wonder, perhaps, that many an en- 
 thusiast in the study of nature, excited by the 
 race of rapid disco very, should lose count of 
 his direction as he sweeps along, and, mount- 
 ed upon these hobbies, should fancy that 
 he can ride off into the region of ontology, and 
 finding nothing, because never really there, 
 should mistake his own failure for its blank. 
 But the calmer critics of human thought 
 know how to distinguish between the phys- 
 ical and the metaphysical use of these con- 
 ceptions. 
 
 " There is scarcely a more naice expression of the 
 materialism of" the day," says Lange, " than escapes 
 from Biichner, when he calls the atoms of modern 
 times ' discoveries of natural science/ while those of 
 the ancients are said to have been * arbitrary specula- 
 tive representations/ In point of fact, the atomic 
 doctrine to-day is still what it was in the time of Demo- 
 critus. It has still not lost its metaphysical character ; 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 1Q3 
 
 and already in ancient times it served also as a scientific 
 hypothesis for explanation of natural processes. 7 '* 
 
 And respecting the law of Conservation of 
 energy, Lange observes that, taken in its 
 " strictest and most consequent meaning it is 
 anything but proved : it is only an '-Ideal of the 
 Reason^ perhaps however indispensable as a 
 goal for all empirical research." f It is from no 
 want of deference for science proper that I 
 pass again under review the competency of 
 these two doctrines to work out ab initio, a 
 blind cosmogony. 
 
 The material hypothesis, as I read it, and 
 as alone I propose to comment on it, main- 
 tains that, with ultimate inorganic atoms to 
 begin with, the present universe could be 
 constructed. Before it can be tested, its 
 datum (inorganic atoms) must be pressed 
 into more Determinate form by an explana- 
 tion of the word " atoms." " Things which 
 cannot be cut " might be all alike ; or they 
 might be variously different inter se : and be- 
 
 * Geschichte des Materialismus, ii. 181. 
 | Ibid. p. 213. 
 
104 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 fore we start, we must know on which of 
 these two assumptions we are to proceed. 
 The former is the only admissible one, so 
 long as you credit the materialist with any 
 logical exactness. When he asks for no more 
 than matter for his purpose, he must surely 
 be understood to require nothing but the 
 essentials of matter, the characters which en- 
 ter into its definition ; and to pledge himself 
 to deduce out of these all the accessory 
 characters which appear here and not there, 
 and which discriminate the several pro vine as 
 of nature. The idea of atoms is indeed sim- 
 ply the idea of " matter ' ? in minimis, arising 
 only from an arrest, by a supposed physical 
 limit, of a geometrical divisibility possible 
 without end ; and the attributes which suffice 
 to earn the one name give the meaning of 
 the other. When in mathematical optics the 
 investigator undertakes, from the conditions 
 afforded by an undulatory elastic medium, 
 to deduce the phenomena of refraction and 
 polarization, he is not permitted to enlarge 
 the data as he proceeds, and surreptitiously 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 1Q5 
 
 import into his ether chemical or other 
 characters unnamed at first. Just as little 
 can one who proposes to show the way from 
 simple atoms to the finished world be allowed 
 to swell the definition of those atoms at his 
 convenience, and take on fresh attributes 
 which change them from matter a-x^c, and 
 make them now this sort of matter, now that. 
 Whatever he thus adds to this assumption is 
 filched from his qucesita, to the relief of his 
 problem and the vitiation of its proof : and if 
 the whole fulness of the qucesita, is so with- 
 drawn, and turned back to be condensed into 
 datum, all deduction is given up, and the 
 thesis is simply taken for granted. 
 
 In precisely this plight unless there is 
 some reasoning between the lines which I am 
 too dull to see Professor Tyndall leaves his 
 case. He ridicules me for defining the as- 
 sumed atoms as " homogeneous extended sol- 
 ids," on the ground that a phrase thus re- 
 stricted to the " requisites of body" gives only 
 4i a metaphysical body." * Everything which 
 
 * It becomes still more metaphysical in the hands 
 
106 MODERN MA TEEIALISM : 
 
 you define is, in the same sense, a " metaphys- 
 ical" (more properly, a " logical" subject. 
 The object of the definition is to specify the 
 attributes which alone are to be considered in 
 giving the name, and in reasoning from it. 
 The atomist who is not content with my ac- 
 count of his premisses should oblige me with 
 a better, instead of stopping short with the 
 discovery that a definition of a class is not a 
 full description of its individuals. When, 
 however, I look about for my critic's correct- 
 er version of "matter" or its atoms, it is long 
 before I learn more than that " we must rad- 
 ically change our notions " of it an injunc- 
 tion upon which, without further help, it is 
 difficult to act. At length, however, on the 
 concluding page of the critique, the missing 
 
 of an eminent teacher of physical science. " L'im- 
 penetrabilite," says Pouillet, "c'est la matiere. On 
 n'a pas raison de dire que la matiere a deux proprietes 
 essentielles, Vetendue et V impenetralilite ; cenesontpas 
 des proprietes, c'est une definition." And again, 
 " L'impenetrabilite inseparable est ce qu'on appelle 
 tin atome." Elements de Physique cxperimentale, tom.i. 
 p. 4. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 1Q7 
 
 definition turns up. " Matter I define as 
 that mysterious thing by which all this has 
 been accomplished" i.e., the whole series of 
 phenomena, from the evaporation of water 
 to self-conscious life of man. Need I say 
 that such a proposition is no definition, 
 and dispenses with all proof; being simply 
 an oracle tautologically declaring the very 
 position in dispute, that matter carries in it 
 " the promise and potency of all terrestrial 
 life? " The whole of the picturesque group 
 of descriptive illustration which lead up to 
 this innocent dictum are only an expansion 
 of the same petitio principii: they simply say, 
 over and over again, the force immanent in 
 matter is matter they are identical ; or if 
 not so as hitherto understood, we will have 
 a new definition to make them so. This is 
 not a process of reasoning, but an act of will 
 a decretal enveloped in a scientific nimbus. 
 Nothing can be less relevant than to show 
 (and nothing else is attempted) that the forces 
 of heat, of attraction, of life, of conscious- 
 ness, are attached to material media and or- 
 
108 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 ganisms, which they move and weave and 
 animate : this is questioned by no one. In 
 the sense of being immanent in matter, and 
 manifesting themselves by its movements, 
 they are material forces ; but not in the sense 
 of being derivable from the essential proper- 
 ties or matter, qud matter. And this is the 
 only sense on which philosophies divide, and 
 reasoning is possible. 
 
 If the essence of the materialist hypothesis 
 be to start with matter on its lowest terms, 
 and work it thence up into its highest, I did 
 it no wrong in taking " homogeneous extend- 
 ed solids " as its specified datum, and its only 
 one; so that it constituted a system of 
 u monism." Dr. Tyndall asks me " where 
 and by whom" any such datum is "specified." 
 In the CONTEMPORARY REVIEW, June, 1872, 
 Mr. Herbert Spencer contends that " the pro- 
 perties of the different elements" (i. e., chem- 
 T ical elements, hydrogen, carbon, &c.) " re- 
 sult from differences pf arrangement, aris- 
 ing by the compounding and recompounding 
 of ultimate homogeneous units." Here, totidem 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 1Q9 
 
 verbis, is the monism which I am charged 
 with "putting into the scheme." As my 
 critic is evidently anxious to disclaim the 
 monistic datum, I conclude that he owns the 
 necessity of heterogeneous elements to begin 
 with, and feels with me the insecurity of 
 Mr. Spencer's deduction of chemical pheno- 
 mena from mechanical. Though I have the 
 misfortune, in the use of this same argument 
 that you cannot pass from the homogen- 
 eous to the heterogeneous to incur the dis- 
 approval of two great authorities, it some- 
 what relieves the blow to find Mr. Spencer 
 at one with the premiss, and Dr. Tyndall 
 ratifying the conclusion. 
 
 Before I quit this point I ought perhaps 
 to explain, in deference to Mr. Spencer, why 
 I venture to repeat an argument which he 
 has answered with care and skill. In com- 
 mon with all logical atomists, he appeals to 
 the case of isomeric bodies, and especially to 
 the allotropic varieties of carbon and phos- 
 phorus, to prove that, without any change of 
 elements in kind or proportion, and even 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 without any composition at all, substances 
 present themselves with marked differences 
 of physical and chemical propert} r . There 
 are several distinct compounds formed out 
 of the same relative weights of carbon and 
 hydrogen. And the simple carbon itself ap- 
 pears as charcoal, as black-lead, and as dia- 
 mond ; and phosphorus again, in the yellow, 
 semi-transparent, inflammable form, and as 
 an opaque, dark-red substance, combustible 
 only at a much higher temperature. In the 
 absence of any variation in the material, 
 these differences in the product are attribu- 
 ted to a different grouping of the atoms ; and, 
 whatever their form, it is easy, within cer- 
 tain limits, to vary in imagination the ad- 
 justments of their homologous sides, so as to 
 build molecules of several types, and ulti- 
 mately aggregates of contrasted qualities. 
 
 I admit that, on the assumption of homo- 
 geneity, we may provide a series of unlike 
 arrangements to count off against a corre- 
 sponding number of qualitative peculiarities, 
 though it is doubtful whether the conceiva- 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 ble permutations can be pushed up through 
 the throng of cases presented by organic 
 chemistry. But the morphological differ- 
 ences,, if adequately obtained, contribute no 
 explanation of the observed variations of at- 
 tribute. What is there in the arrangement 
 a b c to occasion " activity " in phosphorus, 
 while the arrangement b a produces "inert- 
 ness?" Where the products differ only in 
 geometrical properties, and consequently in 
 optical, the explanation may be admissible, 
 the form and the laying of the bricks de- 
 termining. the outline and the density of the 
 structure. But the deduction cannot be 
 extended from the physical to the chemical 
 properties, so as to displace the rule that to 
 these heterogeneity is essential. To treat the 
 cases of allotropy as destructive of a rule so 
 broadly based, and fly off to a conjectural sub- 
 stitute, is surely a rash logic. In these cases we 
 certainly know of no difference of composition. 
 But neither do we know of any difference o 
 arrangement. The first, if we could suppose 
 it latently there, would be a vera causa of 
 
112 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 the unexplained phenomena; the second, 
 though its presence were ascertained, would 
 still rank only as a possible cause of them. 
 If, therefore, an inquirer chose to say, 
 " From this difference of property I suspect 
 a difference of composition," what answer 
 could we give him from Mr. Spencer's point 
 of view? Could we say, " We finally know 
 carbon to be simple ? " On the contrary, we 
 are warned that " there, are no recognized 
 elementary substances, if the expression 
 means substances known to be elementary. 
 What chemists for convenience call element- 
 ary substances are merely substances which 
 they have thus far failed to decompose." If 
 we are to stand ready to see sixty-two out 
 of the sixty-three " elements " fall analyti- 
 cally to pieces before our eyes, how can we 
 feel so confident of the simplicity of phos- 
 phorus or carbon, as to make it answerable 
 for a hypothetical reconstruction of chemical 
 laws ? 
 
 Even in the last resort, if we succeed in 
 getting all our atoms alike, we do not rid 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 ourselves of an unexplained heterogeneity ; 
 it is simply transferred from their nature as 
 units to their rules of combination. Whether 
 the qualitative difference between hydrogen 
 and each of the other elements is condition- 
 al upon a distinction of kind in the atoms, or 
 on definite varieties in their mode of numer- 
 ical or geometrical union, these conditions 
 are not provided for by the mere existence 
 of homogeneous atoms; and nothing that 
 you can do with these atoms, within the lim- 
 its of their definition, will get the required 
 heterogeneity out of them. Make them up 
 into molecules by what grouping or archi- 
 tecture you will ; still the difference between 
 hydrogen and iron is not that between one 
 and three, or any other number ; or between 
 shaped solids built off in one direction and 
 similar ones built off in another, which may 
 turn out like a right and a left glove. If 
 hydrogen were the sole "primordial," and 
 were transmutable, by select shuffling of its 
 atoms, into every one of its present sixty-two 
 associates, both the tendency to those special 
 8 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 
 
 combinations, and the effects of them, would 
 be as little deducible from the homogeneous 
 datum as, on the received view, are the chem- 
 ical phenomena from mechanical conditions. 
 I still think, therefore, that if you assume 
 atoms at all, you may as well take the whole 
 sixty-three sorts in a lot. And this startling 
 multiplication of the original monistic as- 
 sumption I understand Professor Tyndall to 
 admit as indispensable. 
 
