THE OPPONENT OF MATERIALISM
Science and Metaphysics--Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes--Existence of
Matter and Mind--Descartes's Contribution--Materialism and
Idealism--Criticism of Materialism--Berkeley's
Idealism--Criticism of Idealism--Empirical Idealism--Materialism
as opposed to Supernaturalism--Mind and Brain--Origin of
Life--Teleology, Chance, and the Argument from Design.
The prosecution of independent thinking in any branch of knowledge
leads to the ultimate problems of philosophy. The mathematician cannot
ponder over the meaning of his figures, the chemist that of his
reactions, the biologist that of his tissues and cells, the
psychologist that of sensations and conceptions, without being tempted
from the comparatively secure ground of observations and the
arrangement of observations into the perilous regions of metaphysics.
Most scientific men return quickly, repelled and perhaps a little
scared by the baffling confusion of that windy region of thought where
no rules of logic seem incontrovertible, no conclusions tenable, and
no discussions profitable. Huxley, however, not only entered into
metaphysical questions with enthusiasm, but gave a great deal of time
to the study of some of the great metaphysical writers. His views are
to be found scattered through very many of his ordinary scientific
writings, but are specially set forth in a volume on _Hume_, which he
wrote for Mr. John Morley's series, _English Men of Letters_, and in
essays on Berkeley and on Descartes, all of which are republished in
the _Collected Essays_. He contrived to preserve, in the most
abstrusely philosophical of these writings, a simplicity and clarity
which, although they have not commended him to professional
metaphysicians, make his attitude to the problems of metaphysics
extremely intelligible. The greatest barrier and cause of confusion to
the novice in metaphysics is that the writings of most of the great
authorities are overburdened by their great knowledge of the history
of philosophy. Huxley, in a characteristic piece of "parting advice"
in the preface to his work on Hume attacked this confusion between the
history of a subject and the subject itself.
"If it is your desire," he wrote, "to discourse fluently and
learnedly about philosophical questions, begin with the Ionians
and work steadily through to the latest new speculative treatise.
If you have a good memory and a fair knowledge of Greek, Latin,
French, and German, three or four years spent in this way should
enable you to attain your object. If, on the contrary, you are
animated by the much rarer desire for real knowledge; if you want
to get a clear conception of the deepest problems set before the
intellect of man, there is no need, so far as I can see, for you
to go beyond the limits of the English tongue. Indeed, if you are
pressed for time, three English authors will suffice, namely,
Berkeley, Hume, and Hobbes."
The first and perhaps the greatest problem in metaphysics can be put
very shortly. What is the reality behind the apparent universe of
matter and mind we see around us? Or, rather, what do we know of that
reality? To the uninitiated in philosophical thinking it seems
sufficiently plain that there are two entities, body and soul in man,
matter and mind in the whole universe; and various types of
intelligent dogmatists, ranging from the sturdy if somewhat stupid
shrewdness of Dr. Johnson to the agile casuistry of Catholic
metaphysicians, have supported this simple verdict of "common sense."
Trouble begins, however, with any attempt to analyse the relations
between what we call "matter" and what we call "mind." It appears, for
instance, that what we call matter we only know in terms of mind. In
an essay on Descartes's _Discourse on Method_, Huxley explains this by
simple examples.
"I take up a marble and I find it to be a red, round, hard,
single body. We call the redness, the roundness, the hardness and
the singleness, 'qualities' of the marble; and it sounds, at
first, the height of absurdity to say that all these qualities
are modes of our own consciousness, which cannot even be
conceived to exist in the marble. But consider the redness, to
begin with. How does the sensation of redness arise? The waves of
a certain very attenuated matter, the particles of which are
vibrating with vast rapidity, but with very different velocities,
strike upon the marble, and those which vibrate with one
particular velocity are thrown off from its surface in all
directions. The optical apparatus of the eye gathers some of
these together, and gives them such a course that they impinge
upon the surface of the retina, which is a singularly delicate
apparatus connected with the terminations of the fibres of the
optic nerve. The impulses of the attenuated matter, or ether,
affect this apparatus and the fibres of the optic nerve in a
certain way; and the change in the fibres of the optic nerve
produces yet other changes in the brain; and these, in some
fashion unknown to us, give rise to the feeling, or
consciousness, of redness. If the marble could remain unchanged,
and either the vibrations of the ether, or the nature of the
retina, could be altered, the marble would seem not red, but some
other colour. There are many people who are what are called
colour-blind, being unable to distinguish one colour from
another. Such an one might declare our marble to be green; and
he would be quite as right in saying that it is green as we are
in declaring it to be red. But then, as the marble itself cannot
be both green and red, at the same time, this shews that the
quality redness must be in our consciousness and not in the
marble."
