the universe but matter and force; and that all the phenomena of nature are
explicable by deduction from the properties assignable to these two
primitive factors. That great champion of Materialism whom Mr. Lilly
appears to consider to be an authority in physical science, Dr. Buechner,
embodies this article of faith on his title-page. _Kraft und Stoff_--force
and matter--are paraded as the Alpha and Omega of existence. This I
apprehend is the fundamental article of the faith materialistic; and
whosoever does not hold it is condemned by the more zealous of the
persuasion (as I have some reason to know) to the Inferno appointed for
fools or hypocrites. But all this I heartily disbelieve; and at the risk of
being charged with wearisome repetition of an old story, I will briefly
give my reasons for persisting in my infidelity. In the first place, as I
have already hinted, it seems to me pretty plain that there is a third
thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness, which, in the hardness of my
heart or head, I cannot see to be matter or force, or any conceivable
modification of either, however intimately the manifestations of the
phenomena of consciousness may be connected with the phenomena known as
matter and force. In the second place, {221} the arguments used by
Descartes and Berkeley to show that our certain knowledge does not extend
beyond our states of consciousness, appear to me to be as irrefragable now
as they did when I first became acquainted with them some half century ago.
All the materialistic writers I know of who have tried to bite that file
have simply broken their teeth. But, if this is true, our one certainty is
the existence of the mental world, and that of _Kraft und Stoff_ falls into
the rank of, at best, a highly probable hypothesis.
Thirdly, when I was a mere boy, with a perverse tendency to think when I
ought to have been playing, my mind was greatly exercised by this
formidable problem, What would become of things if they lost their
qualities? As the qualities had no objective existence, and the thing
without qualities was nothing, the solid world seemed whittled away--to my
great horror. As I grew older, and learned to use the terms matter and
force, the boyish problem was revived, _mutato nomine_. On the one hand,
the notion of matter without force seemed to resolve the world into a set
of geometrical ghosts, too dead even to jabber. On the other hand,
Boscovich's hypothesis, by which matter was resolved into centres of force,
was very attractive. But when one tried to think it out, what in the world
became of force considered as an objective entity? Force, even the most
materialistic of philosophers will agree with the most idealistic, is
nothing but a name for the cause of motion. And if, with Boscovich, I
resolved {222} things into centres of force, then matter vanished
altogether and left immaterial entities in its place. One might as well
frankly accept Idealism and have done with it.
I must make a confession, even if it be humiliating. I have never been able
to form the slightest conception of those "forces" which the Materialists
talk about, as if they had samples of them many years in bottle. They tell
me that matter consists of atoms, which are separated by mere space devoid
of contents; and that, through this void, radiate the attractive and
repulsive forces whereby the atoms affect one another. If anybody can
clearly conceive the nature of these things which not only exist in
nothingness, but pull and push there with great vigour, I envy him for the
possession of an intellect of larger grasp, not only than mine, but than
that of Leibnitz or of Newton.[61] To me the "chimaera, bombinans in vacuo
quia comedit secundas intentiones" of the schoolmen is a familiar and
domestic creature compared with such "forces." Besides, by the hypothesis,
the forces are not matter; and thus all that is of any particular
consequence in the world turns out to be not matter on the Materialist's
own showing. Let it not be supposed that I am casting {223} a doubt upon
the propriety of the employment of the terms "atom" and "force," as they
stand among the working hypotheses of physical science. As formulae which
can be applied, with perfect precision and great convenience, in the
interpretation of nature, their value is incalculable; but, as real
entities, having an objective existence, an indivisible particle which
nevertheless occupies space is surely inconceivable; and with respect to
the operation of that atom, where it is not, by the aid of a "force"
resident in nothingness, I am as little able to imagine it as I fancy any
one else is.
