MR. MARTINEAU ON MATERIALISM. DROFESSOR TYNDALL'S reply in the November
number of
the Contemporary Review to Mr. Martineau's criticisms on some of the positions of his Belfast address in 1874, has elicited a rejoinder from Mr. Martineau in the new number of the same periodical, which in the clearness of its positions and the precision of its reasoning, should, at least, protect him against any-Teitera- tion of Professor Tyndall's accusation of want of lucidity in his style, and want of accuracy in his apprehensions of the issues discusse& between them. Indeed, to those who look not so much at the descriptions of physical phenomena referred to for purposes of illustration, as at the exposition of the intel- lectual assumptions involved in the scientific description of these phenomena, and the rational inferences drawn from them, it will appear, as we ventured to intimate in commenting on Pro- fessor Tyndall's paper in the November Contemporary, that the charge of vagueness of conception and looseness of exposition may be made with much more truth against his own presentation of the case than against Mr. Martineau's. Indeed, we defy any one to apprehend clearly what it is that Professor Tyndall meant to assert, when he derived all the various elaborate forms of life now existing from what he called the "potency" of matter, and what it is, on the other hand, that he was angry with his op- ponents for supposing that he meant to assert and earnestly pro- tested that he refused to assert. If we are not mistaken, he will find that Mr. Martineau had a much clearer concep- tion than he himself had of the intellectual creed shadowed forth in the Belfast address ; nor need he be much abashed by the discovery, since it has been one of Mr. Martineau's chief works in life to discriminate accurately between the philo- sophical significanee of various systems of thought, while it has been his own duty chiefly to push forward science rather than to analyse its logic, or to distinguish sharply its fundamental assump- tions from the rationale of the methods it pursues and the con- clusions which it gathers. At the same time, when the purport of a popular address such as that given at Belfast is distinctly philosophical, as distinguished from merely scientific, when it deals boldly with the great question of origin, and calmly relegates religion to the sphere of emotion, bidding it beware of meddling with the realm of knowledge, it is not perhaps too much to expect that the thinker who delivers it should have a clearer grasp of the belief he is endeavouring to spread than Professor Tyndall appears to have had in his Presidential address at the British Association. It will be, we believe, the destiny of that picturesque survey of the achievements and claims of Science to make converts to a system of Materialism which it is, to say. the least, doubtful whether Professor Tyndall has ever held, and tolerably clear that he never accurately understood.
Materialism may be practically defined as the philosophy which lavishes on the elementary material agencies discovered to be at work in the universe, the wonder and admiration which all religious creeds reserve for the Mind by which the believers in these creeds assume that those material agencies are moulded and expanded till they produce the results which we all see. Now, whether Professor Tyndall really intended to imply that this wonder and admiration ought to be lavished on those material atoms which contain, according to him, "the promise and potency of every form of life," or whether, as we somewhat incline to believe, he intended us to suspend our judgments absolutely as to the proper object of this wonder and ad- miration,—in fact, wished us to indulge the emotion without defining any object for it at all, while we studied the forms in which this feeling would be apt to express itself, if the intellect refused to come to any decision as to the proper object of the emotion,—it would be a rash thing to affirm with any sort of confidence. In criticising Professor Tyndall's thesis that human emotion, not knowledge, is the true foundation for a religious philosophy, Mr. Martineau had replied that so soon as emotion proved empty, he hoped we should stamp it out, and get rid of it. On this Professor Tyndall brought a charge against Mr. Martineau, that he was kicking away the only founda- tion of his own faith. Mr. Martineau, as we understand him, now rejoins that he did not in the least intend to depreciate the testimony which emotion may supply to the existence of a real object for it, but that what he meant to say- was, that if the emotion is felt without a real object for it, if it makes us indulge in illusions as to an object which does not exist, if, in fact, it wraps us in a world of phantasm, instead of guiding us safely amid the realities of life, then, and then only, he hoped we might stamp it out. If, on the contrary, it be only a sign of something real, though as yet imperfectly apprehended, above and beyond us, then our effort ought to be to get a solid grasp, as far as our faculties admit, of the reality which arouses these emotions, but not to indulge them in the dark without any conviction that such an object really exists :— " It is -for ' emotion ' with a vacuum within and floating in vacuo without, charged with no thought and directed to no object, that I avow distrust; and if there be an 'over-shadowing awe 'from the mere sense of a blank consciousness and an enveloping 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 tempe- rature,' apart from any object of thought,' is to feign the impossible. Colour mast lie upon form, and heat must spring from a focus, and de- clare itself upon a surface. If by 'referring religion 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 certainly not exacting from his builders about the solidity of his ' foundation ; and it can be only a very light and airy architecture, 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 'philosophy' investigates 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 beginningr–a datum of ulterior gims.vita—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 censer invents his new foundation.' Here, he tells us we know nothing, we can think nothing ; the intellectual life is dun:13 and blank ; we do but blindly feel. How can a structure without truth repose on philosophy in its foundation?"
