WHAT IS MODERN MATERIALISM?
MONSIGNOR CAPEL seems to have been discoursing on Sunday at St. George's Cathedral, Southwark, on the Materialism of the age, but he does not seem to have taken much pains to define what is properly meant by Materialism of any kind. In a popular sense,—and this seems to be the sense in which Monsignor Capel used it,—Materialism is taken as the name of all those tendencies which serve the physical rather than the intellectual or spiritual life of man. In other words, Monsignor Capel regarded Materialism as the name of a practical bias, rather than as the name of an intellectual theory,—as the name of a disposition to which those who dis- believe in the materialistic theory are, if not as liable as those who believe in it, still at least as liable as they themselves are to any other conscious temptation against which they are warned and on their guard. We doubt if this is a wise use of the word Materialism.' Certainly it is not an economical one, as it only provides a second name for that tendency to dwell in things visible and external which in the New Testament is called a ' carnal ' disposition, as distinguished from the disposition which lives in what is not temporary, but eternal. Perhaps Monsignor Capel called this tendency Materialism, because in the present day it is a disposition which is nourished on an intellectual diet, —on the consciousness of that immense relative growth of our knowledge of material things and of the material arts, which has shaken the importance attached to things spiritual, and to some extent also the confidence in their existence. And so far as this was the preacher's meaning, no doubt there was some propriety in the use of the term. That sensuous or sensual dis- position to live in what is changeful and temporary which St. Paul called carnal, has no necessary connection with Ma- terialism; but undoubtedly a strong Materialism will always have a necessary tendency to produce that cast of character. And this suggests what seems to us the true definition of Materialism. It is not properly, we think, Materialism to believe, as some very eminent thinkers and some very eminent and (in their day) orthodox ecclesiastics have believed, that the Soul of man is a physical entity, existing only at some particular point of space, and necessarily incurring dissolution, unless rendered immortal by an act of divine power performed in order that the soul may receive the reward of its good or evil deeds. That has often been called Materialism, but so long as the belief remains that this material soul has any real and independent moral power of its own which earns the divine reward or punishment, the fancy that it may be something necessarily possessed of physical qualities,—nay, even that it is visible or tangible, if you will,—is comparatively unim- portant. Materialism in this sense may be an eccentric opinion, and may be regarded by some as inconsistent with the belief in any moral power to earn the gift of a spiritual immortality ; but nevertheless, while the latter belief remains, the materialism, so far as it goes, does not touch the roots of life, does not reduce moral and spiritual life to a mere consequence of laws which can be completely stated and conceived without any reference to moral and spiritual life at all.
On the other hand, as it seems to us, there is a sort of Idealism which is essentially materialistic, even though he who holds and defends it doubts or denies, as is sometimes the
case, the existence of matter altogether. Take the case of one who resolves all matter into force, who regards not only motion, sound, and light, and heat, but all tangible and visible things as mere modes of force, and declares that to call force material is to define the comparatively known by the com- pletely unknown. He, it will be said, is no materialist. Yet if such a one goes on to assert that the higher order of phenomena are strictly dependent on the lower, that, given a definite law of the elementary forces, the more complex laws of the higher aspects of our nature are rigidly implied in them and deducible out of them, it seems to us that, to use Johnson's old play upon words, although he may assert that there is no matter, it is no matter what he asserts. The sting of Materialism, that which makes it, as we believe, erroneous and dangerous, and as almost everyone would say, powerful and efficacious in its influence on character, is not the incidental opinion that the soul is something which might be seen, or even enclosed by sufficiently refined agencies and fixed at a given point in space, but that its spiritual and moral life is a mere issue and effluence of certain laws of lower things, in which laws it originated, and to which as its determining cause it must be traced back.
Not many months ago, we ventured, not in any spirit of cen- - sonousness or out of any odium theologicum, but from the simplest possible wish to give a quasi-scientific meaning to a quasi-scientific term, to say that the most perfect expression of the thought of Materialism we had ever met with was that given by Mr. Douglas
Spalding in his very interesting paper on the intuitive instincts and perceptions of birds in Macmillan's Magazine for February last. In that paper he declared his belief that if it were possible to conceive the sudden production of a duplicate human organisation physiologi- cally identical in every respect,—in every convolution of the brain and every plexus of the nerves,—with that of a living man, the organisation in question would, on waking to life, be found to have a consciousness both of the past and the future,—would be, that is, in relation to memory, affections, fancies, hopes, faiths,—in every respect identical with the being who had acquired all these by real experience. It seems to us impossible to express the scientific essence of the materialistic faith more rigorously,--to put in a more clear and concise form the belief that every moral and spiritual fact has its foundation so completely based in a material fact, that if you could only forge the material fact without going through the usual moral and spiritual antecedents for producing it, you would find that you had arrived by a short cut at the moral and spiritual fact. It is impossible to express more happily and sharply the belief that the lower organisation is the whole and sufficient cause of the higher, that you have nothing at all in what is usually called the spiritual side of life which is not a mere consequence of laws of force of a lower kind,—AUCO it is here conceded that it would be possible to palm off a totally fictitious history, and a whole world of totally fallacious impressions, on any creature whose physical orga- nisation could be accommodated to particular physical conditions. Could one represent more vividly the belief that the physical life governs the (so-called) moral and spiritual life, and not, in any degree even, the moral and spiritual life the physical ? If such an opinion be true, let it by all means be demonstrated and verified. We should be the last to cast any kind of moral censure on the falsest possible theory honestly maintained by a sincere and candid mind. But what is to be called Materialism, if that is not Material- ism? The name had better be dropped altogether, if it is invidious to apply it to so sharply incisive a theory of the absolute dependence of moral and spiritual on a lower order of facts, as was here announced.