Unless and until anybody will resolve all these doubts and difficulties for
me, I think I have a right to hold aloof from Materialism. As to
Spiritualism, it lands me in even greater difficulties when I want to get
change for its notes-of-hand in the solid coin of reality. For the assumed
substantial entity, spirit, which is supposed to underlie the phenomena of
consciousness, as matter underlies those of physical nature, leaves not
even a geometrical ghost when these phenomena are abstracted. And, even if
we suppose the existence of such an entity apart from qualities--that is to
say, a bare existence--for mind; how does anybody know that it differs from
that other entity, apart from qualities, which is the supposed substratum
of matter? Spiritualism is, after all, little better than Materialism
turned upside down. And if I try to think of the "spirit" which a man, by
this hypothesis, carries about under his hat, as something devoid of
relation to space, and as something indivisible, even {224} in thought,
while it is, at the same time, supposed to be in that place and to be
possessed of half a dozen different faculties, I confess I get quite lost.
As I have said elsewhere, if I were forced to choose between Materialism
and Idealism, I should elect for the latter; and I certainly would have
nothing to do with the effete mythology of Spiritualism. But I am not aware
that I am under any compulsion to choose either the one or the other. I
have always entertained a strong suspicion that the sage who maintained
that man is the measure of the universe was sadly in the wrong; and age and
experience have not weakened that conviction. In following these lines of
speculation I am reminded of the quarter-deck walks of my youth. In taking
that form of exercise you may perambulate through all points of the compass
with perfect safety, so long as you keep within certain limits: forget
those limits, in your ardour, and mere smothering and spluttering, if not
worse, await you. I stick by the deck and throw a life-buoy now and then to
the struggling folk who have gone overboard; and all I get for my humanity
is the abuse of all whenever they leave off abusing one another.
Tolerably early in life I discovered that one of the unpardonable sins, in
the eyes of most people, is for a man to presume to go about unlabelled.
The world regards such a person as the police do an unmuzzled dog, not
under proper control. I could find no label that would suit me, so, in my
desire to range myself and be respectable, I invented one; and, as the
chief thing I was sure of was that I did not know a great {225} many things
that the -ists and the -ites about me professed to be familiar with, I
called myself an Agnostic. Surely no denomination could be more modest or
more appropriate; and I cannot imagine why I should be every now and then
haled out of my refuge and declared sometimes to be a Materialist,
sometimes an Atheist, sometimes a Positivist; and sometimes, alas and
alack, a cowardly or reactionary Obscurantist.
I trust that I have, at last, made my case clear, and that henceforth I
shall be allowed to rest in peace--at least, after a further explanation or
two, which Mr. Lilly proves to me may be necessary. It has been seen that
my excellent critic has original ideas respecting the meaning of the words
"laboratory" and "chemical"; and, as it appears to me, his definition of
"Materialist" is quite as much peculiar to himself. For, unless I
misunderstand him, and I have taken pains not to do so, he puts me down as
a Materialist (over and above the grounds which I have shown to have no
foundation); firstly, because I have said that consciousness is a function
of the brain; and, secondly, because I hold by determinism. With respect to
the first point, I am not aware that there is any one who doubts that, in
the proper physiological sense of the word function, consciousness, in
certain forms at any rate, is a cerebral function. In physiology we call
function that effect, or series of effects, which results from the activity
of an organ. Thus, it is the function of muscle to give rise to motion; and
the muscle gives rise to motion when the nerve which {226} supplies it is
stimulated. If one of the nerve-bundles in a man's arm is laid bare and a
stimulus is applied to certain of the nervous filaments, the result will be
production of motion in that arm. If others are stimulated, the result will
be the production of the state of consciousness called pain. Now, if I
trace these last nerve-filaments, I find them to be ultimately connected
with part of the substance of the brain, just as the others turn out to be
connected with muscular substance. If the production of motion in the one
case is properly said to be the function of the muscular substance, why is
the production of a state of consciousness in the other case not to be
called a function of the cerebral substance? Once upon a time, it is true,
it was supposed that a certain "animal spirit" resided in muscle and was
the real active agent. But we have done with that wholly superfluous
fiction so far as the muscular organs are concerned. Why are we to retain a
corresponding fiction for the nervous organs?