 Next, in the striking words of Du Bois- 
 Reymond, I had pleaded the impossibility 
 of bridging the chasm between chemistry 
 and Consciousness. The sensations of 
 warmth, of sound, of color, are facts sui gen- 
 eris, quite other than the undulations of any 
 medium, the molecular movements of any 
 structure ; known on different evidence, com- 
 pared by different marks, needing a different 
 language, affections of a different subject; 
 and defying prediction and interpretation, on 
 the part of a stranger to them, out of any for- 
 mulas of physical equilibrium and motion, or 
 of chemical affinity and composition. They, 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. H5 
 
 with all the higher mental conditions, belong 
 to a world beyond the bounds of the natural 
 sciences a world into which they can never 
 find their way, its phenomena being intrinsi- 
 cally inappreciable by their instruments of 
 research. Here, then, in this establishment 
 of two spheres of cognition, separated by an 
 impassable gulf, we surely have a breach in 
 the continuity of our knowledge : on the one 
 side, all the phenomena of matter and motion ; 
 on the other, those of living consciousness 
 and thought. Step by step the " Naturfor- 
 scher " may press his advance, through even 
 the contiguous organic provinces; but at 
 this line his movement is arrested ; he stands 
 in presence of that which his methods cannot 
 touch an intellectual necessity stops him, 
 and tha-t for ever, at the boundar}^ which he 
 has reached. With this doctrine I invited my 
 readers to compare the statement of Professor 
 Tyndall, that, relying on " the continuity of 
 nature," he " cannot stop abruptly where 
 microscopes cease to be of use," but " by an 
 intellectual necessity crosses the boundary, 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 and " discerns in matter the promise and 
 potency of all terrestrial life," including, 
 therefore, conscious life. This statement 
 appeared to me inconsistent with Du Bois- 
 Reymond's "limit to natural science," and 
 still appears so. What is my critic's reply ? 
 He cites another statement of his, which is 
 quite consistent with the doctrine of the 
 eminent Berlin Professor and anticipates it ; 
 a procedure by which he answers himself, 
 not me and, instead of removing the con- 
 tradiction, takes it home. If, as the earlier 
 passage says, " the chasm between the two 
 classes of phenomena " (physical processes 
 and facts of consciousness) " remains intel- 
 lectually impassable," the " intellectual 
 necessity of crossing the boundary" is not 
 easy to understand. In order to " discern 
 in matter the promise" of conscious life, you 
 must be able, by scrutiny of its mere physical 
 movements, to forecast, in a world as yet in- 
 sentient, the future phenomena of feeling and 
 thought. Yet this is precisely the transition 
 which is pronounced " unthinkable ; " " we 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 do not possess the intellectual organ, nor 
 apparently any rudiment of the organ, which 
 would enable us to pass, by a process of 
 reasoning, from the one to the other." If be- 
 tween these statements "nothing but har- 
 mony reigns," then indeed I am justly charg- 
 ed with being " inaccurate." 
 
 How then does the case stand with the 
 atomic hypothesis, as a starting-point of 
 scientific deduction ? In Dr. Tyndall's latest 
 exposition we have it admitted (1), that the 
 monistic doctrine of homogeneous units will 
 not work, and that the assumption must be 
 enlarged to include heterogeneous chemical 
 atoms ; (2), that nothing which we can do 
 with this magnified datum will prevent our 
 being finally stopped at the boundary of con- 
 sciousness. As these two positions are precise- 
 ly those which I had taken up against the spec- 
 ulative materialists, it is an infinite relief to 
 discover, when the mask of controversy is 
 removed, the features of a powerful ally. 
 The whole argument sums itself up in Sir 
 William Thomson's remark, " The assurnp- 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 tion of atoms can explain no property of 
 body which has not previously been attributed 
 to the atoms themselves." 
 
 That the totality of sensible and deducible 
 phenomena is produced by a constant amount 
 of forces in a given quantity of matter is a 
 legitimate principle of modern science, and an 
 adequate key for the interpretation of every 
 proved or probable evolution. And in order 
 to see what is comprised in changes that are 
 intricately woven or fall broadly on the eye, 
 it is often needful to take them to pieces and 
 microscopically scrutinize them. We thus 
 discover more exactly what they are; and 
 now at the moment they are made up ; and 
 by doing likewise with the prior and posterior 
 conditions of the same group, we learn to 
 read truly the metamorphoses of the materials 
 before us. But this is all. To suppose that 
 by pulverizing the world into its least par- 
 ticles, and contemplating its components 
 where they are next to nothing, we shall hit 
 upon something ultimate beyond which there 
 is no problem, is the strangest of illusions. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 There is no magic in the superlatively little 
 to draw from the universe its last secret. 
 Size is but relative, magnified or dwindled by 
 a glass, variable with the organ of perception : 
 to one being the speck which only the micro- 
 scope can show us may be a universe ; to 
 another, the solar system but a molecule ; 
 and in passing from the latter to .the former 
 you reach no end of searching or beginning of 
 things. If in imagination you simply recede 
 from the molar to the molecular form of body, 
 you carry with you, by hypothesis, all the 
 properties of the whole into the parts where 
 your regress ceases, and merely substitute a 
 miniature of nature for its life-size, without at 
 all showing whence the features come. If, on 
 the other hand, you drop attributes from the 
 mass in your retreat to the elements, on your 
 return you can never pick them up again : 
 starve your atom down to a hard, geometric- 
 ally perfect minimum, and you have parted 
 with the possibility of feeding it up to the 
 qualitative plenitude of our actual material 
 fjrms; for in mere resistance which is all 
 
120 MODERN MA TERIALISM : 
 
 that is left you have no source of new prop- 
 erties, only the power of excluding other 
 competitors for its place. 
 
 Accordingly, the " atom " of the modern 
 mathematical physics has given up its preten- 
 sion to stand as an absolute beginning, and 
 serves only as a necessary rest for exhausted 
 analysis, before setting forth on the return 
 journey of deduction. u A simple elementary 
 atom," says Professor Balfour Stewart, " is 
 probably in a state of ceaseless activity and 
 change of form, but it is, nevertheless, always 
 the same."* " The molecule " (here identical 
 Avith " atom," as the author is speaking of a 
 simple substance, as hydrogen), u though in- 
 destructible, is not a hard rigid body,' 7 says 
 Professor Clerk Maxwell, " but is capable of 
 internal movements, and when these are ex- 
 cited it emits rays, the wave-length of which 
 is a measure of the time of vibration of the 
 molecule," f " Change of form," and " in- 
 ternal movements " are impossible without 
 
 * The Conservation of Energy, p. 7. 
 f A Discourse on Molecules, p. 12. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. ^21 
 
 shifting parts and altered relations; and 
 where, then, is the final simplicity of the 
 atom? It is no longer a pure unit, but a 
 numerical whole. And as part can separate 
 from part, not only in thought but in the phe- 
 nomenon, how is it an " atom " at all ? What 
 is there, beyond an arbitrary dictum, to pre- 
 vent a part which changes its relation to its 
 fellows from changing its relation to the 
 whole removing to the outside? Such a 
 body, though serving as an element in chem- 
 istry, is mechanically compound, and has a 
 constitution of its own, which raises as many 
 questions as it answers, and wholly unfits it 
 for offering to the human mind a point of ul- 
 timate rest. It has accordingly been strictly 
 kept to a penultimate position in the concep- 
 tion of philosophical physicists like Gassendi, 
 Herschel, and Clerk Maxwell, and of masters 
 in the logic of science, like Lotze and Stanley 
 Jevons. 
 
 It is a serious question whether, in our 
 time, atomism can any longer fulfil the condi- 
 tion which all the ancient materialism was 
 
122 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 invented to satisfy. The Ionian cosmogonies 
 sprang from a genuine intellectual impulse ; 
 the desire to conquer the bewildering multi- 
 plicity of nature, and find some pervading 
 identity which should make a woven texture 
 of the whole ; and whether it was moisture, 
 or air, the ether-fire, which was taken as the 
 universal substratum, it was regarded as a 
 single datum, on the simplicity of which the 
 mind might disburden itself of an oppressive 
 infinitude. The intention of these schemes 
 was to unify all bodies in their material, and 
 in some cases all minds as well, so as not 
 even to allow two originals at the fountain- 
 head, but to evolve the All out of the One. 
 This aim was but an overstraining of the 
 permanent effort of all scientific interpreta- 
 tion of the world. It strives to make things 
 conceivable by simplification, to put what 
 was separate into relation, what was confused 
 into order; to read back the many and the 
 different into the one and the same, and so 
 lessen, as far as possible, the list of unattached 
 and underived jprmc'/p'a. The charm of science 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 123 
 
 to the imagination and its gain to life may 
 be almost measured fyy the number of scat- 
 tered facts, which its analysis can bring into 
 a common formula. The very sand-grains 
 and rain-drops seem to lose in multitude, 
 when the morphological agencies are under- 
 stood which crystallize and mould them. 
 The greatness of Newton's law lies in the 
 countless host of movements which it swept 
 from all visible space into one sentence and 
 one thought. No sooner does Darwin supply 
 a verified conception which construes the 
 endless differences of organic kinds into a 
 continuous process, than the very relief which 
 he gives to the mind serves, with others if 
 not with himself, as an equivalent to so much 
 evidence. The acoustic reduction of sounds, 
 in their immense variety, to the length, the 
 breadth, and the form of a wtive, is welcomed 
 as a happy discovery from a similar love of 
 relational unity. To simplify is the essence 
 of all scientific explanation. If it does not 
 gain this end, it fails to explain. Its specula- 
 tive ideal is still, as of old, to reach some 
 
124 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 monistic principle whence all may flow; and 
 in this interest it is, especially to get rid of 
 dualism by dissolving any partnership with 
 mind, that materialism continues to recom- 
 mend its claims. Does it really bring in our 
 day the simplification at which it aims? 
 
 Under the eye of modern science Matter, 
 pursued into its last haunts, no longer presents 
 itself as one undivided stuff ^ which can be 
 treated as a continuous substratum absorbent 
 of all number and distinction ; but as an 
 infinitude of discrete atoms, each of which 
 might be though all the rest were gone. 
 The conception of them, when pushed to its 
 hypothetical extreme, brings them no nearer 
 to unity than homogeneity, an attribute 
 which itself implies that they are separate 
 and comparable members of a genus. And 
 , what is the result of comparing them ? They 
 "are conformed," we are assured, "to a 
 constant type with a precision which is not 
 to be found in the sensible properties of the 
 bodies which they constitute. In the first 
 place, the mass of each individual," " and all 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 125 
 
 its other properties, are absolutely unalterable. 
 In the second place, the properties of all " 
 "of the same kind are absolutely identical."* 
 Here, therefore, we have an infinite assem- 
 blage of phenomena of Resemblance. But 
 further, these atoms, besides the internal 
 vibration of each, are agitated by movements 
 carrying them in all directions, now along 
 free paths and now into collisions.! Here, 
 therefore, we have phenomena of Difference 
 in endless variety. And so it comes to this, 
 that our unitary datum breaks up into a 
 genus of innumerable contents, and its in- 
 dividuals are affected both with ideally per- 
 fect correspondences and with numerous 
 contrasts of movements. What intellect can 
 pause and compose itself to rest in this vast 
 and restless crowd of assumptions? Who 
 can restrain the ulterior question, whence 
 then these myriad types of the same letter, 
 
 * Discourse on Molecules, by J. Clerk Maxwell, 
 M.A., F.R.S., p. 11. 
 
 f Theory of Heat, by J. Clerk Maxwell, M.A., 
 LL.D., F.R.SS. London and Edin. Pp. 310, 311. 
 
126 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 imprinted on the earth, the sun, the stars, as 
 if the very mould used here had been lent to 
 Sirius and passed on through the constella- 
 tions? Everywhere else the likenesses of 
 individual things, especially within the same 
 " species " of daisy to daisy, of bee to bee, 
 have awakened wonder and stimulated 
 thought to plant them in some uniting relation 
 to a cause beyond themselves ; and not till 
 the common parentage refers them to the same 
 matrix of nature does the questioning about 
 them subside. They quietly settle as deriva- 
 tive where they could never be accepted as 
 original. Some chemists think, as Mr. Herbert 
 Spencer reminds us,* that in the hydrogen 
 atom we have the ultimate simple unit. By 
 means of the spectroscope, samples of it, and 
 of its internal vibrations, may be brought 
 from Sirius and Aldebaran distances so great 
 that light itself needs twenty-two years to 
 cross the lesser of them into exact compari- 
 son with our terrestrial specimens ; and were 
 
 * Contemporary Review, June, 1872, p. 142. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. J27 
 
 their places changed, there would be nothing 
 to betray the secret. So long as no a priori 
 necessity is shown for their quantity of 
 matter being just what it is, and always the 
 same at incommunicable distances, or for 
 their elasticity and time of pulsation having 
 the same measure through myriads of in- 
 stances, they remain unlinked and separate 
 starting-points ; and if they explain a finite 
 number of resemblances and differences, it is 
 only by assuming an infinite. 
 
 But even the approach to simplicity which 
 homogeneity would afford fails us. Not- 
 withstanding the possibility, in the case of 
 certain carbonates, of substituting isomor- 
 phous constituents for one another, it 
 cannot be pretended that any evidence as 
 yet breaks down the list of chemical ele- 
 ments : and, should some of them give way 
 before further attempts at analysis, they are 
 more likely if we may judge of the future 
 from the past to grow to a hundred than 
 to dwindle to one: to say nothing of the 
 probability, already suggested by the star- 
 
128 . MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 spectroscope, that in other regions of space 
 there exist elements unknown to us. At 
 present, in place of a single type of atom, we 
 have to set out with more than sixty, all in- 
 dependent, and each repeating the phenom- 
 enon of exact resemblance among its mem- 
 bers wherever found. Perhaps you see noth- 
 ing inconceivable in the self-existence of 
 ever so many perfect facsimiles ready every- 
 where for the making of the worlds, and 
 may treat it as a thing to bo expected that, 
 being there at all, they should be all alike. 
 So much the more certain, then, must be 
 your surprise on finding them not all alike, 
 but ranging themselves under sixty heads 
 of difference. If the similars are entitled to 
 the position of />/ a: the dissimilars are not : 
 and if neither can prefer the claim, the atomic 
 doctrine, when pushed into an ultimate theo- 
 ry of origination, extravagantly violates the 
 first condition of a philosophical hypothesis. 
 Nor is its series of assumed data even yet 
 complete. For these sixty kinds of atoms 
 are not at liberty to be neutral to one an- 
 
ITS A TTITUDE TO WARDS THEOLOG Y. J 29 
 
 other, or to run an indeterminate round of 
 experiments in association, within the limits 
 of possible permutation. Each is already 
 provided with its select list of admissible 
 companions ; and the terms of its partner- 
 ship with every one of. these are strictly pre- 
 scribed ; so that not one can modify, by the 
 most trivial fraction, the capital it has to bring. 
 Vainly, for instance, does the hydrogen atom, 
 with its low figure and light weight, make 
 overtures to the more considerable oxygen 
 element: the only reply will be, Either .none 
 of you or two of you. And so on through- 
 out the list. Among the vast group of facts 
 represented by this sample I am not aware 
 of more than one set the union of the same 
 combining elements in multiple doses for the 
 production of a scale of compounds of 
 which the atomist hypothesis can be said to 
 render an account. Everything else the 
 existence of "affinity" at all, its limitation 
 to particular cases so far short of the whole, 
 the original cast of its definite ratios, its pref- 
 erence for unlike elements, stands unex- 
 9 
 
130 MODERN MA TERIAL1SM: 
 
 pained by it, or must be carried into it as 
 a new burden of primordial assumptions. 
 This chasm between the facts of chemistry 
 and its speculations is clearly seen by its 
 best teachers. Kekule treats the symbolic 
 notation of chemical formulas as a means of 
 simply expressing the fact of numerical pro- 
 portion in the combining weights. 
 