In similar fashion he shewed that the hardness, roundness, and even
the singleness of the marble were, so far as we know, states of our
consciousness and not in the marble. The argument is capable of
application to all that we call matter, and it thus appears, on
analysis, that what we know of matter is simply a series of states of
our consciousness, or mind. In similar fashion, it turns out that what
we call mind is, so far as practical experience goes, always
associated with and dependent on what we call matter. We have no
direct knowledge of thinking without a brain, or of consciousness
without a body. Alterations and changes in matter, as for instance in
the tissues and nutrition of the body, are, so far as our experience
goes, inseparably associated with mental operations. In the animal
kingdom we see the development of the mind creeping slowly after the
development of the material nervous system, until, in man, the most
complex mind and most complex consciousness of which we have knowledge
accompany the most complex body and brain.
Two great rival solutions to this fundamental problem are Materialism
and Idealism. Materialism supposes that what we call matter is the
real substance of the universe, and that mind is merely one of the
forms of its activity. The advance of physical science has done much
to make the materialistic hypothesis more plausible. When matter was
believed to be inert, the mere vehicle or theatre of forces,
materialism remained a singularly crude and unsatisfying position. But
now that science has shewn all that we call matter--the most solid
metals and the most attenuated vapours, the most stable and resisting
inorganic bodies, and the unstable tissues of living bodies--to be
alike in restless, orderly motion, to be, in fact, motion itself and
not the thing moved, to be changeable but indestructible, passing
through phases but eternal, there seems less difficulty in assuming it
to be the ultimate reality, and mind and consciousness to be its most
highly specialised qualities. Huxley, while stating this view plainly
enough, refused to accept it as a legitimate conclusion from the
facts.
"For anything that may be proved to the contrary, there may be a
real something which is the cause of all our impressions; that
sensations, though not likenesses, are symbols of that something;
and that the part of that something, which we call the nervous
system, is an apparatus for supplying us with a sort of algebra
of fact, based on these symbols. A brain may be the machinery by
which the material universe becomes conscious of itself. But it
is important to notice that, even if this conception of the
uuiverse and of the relation of consciousness to its other
components should be true, we should, nevertheless, be still
bound by the limits of thought, still unable to refute the
arguments of pure idealism. The more completely the materialistic
position is admitted, the easier it is to show that the
idealistic position is unassailable, if the idealist confines
himself within the limits of positive knowledge."
However we attempt to form what philosophers call "ejects," to imagine
that what is really in our consciousness is really the world outside
ourselves, these ejects remain mere phenomena of our minds. Matter
itself and its changes may, in the long run, be but modes of motion,
but "our knowledge of motion is nothing but that of a change in the
place and order of our sensations; just as our knowledge of matter is
restricted to those feelings of which we assume it to be the cause."
Huxley's exact position in regard to materialism is most plain in his
expositions of the writings of Berkeley, with whom began in England
the greatest movement towards an idealistic philosophy.
"Berkeley faced the problem boldly. He said to the materialists:
'You tell me that all the phenomena of nature are resolvable into
matter and its affections. I assent to your statement, and now I
put to you the further question, What is matter? In answering
this question you shall be bound by your own conditions; and I
demand, in the terms of the Cartesian axiom, that you in turn
give your assent only to such conclusions as are perfectly clear
and obvious.'"
Huxley then goes on to state the general lines of the arguments by
which Berkeley arrived at the apparently paradoxical conclusion "that
all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth--in a word, all
those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world," have an
existence only so far as they are in a perceiving mind. And he
proceeds at length to explain the immense importance of the truths
underlying Berkeley's position.