If it is replied that no physiologist, however spiritual his leanings,
dreams of supposing that simple sensations require a "spirit" for their
production, then I must point out that we are all agreed that consciousness
is a function of matter, and that particular tenet must be given up as a
mark of Materialism. Any further argument will turn upon the question, not
whether consciousness is a function of the brain, but whether all forms of
consciousness are so. Again, I hold it would be quite correct to say that
material changes are the causes of psychical {227} phenomena (and, as a
consequence, that the organs in which these changes take place have the
production of such phenomena for their function), even if the
spiritualistic hypothesis had any foundation. For nobody hesitates to say
that an event A is the cause of an event Z, even if there are as many
intermediate terms, known and unknown, in the chain of causation as there
are letters between A and Z. The man who pulls the trigger of a loaded
pistol placed close to another's head certainly is the cause of that
other's death, though, in strictness, he "causes" nothing but the movement
of the finger upon the trigger. And, in like manner, the molecular change
which is brought about in a certain portion of the cerebral substance by
the stimulation of a remote part of the body would be properly said to be
the cause of the consequent feeling, whatever unknown terms were interposed
between the physical agent and the actual psychical product. Therefore,
unless Materialism has the monopoly of the right use of language, I see
nothing materialistic in the phraseology which I have employed.
The only remaining justification which Mr. Lilly offers for dubbing me a
Materialist, _malgre moi_, arises out of a passage which he quotes, in
which I say that the progress of science means the extension of the
province of what we call matter and force, and the concomitant gradual
banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and
spontaneity. I hold that opinion now, if anything, more firmly than I did
when I gave utterance to it a score of {228} years ago, for it has been
justified by subsequent events. But what that opinion has to do with
Materialism I fail to discover. In my judgment, it is consistent with the
most thorough-going Idealism, and the grounds of that judgment are really
very plain and simple.
The growth of science, not merely of physical science, but of all science,
means the demonstration of order and natural causation among phenomena
which had not previously been brought under those conceptions. Nobody who
is acquainted with the progress of scientific thinking in every department
of human knowledge, in the course of the last two centuries, will be
disposed to deny that immense provinces have been added to the realm of
science; or to doubt that the next two centuries will be witnesses of a
vastly greater annexation. More particularly in the region of the
physiology of the nervous system, is it justifiable to conclude from the
progress that has been made in analysing the relations between material and
psychical phenomena, that vast further advances will be made; and that,
sooner or later, all the so-called spontaneous operations of the mind will
have, not only their relations to one another, but their relations to
physical phenomena, connected in natural series of causes and effects,
strictly defined. In other words, while, at present, we know only the
nearer moiety of the chain of causes and effects, by which the phenomena we
call material give rise to those which we call mental; hereafter, we shall
get to the further end of the series. {229}
In my innocence, I have been in the habit of supposing that this is merely
a statement of facts, and that the good Bishop Berkeley, if he were alive,
would find such facts fit into his system without the least difficulty.
That Mr. Lilly should play into the hands of his foes, by declaring that
unmistakable facts make for them, is an exemplification of ways that are
dark, quite unintelligible to me. Surely Mr. Lilly does not hold that the
disbelief in spontaneity--which term, if it has any meaning at all, means
uncaused action--is a mark of the beast Materialism? If so, he must be
prepared to tackle many of the Cartesians (if not Descartes himself),
Spinoza and Leibnitz among the philosophers, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas,
Calvin and his followers among theologians, as Materialists--and that
surely is a sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_ of such a classification.