 " If to the symbols in these formulas " (he adds) 
 " a different meaning is assigned, if they are regarded, 
 as denoting the atoms of the elements with their 
 weights, as is now most common, the question arises, 
 ' AY hat is the relative size or weight of the atoms?' 
 Since the atoms can be neither measured nor weighed, 
 it is plain that to the hypothetical assumption of de- 
 terminate atomic weights we have nothing to guide 
 us but speculative reflection." * 
 
 The more closely we follow the atomist doc- 
 trine to its starting-point, and spread before 
 us the necessary outfit for its journey of de- 
 duction, the larger do its demands appear : 
 and when, included in them, we find an un- 
 limited supply of absolutely like objects, all 
 repeating the same internal movements ; an 
 
 * Lehrbuch der organischen Chemie, ap. Lange, 
 Geschichte des Materialismus', ii. p. 191. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 arbitrary number of unlike types, in each 
 of which this demand is reproduced ; and 
 a definite selection of rules for restrict- 
 ing the play of combination among these 
 elements, we can no longer, in the face of 
 this stock of self-existent originals, allow the 
 pretence of simplicity to be anything but 
 an illusion. 
 
 Large as the atomist's assumptions are, they 
 do not go one jot beyond the requirements 
 of his case. He has to deduce an orderly 
 and determinate universe, such as we find 
 around us, and to exclude chaotic system 
 where no equilibrium is established. In or- 
 der to do this he must pick out the spe- 
 cial conditions for producing this particular 
 kosmos and no other, and must provide 
 against the turning up of any out of a host 
 of equally possible worlds. In other words 
 he must, in spite of his contempt for final 
 causes, himself proceed upon a preconceived 
 world-plan, and guide his own intellect as, 
 step by step, he fits it to the universe, by 
 the very process which he declares to be 
 
132 MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 absent from the universe itself. If all 
 atoms were round and smooth he thinks no 
 such stable order of things as we observe 
 could ever arise ; so he rejects these forms 
 in favor of others. By a series of such re- 
 jections he gathers around him at last the 
 select assortment of conditions which will 
 work out right. The selection is made, how- 
 ever, not on grounds of a priori necessity, but 
 with an eye to the required result. Intrin- 
 sically the possibilities are all equal, (for in- 
 stance) of round and smooth atoms, and of 
 other forms ; and a problem therefore yet re- 
 mains behind, short of which human reason 
 will never be content to rest, viz.: How 
 come they to be so limited as to fence off 
 competing possibilities, and secure the actual 
 result ? Is it an eternal limitation, having 
 its " ratio sufficiens " in the uncaused essence 
 of things ; or superinduced by some power 
 which can import conditions into the uncon- 
 ditioned, and mark put a determinate chan- 
 nel for the " stream of tendency " through 
 the open wilds over which else it spreads 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 and hesitates ? It was doubtless in view of 
 this problem, and in the absence of any 
 theoretic means of excluding other atoms 
 than those which we have, that Herschel 
 declared them to have the characteristics 
 of " manufactured articles." This verdict 
 amuses Dr. Tyndall ; nothing more. He 
 twice * dismisses it with a supercilious 
 laugh ; for which perhaps, as for the atoms it 
 concerns, there may be some suppressed "ratio 
 sufficiens." But the problem thus pleasantly 
 touched is not one of those which solventur 
 risu; and, till some better-grounded answer 
 can be given to it, that on which the large and 
 balanced thought of Herschel and the master- 
 ly penetration of Clerk Maxwell have alike 
 settled with content, may claim at least a 
 provisional respect. 
 
 Having confined myself in this paper to 
 the Atomic Materialism, I reserve for an- 
 other the consideration of the Dynamic Mate- 
 rialism, and the bearings of both on the 
 
 * Belfast Address, p. 26. For '.nightly Review, No- 
 vember, 1875, p. 598. 
 
MODERy MA TERIA LISM : 
 
 primary religious beliefs. To those doubt- 
 less the majority in our time who have 
 made up their minds that behind the jurisdic- 
 tion of the natural sciences no rational ques- 
 tions can arise, and from their court no ap- 
 peal can be made, who will never listen to 
 metaphysics except in disproof of their own 
 possibility, I cannot hope to say any useful 
 word; for the very matters on which I 
 speak lie either on the borders of their sphere, 
 or in quite another. I am profoundly con- 
 scious how strong is the set of the Zeit-geist 
 against me, and should utterly fail before it, 
 did it not sweep by me as a mere pulsation 
 of the Ewiglceits-geist that never sweeps by. 
 Nor is it always, even now, that physics shut 
 up the mind of their most ardent and suc- 
 cessful votary within their own province, rich 
 and vast as that province is. "It has been 
 asserted," says Professor Clerk Maxwell, 
 " that metaphysical speculation is a thing of 
 the past, and that physical science has extir- 
 pated it. The discussion of the categories 
 of existence, however, does not appear to be 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 in clanger of coming to an end in our time ; 
 and the exercise of speculation continues as 
 fascinating to every fresh mind as it was in 
 the days of Thales." * 
 
 JAMES MARTINEATJ. 
 
 * Experimental Physics, Introductory Lecture, ad 
 Jinem. 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM : ITS ATTI- 
 TUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 PART II. 
 
 IT is curious to observe how little able is 
 even exact science to preserve its habit- 
 ual precision, when pressed backward past 
 its processes to their point of commencement, 
 and brought to bay in the statement of their 
 " first truth." The proposition which sup- 
 plies the initiative is sure to contain some 
 term of indistinct margin or contents: and 
 usually it will be the term least suspected 
 because most familiar. The student of na- 
 ture takes as his principle that all phenomena 
 arise from a fixed total of force in a given 
 quantity of matter ; and assumes that, in his 
 explanations, he must never resort to any 
 supposed addition or subtraction of either 
 
138 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 element. In adopting this rule lie must 
 know, you would say, what he means by 
 "matter," and what by "force," and that he 
 means two things by the two words. Ask 
 him whence this principle has its authority. 
 If he pronounces it a metaphysical axiom, 
 you may let him go till he can tell you how 
 there can be not simply an d priori notion of 
 matter and notion of force, but also an d 
 priori measure of each, which can guarantee 
 you against increase or diminution of either. 
 As standards of quantity are found only in 
 experience, he will come back with a new an- 
 swer, fetched from the text-books of science : 
 that his principle is inductively gathered ; in 
 one half of its scope viz., that neither mat- 
 ter nor force is ever destroyed proved by 
 positive evidence of persistence ; in the 
 other half viz., that neither is ever created 
 proved by negative evidence, of non-ap- 
 pearance. If now you beg him to exhibit 
 his proof that matter is indestructible, he 
 will in some shape reproduce the old experi- 
 ment of weighing the ashes and the smoke, 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : 139 
 
 and re-finding in them the fuel's mass : his 
 appeal will be to the balance, his witnesses 
 the equal weights. Weight, however, is 
 force: and thus, to establish the perseverance 
 of matter, he resorts to equality of force. 
 Again, when invited to make good the cor- 
 responding position, of the conservation of 
 force, he will show you how, e.g., the chemi- 
 cal union of carbon and oxygen in the fur- 
 nace is followed by the undulations of heat, 
 succeeded in their turn by the molecular 
 separation of water into steam, the expansion 
 of which lifts a piston, and institutes mecha- 
 nical performances : i.e., he traces a series of 
 movements, each replacing its predecessor, 
 and leaving no link in the chain detached. 
 Movements, however, are material phenomena : 
 so that to establish the persistence si force he 
 steps over to the counsel of matter. He 
 makes assertions about each term, as if it 
 were an independent subject: but if his as- 
 sertion respecting either is challenged, he in- 
 vokes aid from the other : and he holds, log- 
 ically, the precarious position of a man rid- 
 
140 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 ing two horses with a foot on each, hiding his 
 danger by a cloth over both, and saved from 
 a fall by dexterous shifting and exchange. 
 
 Nothing can be more unsatisfactory than a 
 scientific proposition, the terms of which 
 stand in this variable relation to each other. 
 The first of them has been sufficiently fixed 
 in discussing the Atomic conception. It re- 
 mains to give distinctness to the second. In 
 order to do so, it will be simplest to follow 
 into their last retreats of meaning the paral- 
 lel doctrines of the "Indestructibility of 
 Matter" and of the "Conservation of En- 
 ergy." If our perceptions were so heightened 
 * and refined that nothing escaped them by its 
 minuteness or its velocity, what should we 
 see, answering to those doctrines, during a 
 course of perpetual observation ? 
 
 1. We should see the ultimate atoms ; and 
 if we singled out any one of them, and kept it 
 ever in view, we should find it in spite of 
 "change of form," " always the same." "A 
 simple elementary atom," says Professor Bal- 
 four Stewart, "is a truly immortal being, .and 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 enjoys the privilege of remaining unaltered 
 and .essentially unaffected by the powerful 
 blows that can be dealt against it." *. Here, 
 then, we have alighted upon the " Matter " 
 which is " indestructible." 
 
 2. These atoms might have been station- 
 ary ; and we should still have seen them in 
 their " immortality." But they are never 
 at rest. They fly along innumerable paths : 
 they collide and modify their speed and their 
 direction : they unite : they separate. How- 
 ever long we look, there is no pause in this 
 eternal dance : if one figure cease, another 
 claims its place. As in the atoms, so in the 
 molecules which are their first clusters, there 
 is a " state of continual agitation," " vibra- 
 tion, rotation, or any other kind of relative 
 motion ; " f " arid uninterrupted warfare go- 
 ing on a constant clashing together of these 
 minute bodies." J In this unceasing move- 
 ment among the " immortal" atoms we alight 
 
 * The Conservation of Energy, p. 7. 
 t Theory of Heat, by J. Clark Maxwell, p. 306. 
 t Conservation of Energy, by Dr. Balfour Stewart, 
 p. 7. 
 
142 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 upon the phenomenon, or series of pheno- 
 mena, described by the phrase " Conservation 
 of Energy." So far as the law thus desig- 
 nated claims to be an observed law, gathered 
 by induction from experience, this is its last 
 and whole meaning. We have only to scru- 
 tinize its evidence with a little care, in order 
 to see that it simply traces a few transmuta- 
 tions of the perpetual motions attributed to 
 atoms and molecules. 
 
 If we chose to shape it thus : " For every 
 cancelled movement or element of movement 
 there arises another, which is equivalent ; " 
 everything would be expressed to which the 
 evidence applies. Had we to look out for a 
 proof of such a proposition, we should first 
 consider what it is that makes two movements 
 equivalent : and in the simplest case, of 
 homogeneous elements, we should find it in 
 equal numbers with the same velocity ; so 
 that the direct demonstration would require 
 that we should count the atoms and estimate 
 their speed. As we cannot count them one 
 by one, we weigh them in their masses; an 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 143 
 
 operation which has the advantage of reckon- 
 ing at one stroke, along with their relative 
 numbers, also the most important of their 
 velocities. The atoms being all equal, the 
 greater mass expresses the larger number. 
 And weight is only the arrested velocity with 
 which in free space, they move to one an- 
 other : it is prevented motion, in the shape 
 of pressure. In order to measure it, i.e. to 
 express it in terms of space and time, we 
 might withdraw the prevention, and address 
 ourselves to the path that would then be 
 described. But it is more convenient to test it 
 by taking it in reverse, and trying what 
 other prevented motion will avail ,to stop it 
 and hold it ready to turn back. Thus even 
 statical estimates of equilibrium are but a 
 translation of motion into more compendious 
 terms. 
 
 If this is a true account of common 
 weights, it still more evidently applies to 
 the process which gives us the foot-pound, or 
 " unit of work : " for this is found by the 
 actual lifting ofong_ggund through one ver- 
 
144 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 tical foot, i.e. by moving it through a space in 
 a time. And as in this, which is the stand- 
 ard, so in all the changes which it is employ- 
 ed to measure, the fundamental quantity is 
 simply movement, performed, prevented, or 
 reversed. 
 
 This fact is easily traced through the proofs 
 usually offered of the Conservation of Energy. 
 The essence of them all is the same: for 
 each extinguished " unit of work" they find 
 a substituted equivalent movement, molar or 
 molecular. Dr. Joule, for instance, estab- 
 lishes for us a common measure of heat and 
 mechanical work. How does he accomplish 
 this ? By applying the descent of a weight to 
 create in moving water friction enough to 
 raise the temperature 1 Fahrenheit; and 
 finding that this result corresponds with a 
 fall of the water through 772 feet. Here, on 
 one side of the equation, we have the move- 
 ment of the mass through its vertical path ;. 
 on the other, the molecular movement that 
 constitutes heat ; measured by a third move- 
 ment of an expanded liquid in the thermom- 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 145 
 
 eter. Where the first is arrested, the sec- 
 ond takes its place : and to double one would 
 be to double both. 
 