"The key to all philosophy lies in the clear apprehension of
Berkeley's problem--which is neither more nor less than one of
the shapes of the greatest of all questions, 'What are the limits
of our faculties?' And it is worth any amount of trouble to
comprehend the exact nature of the argument by which Berkeley
arrived at his results, and to know by one's own knowledge the
great truth which he discovered--that the honest and rigorous
following up of the argument which leads us to materialism
inevitably carries us beyond it."
Huxley, however, while he opposed a materialistic explanation of the
universe with the strength of exposition and acute reasoning at his
disposal, did not pass directly into the other camp and become a pure
idealist.
"Granting the premisses," he wrote, "I do not see any escape from
Berkeley's conclusion, that the substance of matter is a
metaphysical unknown quantity, of the existence of which there is
no proof. What Berkeley does not seem to have so clearly
perceived is that the non-existence of a substance of mind is
equally arguable; and that the result of the impartial
application of his reasonings is the reduction of the all to
co-existences and sequences of phenomena, beneath and beyond
which there is nothing cognoscible."
Hume had written: "What we call a mind is nothing but a heap or
collection of different perceptions, united together by certain
relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with a perfect
simplicity and identity." Here was mind rejected for the same negative
reasons as matter, and Huxley was as ready to point out that while we
can know nothing of the
"substance of the thinking thing, we go beyond legitimate
reasoning if we therefore deny its existence." ... "Hume may be
right or wrong, but the most he or anyone else can prove in
favour of his conclusions is, that we know nothing more of the
mind than that it is a series of perceptions. Whether there is
something in the mind that lies beyond the reach of observation,
or whether perceptions themselves are the products of something
which can be observed and which is not mind, are questions which
can in no wise be settled by direct observation."
In another passage he writes:
"To sum up. If the materialist affirms that the universe and all
its phenomena are resolvable into matter and motion, Berkeley
replies, True; but what you call matter and motion are known to
us only as forms of consciousness; their being is to be conceived
or known; and the existence of a state of consciousness, apart
from a thinking mind, is a contradiction in terms. I conceive
that this reasoning is irrefragable. And therefore, if I were
obliged to choose between absolute materialism and absolute
idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter
alternative. Indeed, upon this point Locke does, practically, go
as far in the direction of idealism as Berkeley, when he admits
that the 'simple ideas which we receive from sensation and
reflection are the boundaries of our thoughts, beyond which the
mind, whatever efforts it would make, is not able to advance one
jot.'"
Locke went further, and Huxley agreed with him. He declared that the
mind cannot "make any discoveries when it would pry into the nature
and hidden cause of these ideas." We must, in fact, definitely reject
what we know as matter as the absolute reality of the universe, for it
becomes very plain that what we call matter we know merely as
affections of our own consciousness. In a sense, then, so far as it is
opposed to materialism, idealism, according to Huxley, must be the
philosophical position of a scientific man. But the idealism is not
the absolute idealism of Berkeley, as we have no logical right to deny
or to affirm the existence of absolute matter or of absolute mind. The
real truth of the philosophy of science lies in a separation between
metaphysical theory and actual pursuits. In ultimate philosophical
theory it is impossible to rest content with a plain natural
conception of the universe. When any conception of matter, or of its
affections, is pushed as far as analysis can take us, what we know
resolves itself into affections of mind, into what without
metaphysical finesse may be called ideas. But this empirical idealism
must be taken positively as being merely the limits of our knowledge,
and it must carry with it neither an undue exaltation of mind nor an
undue depreciation of matter.
"The Platonic philosophy is probably the grandest example of the
unscientific use of the imagination extant; and it would be hard
to estimate the amount of detriment to clear thinking effected,
directly and indirectly, by the theory of ideas, on the one hand,
and by the unfortunate doctrine of the baseness of matter, on the
other."