The truth is, that in his zeal to paint "Materialism," in large letters, on
everything he dislikes, Mr. Lilly forgets a very important fact, which,
however, must be patent to every one who has paid attention to the history
of human thought; and that fact is, that every one of the speculative
difficulties which beset Kant's three problems, the existence of a Deity,
the freedom of the will, and immortality, existed ages before anything that
can be called physical science, and would continue to exist if modern
physical science were swept away. All that physical science has done has
been to make, as it were, visible and tangible some difficulties that
formerly were more hard of apprehension. Moreover, these difficulties {230}
exist just as much on the hypothesis of Idealism as on that of Materialism.
The student of nature, who starts from the axiom of the universality of the
law of causation, cannot refuse to admit an eternal existence; if he admits
the conservation of energy, he cannot deny the possibility of an eternal
energy; if he admits the existence of immaterial phenomena in the form of
consciousness, he must admit the possibility, at any rate, of an eternal
series of such phenomena; and, if his studies have not been barren of the
best fruit of the investigation of nature, he will have enough sense to see
that when Spinoza says, "Per Deum intelligo ens absolute infinitum, hoc est
substantiam constantem infinitis attributis," the God so conceived is one
that only a very great fool would deny, even in his heart. Physical science
is as little Atheistic as it is Materialistic.
So with respect to immortality. As physical science states this problem, it
seems to stand thus: "Is there any means of knowing whether the series of
states of consciousness, which has been causally associated for threescore
years and ten with the arrangement and movements of innumerable millions of
successively different material molecules, can be continued, in like
association, with some substance which has not the properties of matter and
force?" As Kant said, on a like occasion, if anybody can answer that
question, he is just the man I want to see. If he says that consciousness
cannot exist, except in relation of cause and effect with certain organic
{231} molecules, I must ask how he knows that; and if he says it can, I
must put the same question. And I am afraid that, like jesting Pilate, I
shall not think it worth while (having but little time before me) to wait
for an answer.
Lastly, with respect to the old riddle of the freedom of the will. In the
only sense in which the word freedom is intelligible to me--that is to say,
the absence of any restraint upon doing what one likes within certain
limits--physical science certainly gives no more ground for doubting it
than the common sense of mankind does. And if physical science, in
strengthening our belief in the universality of causation and abolishing
chance as an absurdity, leads to the conclusions of determinism, it does no
more than follow the track of consistent and logical thinkers in philosophy
and in theology, before it existed or was thought of. Whoever accepts the
universality of the law of causation as a dogma of philosophy, denies the
existence of uncaused phenomena. And the essence of that which is
improperly called the freewill doctrine is that occasionally, at any rate,
human volition is self-caused, that is to say, not caused at all; for to
cause oneself one must have anteceded oneself--which is, to say the least
of it, difficult to imagine.
Whoever accepts the existence of an omniscient Deity as a dogma of
theology, affirms that the order of things is fixed from eternity to
eternity; for the fore-knowledge of an occurrence means that the occurrence
will certainly happen; and the certainty {232} of an event happening is
what is meant by its being fixed or fated.[62]
Whoever asserts the existence of an omnipotent Deity, that he made and
sustains all things, and is the _causa causarum_, cannot, without a
contradiction in terms, assert that there is any cause independent of him;
and it is a mere subterfuge to assert that the cause of all things can
"permit" one of these things to be an independent cause.
{233}
Whoever asserts the combination of omniscience and omnipotence as
attributes of the Deity, does implicitly assert predestination. For he who
knowingly makes a thing and places it in circumstances the operation of
which on that thing he is perfectly acquainted with, does predestine that
thing to whatever fate may befall it.
Thus, to come, at last, to the really important part of all this
discussion, if the belief in a God is essential to morality, physical
science offers no obstacle thereto; if the belief in immortality is
essential to morality, physical science has no more to say against the
probability of that doctrine than the most ordinary experience has, and it
effectually closes the mouths of those who pretend to refute it by
objections deduced from merely physical data. Finally, if the belief in the
uncausedness of volition is essential to morality, the student of physical
science has no more to say against that absurdity than the logical
philosopher or theologian. Physical science, I repeat, did not invent
determinism, and the deterministic doctrine would stand on just as firm a
foundation as it does if there were no physical science. Let any one who
doubts this read Jonathan Edwards, whose demonstrations are derived wholly
from philosophy and theology.
