"It is worth any amount of trouble to ... know by one's
own knowledge the great truth ... that the honest and
rigorous following up of the argument which leads us to
'materialism' inevitably carries us beyond it."
"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."
Let the jubilant but uninstructed and comparatively ignorant amateur
materialist therefore beware, and bethink himself twice or even thrice
before he conceives that he understands the universe and is competent to
pour scorn upon the intuitions and perceptions of great men in what may
be to him alien regions of thought and experience.
Let him explain, if he can, what he means by his own identity, or the
identity of any thinking or living being, which at different times
consists of a totally different set of material particles. Something
there clearly is which confers personal identity and constitutes an
individual: it is a property characteristic of every form of life, even
the humblest; but it is not yet explained or understood, and it is no
answer to assert gratuitously that there is some fundamental substance
or material basis on which that identity depends, any more than it is
an explanation to say that it depends upon a soul. These are all forms
of words. As Hume says, quoted by Huxley with approval, in the work
already cited, p. 194:--
"It is impossible to attach any definite meaning to the
word 'substance,' when employed for the hypothetical
substratum of soul and matter.... If it be said that our
personal identity requires the assumption of a substance
which remains the same while the accidents of perception
shift and change, the question arises what is meant by
personal identity?... A plant or an animal, in the course
of its existence, from the condition of an egg or seed to
the end of life, remains the same neither in form, nor in
structure, nor in the matter of which it is composed:
every attribute it possesses is constantly changing, and
yet we say that it is always one and the same individual"
(p. 194).
And in his own preface to the Hume volume Huxley expresses himself
forcibly thus--equally antagonistic as was his wont to both ostensible
friend and ostensible foe, as soon as they got off what he considered
the straight path:--
"That which it may be well for us not to forget is, that
the first-recorded judicial murder of a scientific
thinker [Socrates] was compassed and effected, not by a
despot, nor by priests, but was brought about by eloquent
demagogues.... Clear knowledge of what one does not know
is just as important as knowing what one does know....
"The development of exact natural knowledge in all its
vast range, from physics to history and criticism, is the
consequence of the working out, in this province, of the
resolution to 'take nothing for truth without clear
knowledge that it is such'; to consider all beliefs open
to criticism; to regard the value of authority as neither
greater nor less, than as much as it can prove itself to
be worth. The modern spirit is not the spirit 'which
always denies,' delighting only in destruction; still
less is it that which builds castles in the air rather
than not construct; it is that spirit which works and
will work 'without haste and without rest,' gathering
harvest after harvest of truth into its barns, and
devouring error with unquenchable fire" (p. viii).
The harvesting of truth is a fairly safe operation, for if some
falsehood be inadvertently harvested along with the grain we may hope
that, having a less robust and hardy nature, it will before long be
detected by its decaying odour; but the rooting up and devouring of
error with unquenchable fire is a more dangerous enterprise, inasmuch as
flames are apt to spread beyond our control; and the lack of
infallibility in the selection of error may to future generations become
painfully apparent.
The phrase represents a good healthy energetic mood however, and in a
world liable to become overgrown with weeds and choked with refuse, the
cleansing work of a firebrand may from time to time be a necessity, in
order that the free wind of heaven and the sunlight may once more reach
the fertile soil.
But it is unfair to think of Huxley even when young as a firebrand,
though it is true that he was to some extent a man of war, and though
the fierce and consuming mood is rather more prominent in his early
writings than in his later work.
A fighting attitude was inevitable forty years ago, because then the
truths of biology were being received with hostility, and the free
science and philosophy of a later time seemed likely to have a poor
chance of life. But the world has changed or is changing now, the
wholesome influences of fire have done their work, and it would be a
rather barbarous anachronism to apply the same agency among the young
green shoots of healthy learning which are springing up in the cleared
ground.