 If heat is made to do chemical work, its 
 undulations are similarly expended in setting 
 up a fresh order of movements ; of atomic 
 combination, when burning coal unites with 
 oxygen ; of separation, when the fire of a 
 lime-kiln drives its carbonic acid from the 
 chalk. The friction which parts the electric- 
 ities, the spark which attends their reunion ; 
 the crystallization of liquids by loss of tem- 
 perature, and their vaporization by its in- 
 crease ; the waste of animal tissue by action, 
 and its replacement by food ; all reduce 
 themselves to the same ultimate rule, the 
 exchange of one set of movements or resist- 
 ances (which are stopped movements) for 
 another, which, wherever calculable, is found 
 to be an equivalent. 
 
 To a perfect observer, then, able to follow 
 the changes of external bodies, in themselves, 
 and among one another, to their last haunts, 
 
 nothing would present itself but consecutions 
 10 
 
146 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 and assortments of phenomena, and arrests 
 of phenomena. And if he had noticed, and 
 could name, what on the subsidence of each 
 group would emerge to replace it, he would 
 be master of the law of Conservation. The 
 sciences would distinguish themselves for 
 him by taking cognizance each of its special 
 set of phenomena ; as acoustics tell the story 
 of one kind of undulations, optics of another, 
 thermotics of a third. And the law in ques- 
 tion would only carry his glance, as it chased 
 the flight of change, across the lines of this 
 divided work, and show him on the desertion 
 of this field, a new stir in that. 
 
 Though the whole objective world has thus 
 been laid bare before him, and he has read 
 and registered its order through and through, 
 he has not yet, it will be observed, alighted 
 on a single dynamic idea : all that he has 
 seen (and nothing has been hid from him) 
 may be stated without resort to any term 
 that goes beyond the relations of co-existence 
 and sequence. The whole vocabulary of 
 causality may absent itself from the language 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : 
 
 of such an observer. Were it even given to 
 him, it would carry no new meaning, but only 
 tell over again in fresh words the old story of 
 regular time succession. He might, as Comte 
 and Mill and Bain truly contend, command 
 the whole body of science, including its latest 
 law, without ever asking for the origin 
 (other than the phenomenal predecessor) of 
 any change. 
 
 By no such ideal interpreter of nature, 
 however, have our actual books of science 
 been written. Never more than now have 
 they abounded in the language which, we 
 have seen, would be superfluous for him. 
 The formula of the new law contains it : for it 
 is the conservation of " Energy," or the correl- 
 ation of " Forces," which it announces. Are 
 these then some new-comers that we have got 
 to know ? or, have we encountered them be- 
 fore under other names, and only found out 
 some new thing about them ? " Energy," says 
 Professor Balfour Stewart, is the "power of 
 overcoming obstacles or of doing work." * 
 * Conservation of Energy, p. 13. 
 
148 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 I see a flash of lightning pierce a roof and 
 kill a man and plunge into the earth : the 
 obstacles overcome, the work done, are visi- 
 ble enough; but where is the "power?" 
 what does it add to the phenomenon, over 
 and above these elements ? Besides the flash 
 of lightning first, and then the changes 
 in the roof and the man, is there some- 
 thing else to be searched for, and entered, 
 as an object of knowledge, under a sepa- 
 rate name? If there be such a thing, by 
 what sense am I to apprehend it ? through 
 w r hat aids of art, can I penetrate to it ? It is 
 obvious that it has no perceptible presence 
 at all : and that its name stands in the defi- 
 nition and in every inductive equation, as an 
 x, an unknown quantity, which itself has to 
 be found before it can add any new relation 
 to the known. "Force," says Professor 
 Clerk Maxwell, "is whatever changes or 
 tends to change the motion of a body, by 
 altering either its direction or its magni- 
 tude." * The shot fired from a gun at a 
 * Theory of Heat, p. 83. 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 
 
 moderate elevation is scarcely out of the 
 muzzle before it quits the straight line for 
 the parabola, and slackens its initial velocity, 
 and soon alights upon the ground. We say 
 the deflection is due to " gravitation." But, 
 if so, this is an invisible part of the fact : no 
 more is observable than the first direction 
 and subsequent curvature of the ball's path, 
 the changing speed, and the final fall, in 
 presence of the earth. The u force " which 
 we superadd in thought is not given in the 
 phenomenon as perceived : and if we know the 
 movements accomplished, prevented, modi- 
 fied, we know everything that is there. 
 
 One interpretation, indeed, may be given 
 to these mysterious words which makes them 
 not superfluous, in a methodized account of 
 the order of nature. " Gravitation " perhaps 
 may mean only the rule of happening which 
 along with the deflection of the shot, describes 
 also several other cases of movement ; and if it 
 enables us to advert to these, while in 
 presence of the immediate fact, it performs a 
 truly scientific function. It is plain, however, 
 
150 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 that this is not what our Dynamic writers 
 mean. A rule does not " change the motion 
 of a body," does not " overcome obstacles 
 and do work ; " nor would any one dream of 
 attaching such predicates to mere similarities 
 of occurrence. 
 
 Our instructors then suppose themselves 
 acquainted with more than phenomena, more 
 than the laws of them ; and believe that 
 inductive analysis has carried them behind 
 these to " the hiding-place of power" They 
 tell us, with much ease and unanimity, what 
 they have found there : so that the story is 
 familiar to every advanced schoolboy, and re- 
 produced in hundreds of examination papers 
 every year. They have found, as sources .of 
 the phenomena, a considerable number of 
 " Energies " of nature, which they distinguish 
 from one another in various ways, as " strong " 
 or " weak " as stretching far or keeping near, 
 as demanding the unlike or content with any- 
 thing, as single or splitting into opposites, as 
 inorganic or organic. In every text-book of 
 science a complete list of these is presented : 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 and the student, as he learns how to discrim- 
 inate them, cannot doubt that he is dealing, 
 in each instance, with a separate unit of ob- 
 jective knowledge, which is the inner fountain 
 of a definite set of outward changes. He 
 thus is brought to conceive of nature as having 
 many springs. Its multitudinousness is com- 
 manded by a senate of powers. 
 
 Further, it is impossible, on looking at the 
 faces of these assembled forces, to assign the 
 same rank to all, or miss the traits of grad- 
 uated dignity which make them rather a 
 hierarchy than a committee. The delicate 
 precision with which chemical affinity picks 
 its selecting way among the atoms is an 
 advance upon the indiscriminate grasp of 
 gravitation at them all. The architecture of 
 a crystal cannot vie with that of a tree. The 
 sentiency of the mollusk is at an immeasur- 
 able distance from the thought which produces 
 the Mechanique Celeste. Hence, in the company 
 of powers that conduct the business of nature 
 a certain order of lower and higher establishes 
 itself, which, without settling every point of 
 
152 IT $ ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 precedency, at least marks a few steps of 
 ascent, from the mechanical at the bottom to 
 the mental at the top. All equally real, all 
 equally old, they are differenced by the 
 quality of the work they have to do. 
 
 On the imagination thus prepared a new 
 discovery is now flung. Keenly watch the 
 face of any one of these forces ; its features 
 will change into those of another. You can- 
 not fix its identity in permanence ; it migrates 
 from species to species. Now it is mechanical 
 energy; in a minute it will be heat; if a 
 tourmaline is near it will turn up as elec- 
 tricity ; and so on, for no part of the cycle is 
 closed against it. You look, in short, 
 upon a row of masks, behind which the 
 "unknown power," slipping away from one 
 to another with magic agility, seems to mul- 
 tiply itself, but is found on closer scrutiny, 
 never to quit its unity. The senate of nature 
 does but administer a monarchy. 
 
 And so, the plurality of forces disappears 
 from the ultimate background, and comes to 
 the front as a mere semblance. This brings up 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : 153 
 
 a new problem. What stands in the dynamic 
 place thus vacated? How is it related to 
 the disguises it assumes ? Do they in any 
 way represent it ? or do they only hide it ? 
 To this question there are three answers 
 given. (1.) The One Power is indifferently 
 related to all its masks, but is like none of 
 them ; they are opaque and let no lineament 
 shine through. (2.) The " phases " are not 
 on an equal footing, but consecutive in their 
 genesis, the lowest being the oldest. With 
 that the One Power was at first identical, and 
 that is what truly represents its essence. 
 (3.) The "phases " are Consecutive in their 
 genesis, the highest being the oldest. With 
 that the One Power is forever identical ; all 
 else is its action but not its image. The 
 second of these is the materialist's answer. 
 His preference for it is mainly determined by 
 two reasons. In the first place, since the 
 several forces, A, B, C, D, &c., are all inter- 
 changeable, it suffices to allow A (the me- 
 chanical), and all the rest are provided for. 
 In the second place, the traces of actual 
 
154 IT ^ ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 evolution follow this order, conducting us 
 back past the dawn of life, and even the 
 combinations of chemistry, to a period of 
 purely mechanical energy. In estimating 
 these reasons I will step for a moment on to 
 their own ground, and postpone all objection to 
 the theory of " energies " on which they rest. 
 It is true that, among a number of inter- 
 changeables, if the first be given, the others 
 are potentially there. But it is no less true 
 that if the last be given, or any intermediate, 
 there is provision for the rest. The possibility 
 of reciprocal transmutation all round deter- 
 mines no preference of any member as having 
 priority over the rest, and cannot be pleaded 
 as an excuse for selecting the rudest mask of 
 nature as the most faithful likeness of its 
 inner essence. The law of Conservation is 
 impartial, and tells in both directions, exhib- 
 iting the elements of the world, here living 
 up into the self-conscious, there dying down 
 into the inorganic, and suggesting, rather 
 than any initial point, circling currents of 
 crossing change. 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 155 
 
 But further, there is not the slightest 
 ground, in the present transmutations, for 
 treating the lowest phase of force as adequate 
 to the production of the highest. Though 
 mechanical energy, now that it stands in 
 presence of the several chemical elements, 
 may pass into chemical form, it does not 
 follow that it could do so in their absence ; for 
 this would be tol predicate of homogeneous 
 atoms what we know only of heterogeneous. 
 And the same consideration applies to the 
 phases higher in the scale. Given, the exist- 
 ing materials and conditions of life and mind, 
 and the circulation and equivalence of forces 
 may take place as alleged ; but that the 
 order could be inverted, and the equivalence 
 avail to provide the conditions, cannot be 
 inferred. Take on the other hand, any higher 
 " phase " as first, and it carries all below it. 
 Chemical force pre-supposes mechanical (as 
 cohesion), and acts at its expense ; and vital 
 pre-supposes and modifies the inorganic 
 chemical. In this order of derivation, there- 
 fore, the original datum would yield what is 
 
156 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 required by divesting itself of certain con* 
 ditions admitted to be there, while in the 
 opposite order it would have to take on fresh 
 conditions assumed to be absent at its start. 
 If, in choosing from the phases of force the 
 fittest representative form, we are to be 
 guided by the possibility of deduction, the 
 supreme term must surely be taken as 
 First. 
 
 The second plea of the " materialist," viz. 
 that the vista of evolution recedes into the 
 simply mechanical, and is intersected at dimly 
 seen stages by entering lights, first of chemi- 
 cal affinity, then of life, and finally of con- 
 sciousness, it is the less necessary to qualify 
 as a statement of fact, because it is destitute 
 of logical cogency. Granted that at succes- 
 sive eras these new forces appeared upon the 
 scene, this supplies the "when," but not* the 
 " whence " of each. Something more is need- 
 ful, if you would show that it is the product 
 of its predecessor. Instead of advancing from 
 behind, it may have entered from the side. 
 You cannot prove a pedigree by offering 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 157 
 
 a date. Since these several forces are but 
 secondary phases of a Unitary Power, what 
 obliges us to derive them one from another, 
 instead of letting them all stand in equal and 
 direct relation to their common essence ? On 
 this point the first answer to the inquiry after 
 the One Power has a conclusive advantage 
 over the second. 
 
 Such, it seems to me, would be the logical 
 position of the materialist's case, on the as- 
 sumption that separate kinds and transmuta- 
 tion of energy are known to us, ; over and 
 above the resulting phenomena, as discoveries 
 of natural science. That assumption, hitherto 
 conceded, I must now withdraw. No " en- 
 ergy " has ever come under human notice, 
 and disclosed its marks, so as to discriminate 
 itself from others, similarly apprehended. This 
 is not simply true thus far as a matter of fact : 
 it is true permanently as a matter of neces- 
 sity. We might watch for ever the relations 
 of bodies and their parts inter se^ and though 
 we had eyes that ranged from the microscopic 
 minimum to the analysis of the milky way. 
 
158 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 we should fetch no force into the field of view: 
 and the whole story of what was laid open to 
 us would be a record of interminable series 
 and eddies of change. What are called the 
 " transmutations of energy " are nothing but 
 transitions from one chapter of that record to 
 another. A certain catena of phenomena runs 
 to an end ; the first link of a new one is ready 
 to take its place : a body's fall is stopped ; its 
 temperature rises : the thermometer in the ket- 
 tle ascends to 212 Fahrenheit and stays 
 there ; the water turns to steam : this is ob- 
 served, and no more than this. And the list 
 of metamorphosed energies deceives us, if we 
 take it for anything beyond an enumeration 
 of these junctures between class and class of 
 consecutive movements. Did we bring to 
 the contemplation of nature no faculties but 
 those which constitute our scientific outfit, I 
 see no reason to believe that it would come 
 before us under any other aspect ; or that we 
 should ever be tempted to paint its picture or 
 tell its history in dynamic terms. 
 