Thus, when Mr. Lilly, like another Solomon Eagle, goes about proclaiming
"Woe to this wicked city," and denouncing physical science as the evil
genius of modern days--mother of materialism, and fatalism, and all sorts
of other condemnable isms--I {234} venture to beg him to lay the blame on
the right shoulders; or, at least, to put in the dock, along with Science,
those sinful sisters of hers, Philosophy and Theology, who, being so much
older, should have known better than the poor Cinderella of the schools and
universities over which they have so long dominated. No doubt modern
society is diseased enough; but then it does not differ from older
civilisations in that respect. Societies of men are fermenting masses, and
as beer has what the Germans call "Oberhefe" and "Unterhefe," so every
society that has existed has had its scum at the top and its dregs at the
bottom; but I doubt if any of the "ages of faith" had less scum or less
dregs, or even showed a proportionally greater quantity of sound wholesome
stuff in the vat. I think it would puzzle Mr. Lilly, or any one else, to
adduce convincing evidence that, at any period of the world's history,
there was a more widespread sense of social duty, or a greater sense of
justice, or of the obligation of mutual help, than in this England of ours.
Ah! but, says Mr. Lilly, these are all products of our Christian
inheritance; when Christian dogmas vanish virtue will disappear too, and
the ancestral ape and tiger will have full play. But there are a good many
people who think it obvious that Christianity also inherited a good deal
from Paganism and from Judaism; and that, if the Stoics and the Jews
revoked their bequest, the moral property of Christianity would realise
very little. And, if morality has survived the stripping off of several
sets of clothes which have been found to fit badly, why {235} should it not
be able to get on very well in the light and handy garments which Science
is ready to provide?
But this by the way. If the diseases of society consist in the weakness of
its faith in the existence of the God of the theologians, in a future
state, and in uncaused volitions, the indication, as the doctors say, is to
suppress Theology and Philosophy, whose bickerings about things of which
they know nothing have been the prime cause and continual sustenance of
that evil scepticism which is the Nemesis of meddling with the unknowable.
Cinderella is modestly conscious of her ignorance of these high matters.
She lights the fire, sweeps the house, and provides the dinner; and is
rewarded by being told that she is a base creature, devoted to low and
material interests. But in her garret she has fairy visions out of the ken
of the pair of shrews who are quarrelling downstairs. She sees the order
which pervades the seeming disorder of the world; the great drama of
evolution, with its full share of pity and terror, but also with abundant
goodness and beauty, unrolls itself before her eyes; and she learns, in her
heart of hearts, the lesson, that the foundation of morality is to have
done, once and for all, with lying; to give up pretending to believe that
for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions
about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge.
She knows that the safety of morality lies neither in the adoption of this
or that philosophical {236} speculation, or this or that theological creed,
but in a real and living belief in that fixed order of nature which sends
social disorganisation upon the track of immorality, as surely as it sends
physical disease after physical trespasses. And of that firm and lively
faith it is her high mission to be the priestess.
* * * * *
{237}
VI
SCIENTIFIC AND PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC REALISM
Next to undue precipitation in anticipating the results of pending
investigations, the intellectual sin which is commonest and most hurtful to
those who devote themselves to the increase of knowledge is the omission to
profit by the experience of their predecessors recorded in the history of
science and philosophy. It is true that, at the present day, there is more
excuse than at any former time for such neglect. No small labour is needed
to raise oneself to the level of the acquisitions already made; and able
men, who have achieved thus much, know that, if they devote themselves body
and soul to the increase of their store, and avoid looking back, with as
much care as if the injunction laid on Lot and his family were binding upon
them, such devotion is sure to be richly repaid by the joys of the
discoverer and the solace of fame, if not by rewards of a less elevated
character.