Materialism was dismissed by Huxley as being an inadequate
philosophical explanation of the universe, and as being based on a
logical delusion. There remains, however, a practical application of
the word in which the conceptions it involves are almost an inevitable
part of science, and which was strenuously urged by Huxley. In the
earlier days of the world and of science almost all the phenomena of
nature were regarded as random or wilful displays of living
intelligence. The earth itself and the sun, the moon, and the stars
were endowed with life; legions of unseen intelligences ruled the
operations of nature, and although these might be bribed or
threatened, pleased or made angry, their actions were regarded as
beyond prediction or control. The procession of the seasons, the
routine of day and night, the placid appeasement of the rains, the
devastating roar of storms, the shining of the rainbow, the bubbling
of springs, the terrors of famine and pestilence; all these--the
varying environment which makes or mars human life--were regarded as
inevitable and capricious. The whole progress of physical science has
been attended with a gradual elimination of these supernatural
agencies and with a continual replacement of them by conceptions of
physical sequence.
"In singular contrast with natural knowledge, the acquaintance of
mankind with the supernatural appears the more exact, and the
influence of supernatural doctrine on conduct the greater, the
further we go back in time and the lower the stage of
civilisation submitted to investigation. Historically, indeed,
there would seem to be an inverse relation between supernatural
and natural knowledge. As the latter has widened, gained in
precision and trustworthiness, so has the former shrunk, grown
vague and questionable; as the one has more and more filled the
sphere of action, so has the other retreated into the region of
meditation, or vanished behind the screen of mere verbal
recognition. Whether this difference of the fortunes of
Naturalism and Supernaturalism is an indication of the progress,
or of the regress of humanity, of a fall from or an advance
towards the higher life, is a matter of opinion. The point to
which I wish to direct attention is that the difference exists
and is making itself felt. Men are growing seriously alive to the
fact that the historical evolution of humanity, which is
generally, and I venture to think, not unreasonably, regarded as
progress, has been and is being accompanied by a co-ordinate
elimination of the supernatural from its originally large
occupation of men's thought."
Every stage in this long process, every new attempt to place physical
phenomena in a chain of direct causation has been denounced as
dangerous and degrading materialism, and in this sense Huxley was not
only an adherent but one of the foremost champions of materialism. As
everyone knows, some of the greatest advances in this process of
co-ordinating physical phenomena were made during Huxley's life; and
his vigorous onslaughts on those who tried to thwart all attempts at
material explanations in favour of unknown agencies made him specially
open to abusive criticism. The battle was almost invariably between
those who had not special knowledge and those in possession of it, and
it occurred in practically the whole field of science, but
particularly in the biological sciences. A single example will serve
to shew what is meant by materialism in this sense and the attitude of
Huxley to it. The study of the human mind naturally has attracted the
attention of thinkers almost since the beginning of philosophy, but
until this century, with a few crude exceptions, it has been conducted
entirely apart from anatomy and physiology. Advances in these physical
sciences, however, have changed that, and the modern psychologist has
to begin by being a physiologist and anatomist.
"Surely no one who is cognisant of the facts of the case,
nowadays, doubts that the roots of psychology lie in the
physiology of the nervous system. What we call the operations of
the mind are the functions of the brain, and the materials of
consciousness are products of cerebral activity. Cabanis may have
made use of crude and misleading phraseology when he said that
the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile; but the
conception which that much-abused phrase embodies is,
nevertheless, far more consistent with fact than the popular
notion that the mind is a metaphysical entity seated in the head,
but as independent of the brain as a telegraph operator is of his
instrument. It is hardly necessary to point out that the doctrine
just laid down is what is commonly called materialism. I am not
sure that the adjective 'crass,' which appears to have a special
charm for rhetorical sciolists, would not be applied to it. But
it is, nevertheless, true that the doctrine contains nothing
inconsistent with the purest idealism."
The whole doctrine of evolution is similarly a materialistic account
of natural phenomena, in the popular and not the philosophical meaning
of the term. But even within this popular meaning, it is extremely
necessary to have an exact conception of the limits within which
Huxley was materialistic. Take for instance the question of the origin
of life. It would be one of the greatest achievements of physical
science could it shew that life was not inco-ordinate with non-living
physical phenomena, but was a special case of them. Huxley knew that
this advance had not yet been made.