 Are such terms then illusory? Are they 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 159 
 
 susceptible of no meaning ? or of only a 
 false meaning ? Far from it. The thought 
 that is in them we cannot indeed fetch 
 out of nature : but we are obliged to carry 
 it into nature. To witness phenomena and 
 let them lie and dispose themselves in the 
 mere order of time, space, and resemblance, is 
 to us impossible. By the very make of our 
 understanding we refer them to a Power 
 which issues them : and no sooner is percep- 
 tion startled by their appearance than the in- 
 tellect completes the act by wonder at their 
 source. This " power " however, being a 
 postulate intuitively applied to phenomena, 
 and not an observed function found in them, 
 does not vary as they vary, but mentally re- 
 peats itself as the needed prefix to every 
 order of them : and though it may thus mi- 
 grate, now into this group, now into that, it 
 is the dwelling alone which changes, and that 
 which, is immanent is ever the same. You 
 can vary nothing in the total fact, except the 
 collocations of material conditions ; out of 
 which, as each new adjustment emerges, the 
 
160 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 persistent power elicits a different result. In- 
 stead of first detecting many forces in nature 
 and afterwards running them up into identity, 
 the mind imports one into many colloca- 
 tions ; never allowing it to take different 
 names, except for a moment, in order to study 
 its action now here, now there. If this be 
 true, if causality be not seen, but thought, if 
 the thought it carries belongs to a rule of the 
 understanding itself, that every phenomenon 
 is the expression of power, two consequences 
 follow : the plurality of forces disappears : 
 and, to find the true interpretation of the One 
 which, remains, we must look not without but 
 within ; not on the phenomena presented, but 
 on the rational relations into which they are 
 received. Power is that which we mean by 
 it ; nor have we any other way of determin 
 ing its nature than by resort to our self-knowl- 
 edge. The problem passes from the jurisdic- 
 tion of natural science to that of intellectual 
 philosophy. Thither let us follow it. 
 
 I have already hinted that if we were mere 
 passive, though thinking, observers of the 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 
 
 world around us, we should witness phenom- 
 ena without asking for a power : the princi- 
 ple of causality would remain latent in the 
 intellect : the occasion would be wanting < 
 which permits it to awake. That occasion is 
 furnished by the active side of our nature, 
 by our own spontaneous movement from its 
 inner centre out upon objects near its circum- 
 ference. Being conscious as originators of 
 the exercise of power, we admit as recipi- 
 ents its exercise upon us : nor is causality 
 conceivable except upon these meeting lines 
 of action and reaction ; any more than, in 
 the case of position, a here is conceivable 
 without a there. Both pairs, the dynamic 
 and the geometrical, are functions of the 
 same fundamental antithesis, of subject and 
 object, which is involved in every cogni- 
 tive act. Till we disengage ourselves from 
 nature, we do not think though we may feel : 
 and when we disengage ourselves from na- 
 ture, we are self-conscious subjects and ob- 
 jects of casual operation. The idea of power 
 
 coming in this dual form, as out from us and 
 11 
 
162 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEO )GY. 
 
 on to us, its two sides are reciprocally re- 
 lated : and that which the inner side is to the 
 object^ the same is the outer side to the sub- 
 ject. With the inner side, however, we are 
 intimately familiar : it is the one thing which 
 we immediately know ; unless, indeed, it sits 
 so near our centre as rather to regulate our 
 knowing than stand off enough to become it- 
 self the known : but in any case we have to 
 mark it by a name, as the inmost nucleus of 
 dynamic thought : and we call it living 
 Will. This is our causality ; and it is what 
 we mean by causality : in the absence of this, 
 no other source for the idea, in the presence 
 of this, no other meaning for it, can be found. 
 It is true that of the reciprocal propositions, 
 "We push against the wind," "The wind 
 pushes against us," we know the force 
 named in the first with a closeness not be- 
 longing to our knowledge of the other. We 
 cannot identify ourselves with the wind as 
 our own nisus is identified with us. We go 
 out on an energy: we return home on a 
 thought. But that thought is only the re- 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : 163 
 
 flex of the energy ; it has, and can have, no 
 other type. Our whole idea of Power is 
 identical with that of Will, or reduced from 
 it. That which, in virtue of the principle of 
 causality, we recognize as immanent in na- 
 ture, is homogeneous with the agency of 
 which we are conscious in ourselves. Dynam- 
 ic conceptions have either this meaning, or 
 no meaning : cancel this, and you cut them 
 at the root, and they wither into words ; and 
 your knowledge, cast out into dry places, has 
 to take refuge again with co-existences and 
 successions. Whatever authority attaches to 
 the law of causality at all attaches to it, pre- 
 sumably at least, in its intuitive form, 
 phenomena are the expression of living ener- 
 gy ; and cannot be reduced within narrower 
 limits, unless by express disproof of coinci- 
 dence between its natural range and its real 
 range. Till that disproof is furnished, the 
 One Power stands as the Universal Will. 
 
 I am aware what courtesy it woiild require 
 in a modern savant, whether of the Nescient 
 or of the Omniscient school, to behave civilly 
 
164 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 to such folly as this must seem to him : nor 
 can I pretend to find his laughter a pleasant 
 sound : for I honor his pursuits, and sorrow- 
 fully dispense with his sympathy. It makes 
 amends, however, that even among the most 
 rigorous scientific thinkers, some curious 
 testimony or other from time to time turns 
 up to the correctness of the interpretation 
 just given of the idea of power. Even Gas- 
 sendi, the modern Epicurus, the eager dis- 
 ciple of Copernicus and Galileo, cannot re- 
 frain from resorting to living and conscious 
 action in explanation of physical. To render 
 the earth's attraction intelligible he has two 
 favorite devices. He lays it down that 
 every whole nature has a sort of clinging af- 
 fection for all its parts, and resists their being 
 torn or kept away from it ; so that the earth 
 sends out invisible arms or tentacula to fetch 
 back objects detached from it : and hence the 
 fall of the rain, the hail, the stone from the 
 sling.* And he institutes a double compari- 
 
 * De motu impresso a Mo tore translate, xii. Opera, 
 Lugd. 165, torn. iii. p. 491. 
 
MODERN MA TEEIALISM: 165 
 
 son ; first assimilating the earth to a mag- 
 net ; and then the magnet's force to the 
 fascinating or repulsive influence of objects 
 upon the senses, the sweetness of the rose, 
 which draws us to it, the noisomeness of a 
 drain, that drives us away.* In this appeal 
 to " sympathy " and " antipathy " we see 
 again, as already in the <f>dfa of Democritus, 
 how inevitably the imagination, even when 
 most intent on keeping within physical limits, 
 is betrayed into mental analogies. Not a few 
 indeed, of the most clearsighted men of 
 science have been well aware of the real 
 source of our dynamic conceptions ; in some 
 cases accepting it as authoritative, in others 
 being ashamed of it as a mere occasion of 
 superstition. Redtenbacher, in his " Princi- 
 ples of Mechanical Physics," refers our knowl- 
 edge of " the existence of forces to the 
 various effects which they produce, and es- 
 pecially to the feeling and consciousness of our 
 
 # Syntagma Philos. Phys. sect. iii. mem. I. lib. iii. 
 p. ii. Op. 132 ; and De motu impresso xiii. torn. iii. 
 p. 492. 
 
106 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 own forces." * And in conversation with 
 Feehner, Professor E. H. Weber laid stress 
 on the fact that in the will to move the body 
 occurs the only case of immediate conscious- 
 ness of power operative on matter, and ac- 
 cordingly identified the essence of power 
 with that of will, and from this principle 
 worked out his religious ideas.f That it is 
 not, however, in the mere interest of a reli- 
 gious theory that this doctrine finds its 
 strength, it is evident from its hold on Schop- 
 enhauer, who, in virtue of it, would call the 
 inward principle of nature nothing but will, 
 though striking out from that name what- 
 ever makes its meaning divine. Herschel's 
 judgment, often criticized but never shaken, 
 was deliberately pronounced : 
 
 "That it is our own immediate consciousness of 
 effort when we exert force to put matter in motion, or 
 
 * Das Dynamidensystem, Grundziige einer mechan- 
 ischen Physik, p. 12, ap. Lange; Gesch. d. Material- 
 ismus, ii. p. 205. 
 
 f Fechner, Ueber die physikalische und pliilosoph 
 ische Atomenlehre; 2te Aufl., p. 132 (note). 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : 167 
 
 to oppose and neutralize force, which gives us this in- 
 ternal conviction of power and causation so far as it re- 
 fers to the material world, and compels us to believe 
 that whenever we see material objects put in motion 
 from a state of rest, or deflected from their rectilinear 
 paths and changed in their velocities if already in mo- 
 tion, it is in consequence of such an effort somehow 
 exerted, though not accompanied with our conscious- 
 ness."* 
 
 With the tone of this memorable statement 
 it is interesting to compare the feeling of one 
 who, owning the same psychological fact, 
 treats it as an infirmity, instead of accepting 
 it as a guide. 
 
 " Power, regarded as the cause of motion, is noth 
 ing," says Du Bois-Reymond, " but a more recondite 
 product of the irresistible tendency to personify which is 
 impressed upon us ; a rhetorical artifice, as it were, 
 of our brain, snatching at a figurative turn of thought, 
 because destitute of any conception clear enough for 
 literal expression. In the notions of Power and Mat- 
 ter we find recurring the same dualism which presents 
 itself in the ideas of God and the world, of soul and 
 body ; the same want which once impelled men to 
 people bush and fountain, rock, air and sea with 
 
 * Treatise on Astronomy, 1833. Ch. vii. 370. 
 
168 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 creatures of their imagination. What do we gain by 
 saying it is reciprocal Attraction whereby two parti- 
 cles of matter approach each other ? Xot the shadow 
 of any insight into the nature of tlie process. But, 
 strangely enough, our inherent quest of causes is in a 
 manner laid to rest by the involuntary image tracing 
 itself before our inner eye, of a hand which gently 
 draws the inert matter to it, or of invisible tentacles, 
 with which the particles clasp together, try to seize 
 each other, and at last twine together into a knot." * 
 
 This outburst of exasperation against all 
 dynamic conception, for to that length it 
 really goes, is justified if the human mind 
 has nothing to do but to become an accom- 
 plished Naturforscher. It is quite true that 
 " insight into the nature of the process " is 
 gained only by a closer reading of its steps 
 in their series and in their analogies, and is 
 in no way aided by passing behind the move- 
 ments they comprise. What then? Shall 
 we be angry at our propensity to look behind 
 them, and tear it from our nature under vows 
 * Untersuchungen iiber thierische Electricitat. I. 
 Bd. Berlin, 1848. Vorrede, S. xi. ap. Lange's Gesch. 
 d. Mat. ii. 204. 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : 169 
 
 to reach a stainless intellect ? We shall but 
 emasculate the mind we wish to purify : for 
 what is the nerve of its vigor but the very 
 Wonder which is for ever seeking an unat- 
 tainable rest ? If we incessantly press into 
 nature, it is in hope of finding what is be- 
 yond nature : and all that we have learned 
 of the finite world indirectly comes from our 
 affinity with the embracing Infinite. It 
 would be strange if the Causal appetency 
 which no disappointment wears out, should 
 be at once our greatest strength and our 
 most fatal illusion. It is admitted to be " ir- 
 resistible: " it is admitted to carry the belief 
 of personality : but these features, which in- 
 duced Herschel to yield to it and trust in it, 
 are reasons with Du Bois-Reymond for re- 
 sisting and despising it. I need hardly say 
 that, when he calls its language u figurative " 
 and its conception a "personification," he 
 oracularly assumes the very point at issue. 
 "To "personify " is to invest with personality 
 that which has it not : and to tell any one 
 with Herschel's belief that he does this is 
 
170 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 only to contradict him. So again, if you 
 know that there are two things of different 
 type, living power and dead power, and then 
 transfer to the second the marks of the 
 first, your language is "figurative:" but if 
 to you the types are identical, the second co- 
 inciding with the first, you speak with literal 
 exactitude ; and to charge you with rhetoric 
 is only to beg the question in dispute. Prob- 
 ably the writer was the less conscious of 
 any dogmatism here, from his thoughts al- 
 ready running upon the stock example of be- 
 lief in the Pagan gods of " rock and air and 
 sea," fairly enough adducible as a departed 
 superstition. But the dying out of Poly- 
 theism is misconceived if it be regarded as an 
 expulsion of every Conscious Presence from 
 venerated haunts, and the substitution of a 
 dead for a living world. It was a fusion, not 
 an extinction, of Will ; as the little cantons 
 of nature, once under independent guardians, 
 melted into ever wider provinces, and clans 
 of men clustered into confederated nations, 
 the detected harmony of the kosmos and the 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 
 
 felt unity of humanity carried with them the 
 enthronement of a single Divine Mind in 
 place of the vanished local gods. It is not 
 that other' and other powers have been dis- 
 covered, but that fewer and fewer have been 
 needed, till the plurality is lost in One 
 Supreme. And as, with the widening scope 
 of the natural order, the many wills lapsed 
 into one, so, among monotheists, did the 
 many motives of that One, once so freely at- 
 tributed, more and more merge themselves in 
 the recognition of an all-comprehending 
 scheme, whose thoughts were not acts but 
 laws, and whose purpose flowed into the in- 
 lets of individual life from an ocean of uni- 
 versal relations. By this surrender of provi- 
 dence in exig.uis we drop the quest of design 
 in events taken one by one, and learn to 
 speak of the power which produces them, 
 and to divide it into lots, not according to 
 their supposed aims, but according to their 
 visible kinds : and thus it is that by suspend- 
 ing the idea of an end in view the full-bodied 
 notion of Will is attenuated to that of Force. 
 