And it is precisely in this sense, and in no other, that we call the tendencies of the present day specifically materialistic. There have been plenty of periods in which men have been far more 'carnally' disposed, to use the New Testament phrase, far more biassed by their own passions to the life which is rooted in the external, the temporary, the changeful, the shows of things, than they are now. It is probably true to say that at no time has there been so mach genuine religion in the world as there is now, so much of spiritual life, even amongst those who disbelieve in spiritual life, so much of high moral feeling, even in those who proclaim aloud the utili- tarian creed as the standard of all ethics. B ut at the same time, there never has been a period when the vast strides in our knowledge of the lower phenomena and the operation of the forces which govern the part of our organisation usually called physical, have so thrown into the shade the guesses at truth' on the other side of our nature, and made them seem for a time so vague and dim and almost unverifiable, that the intellectual tendency is more and more to let a well-defined fact of the former bearing weigh twice as heavily, even with our imagination, as a whole class of vague and less accurately defined facts of the latter bearing. Steam and the Electric Telegraph, and the theory of natural selection,' and of inherited character, and of unconscious 'cerebration,' ride rough- shod over our speculations ; and our age seems to itself to tread firmly only when it is following out a physical clue to a moral issue. This, therefore, and this only is what it seems to us that Materialism means,--not a conjecture as to the soul having a ma- terial shape, though we confess we never have understood what that could mean, but the belief that the law of the higher is ultimately to be found in the law of the lower, that moral and spiritual facts could all be predicted by anyone who bad a thorough knowledge of the laws of what rightly or wrongly is called the material universe, that principles of right and wrong, the life of the conscience, the volitions of the spirit, flow out of the molecular and other forces which regulate the attraction, repulsion, and combination of the simplest constituents of the physical uni- verse, as the web of the cloth flows from the machinery in which the wool is woven. If that be not Materialism,—at least in the only sense in which our day is specially materialistic,—we do not know what Materialism is. Of course it is open to any such materialist to assert that though he believes what he calls the moral and spiritual life to be strictly determined by the laws of what is called the physical and physiological life, still he may find it more philo-
sophical to refer these in their turn to a Creative spirit, so that at the root of all the causative material phenomena, he assumes a still more radical spiritual cause. But even so, granting that the material laws are to be conceived as the instrument of a divine spirit, Materialism does not lose any of its dangerous influence over our moral bias. If the material laws are mere secondary instru- ments in the hands of a divine mind bent on deducing spiritual forces out of the material, still, if they are thus deduced with as much certainty, as rigorous and inevitable a sequence, as the cer- tainty with which, given the initial velocity of projection, the path of a planet is deduced from the laws of dynamics, it is clear that there is no room for moral freedom, and that the spiritual re- sults are one and all mere manipulations by the original creative mind of its own resources,—manipulations effected for its own de- light. Such a conclusion cannot but throw men back on materialistic conceptions, as, at least to them, more apprehensible, and therefore more adequate than spiritual. Moreover, in most men, the denial of any spiritual phenomenon which is independent of a physical cause, will unquestionably involve very great doubt of the existence of any spiritual origin for the physical cause, and so lead to a final acquiescence in the lower laws of the universe as the most fundamental of all,—the nearest of any to the fountain of things, the equivalent, so far as an equivalent exists, for the idea of Creation. And of course such a theoretic conception can- not but have practical consequences. However noble the forms of our modern materialism, we cannot realise our absolute and abject dependence upon forces of which number and magnitude are the completest and most exhaustive measures, without feeling that a great blow has been struck at the dream that we are moral beings at all, or without learning to rely ever more and more upon the physical machinery of life as the only true leverage for the improvement of what we call, but in that case mistakenly call, its moral tendencies. Only one who believes that even in man there is an element which is not the work of his physical constitution, will be inclined to appeal directly with any real hope to his spiritual nature. They who deny this will say, that the spiritual and moral life is indeed the blossom of the tree, but that the blossom depends upon the roots, and that as the roots are in the earth, it is only by dealing with the body that We can hope to affect the mind.
Previous page