"It may be that, by-and-by, philosophers will discover some
higher laws of which the facts of life are particular cases--very
possibly they will find out some bond between physico-chemical
phenomena on the one hand, and vital phenomena on the other. At
present, however, we assuredly know of none; and I think we shall
exercise a wise humility in confessing that, for us at least,
this successive assumption of different states (external
conditions remaining the same)--this spontaneity of action--if I
may use a term which implies more than I would be answerable
for--which constitutes so vast and plain a practical distinction
between living bodies and those which do not live, is an ultimate
fact; indicating as such, the existence of a broad line of
demarcation between the subject matter of biological and of all
other science."
In another passage he wrote:
"Looking back through the prodigious vista of the past I find no
record of the commencement of life, and therefore I am devoid of
any means of forming a definite conclusion as to the conditions
of its appearance. Belief, in the scientific sense of the word,
is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say,
therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any
belief as to the mode in which the existing forms of life have
originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But
expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were
given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time
to the still more remote period when the earth was passing
through physical and chemical conditions which it can no more see
again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a
witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from non-living
matter. I should expect to see it appear under forms of great
simplicity, endowed, like existing fungi, with the power of
determining the formation of new protoplasm from such matters as
ammonium carbonates, oxalates, and tartrates, alkaline and earthy
phosphates, and water, without the aid of light. That is the
expectation to which analogical reasoning leads me, but I beg you
once more to recollect that I have no right to call my opinion
anything but an act of philosophical faith."
Since these words were written the reasons for Huxley's "philosophic
faith" have been strengthened by later discoveries, and perhaps a
majority of biologists would take the view that except for practical
purposes there is no sound reason for placing living and inorganic
aggregations of matter in totally different categories. But even if
the main outline of the theory of evolution were proved beyond the
possibility of doubt, if we could trace existing plants and animals
backwards with the accuracy of a genealogist and find that they had
been developed, under purely physical "laws" from a few simple forms,
and if we could understand exactly how these few simple forms of
living matter took origin from non-living matter, we would not, if we
followed Huxley, be able to rest in a purely materialistic position.
As he, in different words, repeatedly said:
"It is very desirable to remember that evolution is not an
explanation of the cosmos, but merely a generalised statement of
the method and results of that process. And, further, that, if
there is any proof that the cosmic process was set going by any
agent, then that agent will be the creator of it and of all its
products, although supernatural intervention may remain strictly
excluded from its further course."
The doctrine of evolution was, for him, no attempt to reinstate the
"old pagan goddess, Chance." Darwin had again and again explained, and
Huxley again and again had called attention to the explanation, that
when words like "chance" and "spontaneous" were used, no more was
intended to be implied than an ignorance of the causes. In the true
sense of the word "chance" did not exist for Huxley and Darwin. So far
as all scientific and common experience goes, every event is connected
with foregoing events in an orderly and inevitable chain of
sequences,--a chain that could have been predicted or predetermined
by any sufficient intelligence. Moreover, Huxley did not believe that
Darwin's views, rightly interpreted, "abolished teleology and
eviscerated the argument from design." They only abolished that crude
expression of teleology which supposed all structures among animals
and plants to have been created in their present forms for their
present purposes. Under the stimulus given to biology by the doctrine
of evolution that science has progressed far beyond conceptions so
rudely mechanical. We know that behind each existing structure there
is a long history of change; of change not only in form and
appearance, but also in function. In the development of living
organisms to-day, as they grow up into tree or animal from seed or
egg, we can trace the record of these changes of form; in some cases
we can follow the actual change of function. But in a wider sense
there is no incongruity between evolution and teleology.
"There is a wider teleology," Huxley wrote, "which is not touched
by the doctrine of evolution, but is actually based on the
fundamental proposition of evolution. This proposition is that
the whole world, living and not living, is the result of the
mutual interaction, according to definite laws, of the forces
possessed by the molecules of which the primitive nebulosity of
the universe was composed. That acute champion of teleology,
Paley, saw no difficulty in admitting that the 'production of
things' may be the result of mechanical dispositions fixed
beforehand by intelligent appointment and kept in action by a
power at the centre."