172 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 How imperfectly, even then, the life is driven 
 out of it, may be seen from Dn Bois-Rey- 
 mond's expostulation with it. And the sus- 
 pended idea only flits away to settle upon a 
 higher point. Instead of having discovered 
 that purpose is not there, we have simply 
 learned that purpose takes in more ; and the 
 little pulses of separate volition are lost in 
 the mighty movements of Eternal Thought. 
 
 In the remarkable passage which I have 
 quoted, and in the argument of which it 
 forms a part, Du Bois-Reymond puts Matter 
 and Force on the same footing, and dischar- 
 ges the former as well as the latter from the 
 realm of reality, by reducing it also to an 
 empty abstraction. He is led to this position 
 by that just logical appreciation which gives 
 to his writings, as to those of HelmhoLtz, a 
 high philosophical rank, in addition to their 
 value as models of scientific exposition and 
 research. The equipoise, true enough, is 
 perfect, in respect, to validity, between the 
 ideas of Matter and of Power : and the only 
 question is, whether both are to be dismissed 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 173 
 
 as illusions, or both retained as intuitive data 
 of thought, the conditions of all construed 
 experience. To reject them both is practi- 
 cally impossible, though logically necessary 
 if you part with either. To retain them both 
 is simply to accept the fundamental relation 
 of object and subject under its two constitu- 
 tive functions, instead of treating our only 
 modes of knowing as snares of ignorance. 
 The existence of a Universal Will and the 
 existence of Matter stand upon exactly the 
 same basis, of certainty if you trust, of un- 
 certainty if you distrust, the principia of 
 your own reason. For my part, I cannot 
 hesitate. Shall I be deterred by the reproach 
 of " anthropomorphism ? " If I am to see a 
 ruling Power in the world, fy ^ folly to pre- - 
 fer a man-like to ,a brute-like power, a see- 
 ing to a blind? The similitude to man 
 means no more and goes no further than the 
 supremacy of intellectual insight and moral 
 ends over every inferior alternative : and how 
 it can be contemptible and childish to derive 
 everything from the highest known order of 
 
IT S ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 power rather than the lowest, and to con- 
 verse with Nature as embodied Thought, in- 
 stead of taking it as a dynamic engine, it is 
 difficult to understand. Is it absurd to sup- 
 pose mind transcending the human ? or, if 
 we do so, to make our Reason the analogical 
 base for intellect of wider sweep? How is 
 it possible to look along any line of light 
 traced by past research, and, estimating the 
 contents which it reveals, and leaves still un- 
 revealed, to remember that along all radii to 
 which we may turn a similar infinitude pre- 
 sents itself to airf faculty that seeks it, and 
 yet to conceive that this mass of truth to be 
 known has only our weak intelligence to 
 know it ? And if two natures know the 
 same thing, how can they be other than like ? 
 Nay, Du Bois-Reymond himself takes up the 
 magnificent fancy of Laplace, of a "mind 
 cognizant of all forces operating in nature at 
 a given moment, and all mutual relations 
 among the beings, composing it. Such a 
 mind, if in other respects capacious enough 
 to subject these data to analysis, would com- 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 175 
 
 prise in the same formula the movements of 
 the greatest masses in the universe, and of 
 the lightest atom. Nothing would be un- 
 certain to him ; and to his glance future and 
 past would alike be present. The human 
 understanding presents, in the perfection to 
 which it has brought astronomy, a feeble 
 image of such a mind/' * Here is reproduced 
 the very thought which, in his ignorance of 
 differential equations, Plato expressed by 
 saying that God was the supreme Geometer ; 
 simply taking to the summit-level the analogy 
 which Laplace leaves floating at some in- 
 definite height above the human. Is the 
 conception, then, vitiated because it is " an- 
 thropomorphic ? " Let Du Bois-Reymond 
 answer, " Wir gleichen diesem Geist, denn 
 wir begreifen ihn." f If to have the idea of 
 a diviner nature is to resemble him, and if re- 
 semblance must be reciprocal, what can be 
 more futile than the reproach that men at- 
 tribute to God what is highest in humanity. 
 
 *Ueber die Grenzen des Naturerkennens, p. 6. 
 flbid. p. 10. 
 
176 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 It may be doubted, indeed, whether the 
 analogy might not be pressed further, with- 
 out overstraining its truth. If the collective 
 energies of the universe are identified with 
 Divine Will, and the system is thus animate 
 with an eternal consciousness as its moulding 
 life, the conception we frame of its history 
 will conform itself to our experience of in- 
 tellectual volition. Its course is ever from 
 the indeterminate to the determinate ; and 
 as the passage is made by rational preference 
 among possibilities, thought has its intensity 
 at the outset, and action in the sequel. It 
 is in origination, in disposing of new condi- 
 tions, in setting up order by differentiation, 
 that the mind exercises its highest function. 
 When the product has been obtained, and a 
 definite method of procedure established, the 
 strain upon us is relaxed, habit relieves the 
 constant demand for creation, and at length 
 the, rules of a practised art almost execute 
 themselves. As the intensely voluntary thus 
 works itself off into the automatic, thought, 
 Liberated from this reclaimed and settled 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 
 
 province, breaks into new regions, and as- 
 cends to ever higher problems : its supreme 
 life being beyond the conquered and legis- 
 lated realm, while a lower consciousness, if 
 any at all, suffices for the maintenance of its 
 ordered mechanism. Yet all the while it is 
 one and the same mind that, under different 
 modes of activity, thinks the fresh thoughts 
 and carries on the old usages. Does any- 
 thing forbid us to conceive similarly of the 
 kosmical development ; that it started from 
 the freedom of indefinite possibilities and the 
 ubiquity of universal consciousness ; that, as 
 intellectual exclusions narrowed the field, 
 and traced the definite lines of admitted 
 movement, the tension of purpose, less need- 
 ed on these, left them as the habits of the 
 universe, and operated rather for higher and 
 ever higher ends not yet provided for ; that 
 the more mechanical, therefore, a natural law 
 may be, the further is it from its source ; and 
 that the inorganic and unconscious portion 
 of the world, instead of being the potentiality 
 
 of the organic and conscious, . is rather its 
 12 
 
178 IT S ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 residual precipitate, formed as the Indwelling 
 Mind of all concentrates an intenser aim on 
 the upper margin of the ordered whole, and 
 especially on the inner life of natures that 
 can resemble him? I am aware that this 
 speculation inverts the order of the received 
 kosmogonies. But, in advancing it, I only 
 follow in the track of a veteran physiologic fc 
 and philosopher, whose command of all the 
 materials for judgment is beyond question, 
 the author of "Psychophysik." Fechner in- 
 sists that protoplasm and zoophyte structure, 
 instead of being the inchoate matter of organ- 
 ization, is the cast-off residuum of all pre- 
 vious differentiation, stopping short of the 
 separation of animal from plant and of sex 
 from sex, and no more capable of further de- 
 velopment than is inorganic matter, without 
 powers beyond its own, of producing organi- 
 zation.* And, far from admitting that the 
 primordial periods had few organisms, which 
 time increased in number, he contends that 
 
 * Einige Ideen zur Schopfungs-und Entwickelungs- 
 geschichte der Organismen, p. 73. 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 1ft) 
 
 4 
 
 the earth was formerly more rich in organ- 
 isms than now, and that the inorganic realm 
 has grown at the expense of the organic." * 
 
 The resolution of all power into Will is 
 met by the thorough-going objection, that 
 Mind is not energy at all, and can never stir 
 a particle of matter. " Were it possible," 
 says Lange, " for a single cerebral atom to be 
 moved by c thought' so much as the millionth 
 of a millimetre out of the path due to it by 
 the laws mechanics, the whole ' formula of 
 the universe ' (i.e., as imagined by Laplace) 
 would become inapplicable and senseless." f 
 "Suppose," he adds, "two worlds, both oc- 
 cupied by men and their doings, with 
 the same course of history, with the same 
 modes of expression by gesture, the same 
 sounds of voice, for him who could hear 
 them i.e., not simply have their vibrations 
 conveyed through the auditory nerve to the 
 brain, but be self-conscious of them. The two 
 worlds are therefore to be absolutely alike, 
 
 * Einige Ideeii zur Schopfangs-uud Ent vvickelungs- 
 geschichte der Organismen, p. 73. 
 
 f Gescldchte des Materialismus, ii. p. 155. 
 
180 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 with only this difference : that in the one 
 the whole mechanism runs down like that of 
 an automaton, without anything being felt 
 or thought, whilst the other is just our world ; 
 then would the formula for these two worlds 
 be completely the same. To the eye of exact 
 research they would be indistinguishable." * 
 So much the worse, are we not tempted to 
 say, for " exact research ? " If, with all its 
 keenness and precision it misses half the 
 universe, and identifies diametrical opposites, 
 it will be perhaps, a calamity rather for it 
 than for us, that its " formula " should prove 
 less applicable than had been supposed. The 
 extension to man, in an exaggerated form of 
 Descartes' doctrine of animal automatism 
 marks, perhaps, the lowest point which the 
 falling barometer of philosophy has reached. 
 By him it was propounded for the express 
 purpose of finishing off the mechanical modes 
 of action, even when strained to their maxi- 
 mum, short of the human characteristics; 
 and of opening in these a second and sharply 
 
 *Ibid. ii. p. 156. 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISX: 
 
 contrasted world, containing another hemi- 
 sphere of phenomena, with their own lines of 
 causality and relations of affinity. Though 
 by his absolute separation of matter and 
 mind he cut the problem of the world in two, 
 he at least embraced the whole of it, and at- 
 tempted to solve it by a double formula. 
 But his modern interpreters do not see why 
 one half of his theory should not be stretch- 
 ed to do the work of the whole : they have 
 only to ignore his unmechanical part of the 
 world and leave it out in the cold, and in 
 place of his contrast they will get an identity. 
 For his maxims, Movement is the cause of 
 movement, Thought of thought, but neither 
 of the other, they substitute the rule that 
 Movement is the cause of both, but Thought 
 of neither: so that there is no longer any 
 counterpart to the mechanism of nature, or 
 any work done beyond it; and whatever 
 puffs of thought and screeches of feeling 
 there may be, it is only that the engine is 
 blowing off its steam : nothing comes of it, 
 and it may be treated as waste. This theory 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 is founded on the analysis of reflex action in 
 the nervous apparatus, in which the sensory 
 conductor having delivered its stimulus in the 
 ganglion, the motory takes up the sequence 
 and contracts the muscles requisite for ac- 
 tion in response. If the brain be kept from 
 interfering the circuit is completed in uncon- 
 sciousness; and its series, though determin- 
 ing the subject to all sorts of clever and con- 
 gruous movements, is composed of molecular 
 changes unattended by feeling or design. 
 When the scene is transferred to the brain 
 or connected with it, the story, we are as- 
 sured, is still the same, only with the added 
 phenomenon of consciousness. In the one 
 case, the subject acts : in the other, he acts 
 and knows it. But this new fact is inoper- 
 ative, and leads to nothing: were it absent, 
 he would figure away as a molecular automa- 
 ton all the same, and not a scene or a word 
 would be altered in the five-act comedy of 
 life. Comparing in this view the reflex and 
 the cerebral activities, we might say that the 
 former resembles a clock with one beat viz., 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 1 S3 
 
 movement only ; the latter, a clock with two 
 beats viz., movement plus consciousness. 
 
 By the extent of this increment, the second 
 does more work than the first. What, then, 
 becomes of the difference ? Where are we 
 to look for it at the next stage? We are ex- 
 pressly told it has no next stage, and things 
 will go on exactly as if it had not been there. 
 Then a portion of work has perished, and 
 the Conservation of energy is contradicted. 
 
 The only escape from this conclusion 
 would be by denying that consciousness pro- 
 duced is " work done." This, however, is 
 to admit that it is not an effect of molecular 
 forces ; to exempt it altogether from the 
 range of physical law ; and to throw it into 
 an independent world of its own, beyond the 
 jurisdiction of the natural philosopher. Such 
 a position would be an unconditional relapse 
 into the two-armed embrace of Descartes, 
 from which the whole doctrine is a struggle 
 to escape. 
 
 It is said that if thought can move a single 
 molecule, the law of causality is at an end. 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY, 
 
 Why is it not equally at an end if, conversely, 
 molecular movement can wake a single 
 f thought ? Either way, causality alike steps 
 out of the material series, and crosses over to 
 the other, now last, now first. And it is only 
 on the assumption that it cannot do this, be- 
 ing a monopoly of Physics, that the objec- 
 tion has any sense. 
 
 This doctrine, that the most important 
 elements of life, all that constitute exper- 
 ience, and embody themselves in language, 
 art, religion, are so much surplusage, that 
 the mental phenomena are collectively a cul- 
 de-sac, leading nowhither, comes with a 
 singular irony from men who by force of in- 
 tellect, knowledge and character are in many 
 ways changing the conceptions, of their time, 
 and whose most signal triumph it will be to 
 convince us that, if they never felt or 
 thought at all, or stirred emotion and idea in 
 us, it would make no difference to our his- 
 tory, and the senseless pantomime of our life 
 would fit into the same niche in the world's 
 " formula." Such paradoxical triumphs are 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 135 
 
 occasionally won by planting the old night- 
 mare of necessity closely on our breast. But 
 not for long : and the first of us that, feeling 
 cold, spreads his hands before the fire, or, 
 struck with grief, wrings them over the life- 
 less features of a friend, will here break the 
 spell, and restore the faith that to be con- 
 scious, to think, to love, is to have power. 
 
 But then, it is said, this mental power, 
 even if we concede it, is found only in con- 
 nection with definite material conditions ; in 
 the absence of which, as in the structure of 
 plants, we have no grounds for admitting 
 any conscious life. 
 
 " What can you say then to the student of nature if, 
 before he allows a Psychical principle to the universe, 
 he asks to be shown, somewhere within it, embedded 
 in neurine and fed with warm arterial blood under 
 proper pressure, a convolution of ganglionic globules 
 and nerve-tubes proportioned in size to the faculties 
 of such a Mind? "* 
 
 " What can we say ? " I say, first of all, that 
 
 * DuBois-Reymond, Ueber die Grenzen des Naturer- 
 kennens, p. 37. 
 
1S6 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 this demand for a Divine brain and nerves 
 and arteries comes strangely from those who 
 reproach the Theist with '" anthropomorph- 
 ism." In order to believe in God, they must 
 be assured that the plates in " Quain's An- 
 atomy " truly represent him. If it be a dis- 
 grace to religion to take the human as meas- 
 ure of the Divine, what place in the scale of 
 honor can we assign to this stipulation? 
 Next, I ask my questioner, whether he sus- 
 pends belief in his friends' mental powers till 
 he has made sure of the contents of their 
 crania ? and whether in the case of ages be- 
 yond reach, there are no other adequate 
 vestiges of intellectual and moral life in 
 which he places a ready trust ? Immediate 
 knowledge of mind other than his own he 
 can never have : its existence in other cases 
 is gathered from the signs of its activity, 
 whether in personal lineaments or in pro- 
 ducts stamped with thought : and to stop 
 this process of inference with the discovery 
 of human beings is altogether arbitrary, till 
 it is shown that the grounds for extending it 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : 187 
 
 are inadequate. Further, I would submit 
 that, in dealing with the problem of the Uni- 
 versal Mind, this demand for organic central- 
 ization is strangely inappropriate. It is 
 when mental power has to be localized, 
 bounded, lent out to individual natures and 
 assigned to a scene of definite relations, that 
 a focus must be found for it and a molecular 
 structure with determinate periphery be built 
 for its lodgment. And were Du Bois-Rey- 
 mond himself ever to alight on the porten- 
 tous cerebrum which he imagines, I greatly 
 doubt whether he would fulfil his promise and 
 turn theist at the sight : that he had found 
 the Cause of causes would be the last in- 
 ference it would, occur to him to draw; 
 rather would he look round for some mons- 
 trous creature, some kosmic megatherium, 
 born to float and pasture on the fields of 
 space. The great " energies " which we 
 recognize as modes of the Universal Power 
 are not central but ubiquitous : gravitation 
 reports itself whenever there is a particle of. 
 matter ; heat and light spread with the 
 
188 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 ether whose undulations they are ; and elec- 
 tricity, at one moment gathered into poles, 
 at another sweeps in the aurora over half the 
 heavens. But if still my questioner cannot 
 dispense with some visible structure as the 
 organ of the Ever-living Mind, I will ask 
 him, in his conception of the brain to take 
 into account these words of Cauchy's : 
 
 " Ampere has shown . . . that the molecules of 
 different bodies may be regarded as composed each of 
 several atoms, the dimensions of which are infinitely 
 small relatively to their separating distances. If then 
 we could see the constituent molecules of the different 
 bodies brought under our notice, they would present 
 to our view sorts of constellations; and in passing 
 from the infinitely great to the infinitely small we 
 should find, in the ultimate particles of matter, as in 
 the immensity of the heavens, central points of action 
 distributed in presence of each other."* 
 
 If then the invisible molecular structure 
 and movement do but repeat in little those 
 of the heavens, what hinders us from invert- 
 
 * Cited from Moigno's Cosmos, torn. ii. p. 374, by 
 Fechner : Atomenlehre, xxvi. p. 232. 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 1 89 
 
 ing the analogy, and saying that the ordered 
 heavens repeat the rhythm of the cerebral 
 particles? You need an embodied mind? 
 Lift up your eyes, and look upon the arch of 
 night as the brow of the Eternal, its constel- 
 lations as the molecules of the universal con- 
 sciousness, its space as their possibility of 
 change, and the ethereal waves -as the affer- 
 ents and efferents of Omniscient Thought. 
 Even in the human nerves, the solid lines are 
 but conductors, and the granules but media 
 of movement ; and science is ever on the 
 search for some subtler essence that is thus 
 sheathed and transmitted. In the kosmos, 
 then, think of that essence as unsheathed 
 and omnipresent, with light for its messenger 
 and space for its scope of perception, and 
 your material requisition is not wholly a 
 dream. 
 
 Quite in the sense of Du Bois-Reymond's 
 objection was the saying of Laplace, that in 
 scanning the whole heaven with the telescope 
 he found no God ; which again has its paral- 
 lel in Lawrence's remark that the scalpel, in 
 
190 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 opening the brain, came upon no soul.* 
 Both are unquestionably true, and it is pre- 
 cisety the truth of the second which vitiates 
 the intended inference from the first. Had 
 the scalpel alighted on some perceptible <l>vyji, 
 we might have required of the telescope to 
 do the same ; and, on its bringing in a dumb 
 report, have concluded there was only 
 mechanism there. But, in spite of the 
 knife's failure, we positively know that con- 
 scious thought and will were present, yet no 
 more visible, yesterday: and so, that the 
 telescope misses all but the bodies of the 
 universe and their light avails nothing to 
 prove the absence of a Living Mind through 
 all. If you take the wrong instruments, 
 such qusesita may well evade you. The test- 
 tube will not detect an insincerity, or the 
 microscope analyze a grief. The organism 
 
 * Both these dicta I quote from memory, without at 
 the moment being able to verify the citations. An 
 equivalent passage to the latter occurs in the "Lec- 
 tures on Physiology, Zoology, and the Natural History 
 of Man," p. 8, 1819. 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : ]_ 9 ]_ 
 
 of nature, like that of the brain, lies open in 
 its external features, to the~ scrutiny of sci- 
 ence : but, on the inner side, the life of both 
 is reserved for other modes of apprehension, 
 of which the base is self-consciousness and 
 the crown is religion. 
 
 The contempt or sorrow with which the 
 claim of design is struck out from the inter- 
 pretation of the world results in like manner 
 from a false start in construing the dynamic 
 idea. We are supposed to have made ac- 
 quaintance, in the laboratory, the botanic 
 garden, the aquarium, and among the stars, 
 with a set of blind forces to which a happy 
 hit and a stupid blunder are indifferent and 
 possible, alike ; and then by way of supple- 
 ment to these, to introduce into the thus pre- 
 pared scene the action of intellectual pur- 
 pose. The former is treated as the sphere of 
 determinate causality ; the latter of teleologi- 
 cal government. It is plain that, under these 
 conditions, nothing is left to the second 
 agency except the residue unexplained by 
 the first ; nor does anything suit its character 
 
192 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 except the fitness which (inter alia) are not 
 impossible to the other also. Unless there- 
 fore it invades and interrupts the series other- 
 wise inevitable, it is liable to be deposed and 
 " mediatized " by advancing knowledge ; its 
 troop of anomalies filing off by degrees into 
 the drilled army of necessity ; and the adap- 
 tations it had claimed being traced to the 
 forces which cannot think. With these logi- 
 cal preconceptions, it is no wonder that the 
 naturalist directs a professional enmity 
 against the doctrine of design, and meets it 
 as the opponent he is for ever beating back : 
 and as he is certainly not only in his right, 
 but at his duty, in pushing to the utmost his 
 researches into the physical history of the 
 forms and phenomena he studies, it is a 
 venial impatience with which he resents at- 
 tempts to stop him by " supernatural phan- 
 toms " across his path. If he can display 
 the mechanism by which the heliotrope turns 
 to the sun, or the chemistry by which in a 
 few hours the turbot assumes the color of 
 the ground over which it swims, or tell the 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 193 
 
 whole story which, beginning with a jelly- 
 point tingling in the sunshine, ends with the 
 completed human eye, let his work have all 
 sympathy and honor. But if he imagines that 
 he is displacing Thought from nature by dis- 
 covering causality, he is the subject of the 
 very same illusion which would cry him 
 down and arrest his course. The cases do 
 but present the two sides of one supersti- 
 tion. 
 
 The dispute between acting Force and in- 
 tending Mind is as unmeaning as the quarrel 
 of a man with his own image. The two are 
 identical, expressions, now in all dimen- 
 sions, now in some, of the same nature. 
 Causal power other than Will being an un- 
 known quantity, nay, absolutely out of the 
 sphere of thought, teleology and causality 
 are incorporated in one; and mechanical 
 necessity, instead of being the negation of 
 purpose, is its persistence, the declining, no 
 doubt, of this or that possible diversion to 
 minor ends, but in subservience to the sta- ' 
 bility of a more comprehensive order. The 
 
ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. . 
 
 inexorability of nature is but the faithful- 
 ness of God, the maintenance of those un- 
 swerving habits in the universe, without 
 which it could train no mind and school no 
 character : and that it is hard and unbend- 
 ing to us does not prevent its being fluid to 
 Him. To affirm purpose therefore in the ad- 
 justments of the world is not to set up a rival 
 principle outside their producing force, but 
 to plant, or rather to leave, an integrating 
 thought within it. And, conversely, to trace 
 those adjustments to their " physical causes," 
 is not to withdraw them from their ideal 
 origin, but only to detect the method of 
 carrying the inner meaning to its realization. 
 Who will venture to say, what nevertheless 
 is constantly imagined, that to find how a 
 change comes about is to prove that it was 
 never contemplated? If it were contemplated 
 it would have to be executed somehow ; if ', 
 the moment you read the machinery provid- 
 ed for this purpose, the purpose itself is 
 quenched from your view, is this the dis- 
 covery or the loss of a reality ? 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: ^95 
 
 This treatment of determinate causation 
 as incompatible with conscious aims is the 
 more curious, as proceeding from a school 
 which, as necessarian, is constantly laboring 
 to show the co-existence of the two in human 
 nature. If man is only a sample of the uni- 
 versal determinism, yet forms purposes, con- 
 trives for their accomplishment, and executes 
 them, definite causality and prospective 
 thought can work together, and the field 
 which is occupied by the one is not preoccu- 
 pied against the other. 
 
 The frequent pleas, " See, there is no mind 
 here, for all is necessary causation," tacitly 
 concedes that, in order to have mind, there 
 must be exemption from necessity ; and can 
 be consistently urged only by one who attri- 
 butes this exemption to the human will. Is 
 the argument conclusive from his point of 
 view? It would be so, were it possible to 
 prove his premiss, viz., the universality in the 
 kosmos of necessary causation. But this is 
 plainly out of the question, because his am- 
 plest science carries the induction, such as it 
 
196 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 is, only skin-deep into the universe ; because 
 he would have to show that the present fixity 
 was not determined by a past exercise of 
 will ; because Mind, in proportion as it is 
 orderly and exact in its methods, may assume 
 the semblance of necessity, and be the less 
 suspected that its freedom works by rule. 
 He knows how he himself, though conscious 
 of self-disposal as well as of subjection to 
 nature, presents to the determinist the aspect 
 of a machine ; and how can he be secure 
 against a similar illusion in his interpretation 
 of the world ? What is to prevent the same 
 combination of free and necessary causality 
 which he finds in himself from existing also 
 beyond? Nay, if there were only mind-ex- 
 cluding force in nature, how could there arise 
 a force-resisting mind in him ? He could not 
 carry in himself new causal beginnings, if in 
 the kosmos whence he comes the lines of 
 possibility were definitely closed. 
 
 I revert, then, after weighing these objec- 
 tions, to my " unwiderstehlicher Hang zur 
 Personification," and persist in regarding 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM : 
 
 that which the natural philosopher calls force, 
 and Professor Tyndall raises to an immanent 
 life, as Causal Will, manifesting itself, not in 
 interference with an established order, but in 
 producing it. As it builds and weaves and 
 quickens all matter, and could not otherwise 
 work before us at all, the structures and 
 growths of the material world are its seat, 
 and their phenomena its witnesses : so that 
 the very story, of saline crystals, and ice- 
 stars, and fernfronds, and human birth, 
 which Professor Tyndall tells in order to ex- 
 clude it, is to me a continuous report of its 
 agency and laws. He asks, what else is there 
 here than matter ? I answer, the movement 
 of matter, with their disposing and " forma- 
 tive power, 7 the attracting and repelling 
 energies, which, dealing with molecules and 
 cells, are not molecules and cells. " Mens 
 agitat molem." Whoever finds this incredi- 
 ble will soon have to make friends with some 
 abstraction which is but a ghastly mimicry of 
 it ; for some conception over and above that 
 of "pure matter," is indispensable to the ae- 
 
]L9S ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 curate representation of the simplest facts. 
 If in the typical u oak-tree '' the vitality sud- 
 denly ceased, the " matter " of it would at 
 the next moment still be there, as certainly 
 as that of a clock which had run down : it 
 would weigh the same as before, and so 
 stand the admitted test of the indestructi- 
 bility of matter. Yet something is gone 
 which was previously there, and that some- 
 thing has to be described otherwise than in 
 terms of " matter." The droll " hypothesis " 
 which my critic amuses himself with con- 
 jecturally attributing to me, " of a vegetable 
 soul," wedded to the tree at a definite date, 
 and quitting it when its term was up, cer- 
 tainly does not help us ; and is set up on my 
 behalf, I presume, simply from the facility of 
 knocking it down. But are we any better 
 served by the " alternative " conception of 
 a " formative power," long latent and " po- 
 tential," i.e. not forming anything, but only 
 going to do so? I see that the conception 
 contradicts Biichner's dictum, " A power not 
 expressing itself has no existence ; " yet am 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 199 
 
 at a loss to know how, during its latency, its 
 presence is ascertained, and to exercise with 
 regard to it "that Vorstellungs-fahigkeit 
 with which, in my efforts to think clearly, I 
 can never dispense." Whilst it lies in wait 
 behind the scenes, before the time for the 
 deposit of the crystal or the germination of 
 the acorn, where is it ? behind what mole- 
 cules does it hide ? through what space is it 
 invisibly present ? What shape has it, ena- 
 bling it to lay its building particles and to 
 agglutinate cells ? How does it know the 
 right moment of temperature for stepping on 
 to the stage, and declaring itself without 
 further reserve ? In short, all the questions 
 addressed to me respecting the "formative 
 soul " invented for me, I refer back to be 
 answered on behalf of my critic's " potential 
 power." "Potentiality" is an intelligible 
 fact in a being consciously able to act or to 
 refrain. But when the idea is carried into a 
 system of necessitated phenomena, it means 
 nothing in them, but something in us, as their 
 observers viz., that we conditionally antici- 
 
200 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 pate a future change, forseeing a distant 
 term of a series which would be certain, pro- 
 vided the nearer ones were not obscure. To 
 plant this subjective suspense out into the 
 field of nature to do objective work there, 
 now alighting visibly upon the earth, and 
 then hidden again in " an ambrosial cloud," 
 is a sort of intellectual illusion which modern 
 logic might have been expected to cast out. 
 
 In truth, the nearer I approach the Power 
 which Professor Tyndall pursues through 
 nature with so subtle and brilliant a chase, 
 and the more I try, by combining the predi- 
 cates which he gives and withholds, to think 
 it out into the clear, the less distinct does 
 this " ideal somewhat " become, not simply 
 to the imagination, but to intellectual appre- 
 hension. A power which is not Mind, yet 
 may be "potential " and exist when and 
 where it makes no sign ; which is " imma- 
 nent" in matter, yet is matter; which " is 
 manifested in the universe," yet is not " a 
 Cause," therefore has no effects ; presents to 
 me, I must confess, not an overshadowing 
 
MODERN MATERIALISM: 2Q1 
 
 mystery, but an assemblage of contradictions. 
 I have always supposed that " Power " was 
 a relative word, and that the correlative was 
 found in the " work done : " take away the 
 latter by denying the causation, and the term 
 drops into five letters which might as well 
 be arranged in any other order. 
 
 Yet elsewhere this negative language is 
 balanced by such large affirmative sugges- 
 tions that I almost cease to feel the interval 
 between my critic's thought and my own. 
 Of the inorganic, the vegetable, and the 
 animal realms, he says 
 
 u From this point of view all three worlds would 
 constitute a unity, in which I picture life as immanent 
 everywhere. Nor am I anxious to shut out the idea that 
 the life here spoken of may be but a subordinate part 
 and function of a higher life, as the living, moving 
 blood is subordinate to the living man. I resist no 
 such idea, as long as it is not dogmatically imposed. 
 Left for the human mind freely to operate upon, the 
 idea has ethical vitality ; but stiffened into a dogma, 
 the inner force disappears, and the outward yoke of 
 a usurping hierarchy takes its place." * 
 
 * Fortnightly Revieio, November, 1875, p. 596. 
 
202 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY 
 
 Bidding God-speed to this sudden flank-at- 
 tack upon usurping hierarchies and dogmas, 
 I pursue only the main line of march in the 
 free " idea." Whither does it lead me ? It 
 shows me the three provinces which make up 
 our kosmos blended into one organism by an 
 all-pervading life, which conducts all their 
 processes, from the flow of the river to the 
 dynamics of the human brain. This alone 
 brings me to a pause of solemn wonder, a 
 single power through the whole, and that a 
 living one ! But there is more behind. This 
 power, co-extensive though it is with nature, 
 is not all : beyond her level we are to think 
 of a " higher life," to which her laws and 
 history do but give functional expression. 
 May we then really think out this " idea " 
 of a life " higher " than what is supreme in 
 the world, higher, therefore, than the 
 human? But scale of height above that 
 point we do not possess, except in gradation 
 of intellectual and moral sublimity; and 
 either that Ideal Life must cease to live, or 
 must come before our thought as transcen- 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : 203 
 
 dent Mind and Will, on a scale comprehending 
 as well as permeating the universe. With 
 any guide who brings me hither I sit down 
 with joy and rest. It is the mountain-top, 
 which shows all things in larger relations 
 and through a more lustrous air ; and every 
 feature, the great build of the world close 
 at hand; the thinning of the everlasting 
 snows, as they stoop and melt towards human 
 life ; the opening of sweet valleys below the 
 earlier and wilder pines ; and the final plains, 
 teeming in their silence with industry and 
 thought, is better understood than from 
 level points of view, where the scope is nar- 
 rowed or the calm is lost. But my guide 
 seems less content than I to rest here, and 
 deserts me, not, so far as I can trace him, to 
 reach a brighter point, but rather to descend 
 into the mists. To the "higher life," trans- 
 cending our highest, he dares not give the 
 predicate " Mind," or apply the pronoun of 
 Personality.* On what scale, then, is ifc 
 " higher ? " If not on the intellectual and 
 
 * Fortnightly Review, November, 1875, p. 596. 
 
204: ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 moral, then there is that in man which rises 
 above it ; for the power of attaining truth and 
 goodness is ideally supreme. If Professor 
 Tyndall can reveal to us something which is 
 higher than Mind and Free Causality, by all 
 means let us accept it at his hands and assign 
 it to God. But in order to profess this, and 
 therefore to deprecate as an " anthropomor- 
 phism," the ascription of a mind to Him, one 
 would have, I think, to be one's self some- 
 thing more than man. Only such a one could 
 cast a look above the level of Reason, to see 
 whether it was overtopped : and so, this 
 fashionable reproach against religion is virtu- 
 ally an arrogating of a superhuman position. 
 As we cannot overfly our own zone, no beat 
 of our wings availing to lift us out of the 
 atmosphere they press, surely, if that " high- 
 er life " speaks to us in idea at all, it can 
 only be as Perfect Reason and Righteous 
 Will. Those who find this type of concep- 
 tion not good enough for them, do they 
 succeed in struggling upwards to a better? 
 Rather, I should fear, does a persistent gravi- 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 205 
 
 tation gain upon them, till they droop and 
 sink into the alternative faith of blind force 
 which leaves their own rank supreme. 
 
 Professor Tyndall sets the belief in " un- 
 broken causal connection" and the "theo- 
 logic conception " over against each other as 
 " rivals ; " 'and says that an hour's reasoning 
 will give the first the victory.* The victory 
 is impossible, because the rivalry is unreal. 
 Why should not a Mind of illimitable re- 
 sources, such as " the theologic conception " 
 enthrones in the universe, conduct and 
 maintain " unbroken causal connection ? " 
 Ts not such connection congenial with the 
 relations of thought and the harmony of in- 
 tellectual life? Do not you, the student of 
 nature, yourself admire it ? Is it not the 
 theme of your constant praise ? Do you not 
 speak with contemptuous aversion of alleged 
 deviations from the steadfast tracks of order ? 
 and would you not yourself maintain those 
 tracks, if you were at the head of things ? 
 To this attitude you are impelled by a just 
 
 * Fortnightly Review, November, 1875, p. 596. 
 
206 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 jealousy for the coherent beauty and worth 
 of science as a whole. If, then, these un- 
 swerving Unas so dignify the investigating 
 intellect which regressively traces them up, 
 how can it be out of character with the 
 Mind of minds to think them progressively 
 forth? 
 
 In the discussion which here reaches its 
 close my object has been simply defensive, 
 to repel the pretension of speculative mat- 
 erialism to supersede " the theological con- 
 ception," by tracing the pretension to an im- 
 perfect appreciation of the ultimate logic of 
 science. But the idea of Divine Causality 
 which is thus saved, though an essential con- 
 dition, is not the chief strength of religion ; 
 giving perhaps its measure in breadth, but 
 not in depth. Were the physical aspect of 
 the world alone open to us, we should doubt- 
 less gain, by reading a divineness between 
 the lines, for beauty a new meaning, for 
 poetry a fuller music, for art a greater eleva- 
 tion ; but hardly a better balance of the af- 
 fections or more fidelity of will. It is not 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM : 207 
 
 till we cross the chasm which stops the scien- 
 tific continuity, not till we make a new be- 
 ginning on the further side, that the " idea 
 of a higher life," emerging now in a far dif- 
 ferent field, can claim its " ethical value/' 
 The self-conscious hemisphere of inner ex- 
 perience, which natural philosophy leaves 
 in the dark, this it is which turns to its 
 Divine Source ; and finds, not in any vacant 
 " myster}V but in the living sympathy of a 
 supreme Perfection, " the lifting power of an 
 ideal element in human life." Only by con- 
 verse with our own minds can we to use 
 the words of Smith of Cambridge " steal 
 from them their secrets," and " climb up to 
 the contemplation of the Deity." * It is but 
 too natural that this inner side of knowledge, 
 this melior pars nostri, should be unheeded 
 by those who look on it as the mere accessory 
 fringe of an automatic life, gracefully hang- 
 ing from the texture, but without a thread of 
 connection beyond ; and that with them the 
 
 * Discourse iii., p. 66. ap. Tulloch's Kational Theo- 
 logy, vol. ii. p. 158. 
 
208 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 word "subjective*' should be tantamount to 
 " groundless." They confess the " mystery " 
 of this interior experience only to fly from it 
 and refuse its light. Yet here it is that at 
 last light and vision lapse into one, and sup- 
 ply the TjhnstSiffTarov rcvv dpfdvujv * for the ap- 
 prehension of the first truths of physical and 
 the last of hyperphysical knowledge. Till 
 we accept the "faiths " which our faculties 
 postulate, we can never know even the sen- 
 sible world ; and when we accept them, we 
 shall know much more. Short of this firm 
 trust in the bases whereon our nature is ap- 
 pointed to stand, a trust which, if destroy- 
 ed by a half-philosophy, must be restored by 
 a whole one, the grandest " ideas " flung 
 out to play with and turn about in the 
 kaleidoscope of possibilities, or work up as 
 material of poetry and rhetoric, can no more 
 " lift " a human will than the gossamer pluck 
 up the oak on which it swings. Unless your 
 "ideal" reveals the real, it has no power, 
 and its " ethic value " is that of a dissolving 
 
 * Plato de Rep., 508, A. 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM: 209 
 
 image or a passing sigh. You must " be- 
 lieve," ere you can "remove mountains : " if 
 you only fancy, they sit as a nightmare on 
 your breast. And if man does nothing well, 
 till he ceases to have his vision, and his visi on 
 rather has him and wields him for action or 
 repose ; and if then he astonishes you with 
 his triumphs over " nature " and her appar- 
 ent real, is he the only being who thus rides 
 out upon a thought, and makes the elements 
 embody it ? Have not these elements already 
 learned their obedience, and grown familiar 
 with the intellectual mandate to which they 
 yield ? A man truly possessed, ethically 
 moulded by the pressures of reverence and 
 love, you can never persuade that the beauty, 
 the truth, the goodness which kindles him is 
 but his private altar-lamp : it is an eternal, 
 illimitable light, pervading and consecrating 
 the universe. Unless it be so, it fires him no 
 more : and, instead of utterly surrendering 
 his will to it in trust and sacrifice, he begins 
 to admire it as a little mimic star of his own, 
 a phosphorescence of matter set up by the 
 
 14 
 
210 ITS ATTITUDE TOWARDS THEOLOGY. 
 
 chemistry of nature, not to see things by, but 
 to glisten on the darkness of himself. It is 
 vain to expatiate on the need of religion for 
 our nature, and on the elevation of character 
 which it can produce, and in the same breath 
 bid it begone from the home of truth and 
 seek shelter in the tent of romance. If its 
 power is noble, its essence is true. And 
 what that essence comprises has been worked 
 fairly out in the long experiment of Christi- 
 anity on human nature ; which has shown 
 that in its purest and strongest phase, religion 
 is a variety and last sublimity of personal af- 
 fection and living communion with an Infi- 
 nitely Wise and Good and Holy. The ex- 
 pectation that anything will remain if this 
 be dropped, and that by flinging the same 
 sacred vestments of speech round the form of 
 some empty abstraction you can save the con- 
 tinuity of piety, is an illusion which could 
 never occur except to the outside observer 
 Look at the sacred poetry and recorded de- 
 votion of Christendom : how many lines of 
 it would have any meaning left, if the con- 
 
MODERN MA TERIALISM. % 1 1 
 
 ditions of conscious relationship and imme- 
 diate converse between the human and the 
 Divine Mind were withdrawn ? And where- 
 ever the sense of these conditions has been 
 enfeebled, through superficial "rationalism " 
 or ethical self-confidence, "religious sterili- 
 ty " has followed. To its inner essence, thus 
 tested by positive and negative experience, 
 Religion will remain constant, taking little 
 notice of either scientific forbearance or 
 critical management; and, though left, per- 
 haps, by temporary desertion to nourish its 
 life in comparative silence and retirement, 
 certain to be heard, when it emerges, still 
 speaking in the same simple tones, and 
 breathing the old affections of personal love, 
 and trust, and aspiration. 
 
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