To this we cannot conceive any reply, unless it be that emotion may be properly aroused by even an unknown cause, when we contem- plate the magnitude of the effects produced by it,—which is true, so long as the emotion is limited to one of pure surprise and de- sire to sound what is nevertheless not to be sounded. But then if it be so limited, it is quite certain that no religion can ever be got out of it. A religion, if it be a religion in anything but name, implies moral trust in something, but moral trust is wholly un- warrantable, if all that we see can be even more securely referred to matter as "the promise and potency of every form of life," than it can to any ulterior spiritual cause beyond matter -which gave matter this "promise," and implanted in it, so far as it can be said to contain, this "potency." Mr. Martineau's argumentation in his new essay is wholly devoted to showing that in no sense can the higher forms of life be really educed out of the lower, unless you already assume as latent in the lower, the fullness of power which is eventually expressed in the higher. He analyses with great force and precision the real assumptions of the atomic theory, so far only as the che- mistry of the universe is supposed to be implicitly contained in its mechanics, and shows, as it seems to us unanswerably, that the only sense in which qualitative differences are explicable by the assumption of differences in the bare form and motion of otherwise homogeneous atoms, is a sense in which the hypothesis does not in the least explain the qualities thus resulting, but only finds for us a valuable scientific test and measure of their exist- ence and their intensity,—just as the assumption as to the length of different waves of light, while it gives us a test and measure of the different colours, and enables us to predict the results of interferences, does not in the least explain the sensation of colour, any more than the expansion of the mercury or the spirit in the tube of a thermometer, while it measures for us the intensity of heat, gives us the slightest explanation of the sensations which accompany the various gradations of that heat in our own frames. Show, if you can, that the chemical qualities of a substance might be connected with the as- sumed form and vibratory velocities of the atoms of which it is composed, yet this only means that you have discovered certain uniform criteria of the relation between mechanical and chemical phenomena, by the help of which you can predict the latter from the study of the former. Does that make it at all more philosophical to say that the latter are contained in the former ? Is the quality which we call heat (of sensation), in any way latent in the criterion which leads us to expect it ? Is the beauty of the flower latent in the seed, even in conjunction -with
the earth and air and moisture which lend that seed the consti- tuents of its growth ? If so, as Mr. Crosskey, of Birmingham, finely put it in the masterly sermon which he preached before the British Association last August at Bristol,* "in the attempt to reduce ' spirit ' to 'matter,' matter is itself transfigured and be- comes spirit." Or to quote the passage more at length :—
"The words 'promise' and 'potency,' as used by Tyndall, do not exclude intellectual action or describe an imagined physical substitute for a 'Father in heaven."Poteney'—for what ? Power exercised ac- cording to method is equivalent to power guided by controlling thought —and where there is controlling thought, the Lord of the Heavens and the earth is near at hand. In the last analysis matter itself disappears in any tangible sense, and force alone remains. What is force restricted to definite combinations, but the expression of a determining will? When 'promise' is connected with potency,' there must be that fore- casting of the future of which we know nothing except as a mental act. If qualities commonly described as mental are referred to the 'promise and potency' associated with 'matter,' mind is not degraded to matter, but matter is uplifted to mind. The tendency of philosophical materialism is not to scepticism, but to idealism. The resolution of matter into force, and the attribution to force of those mighty qualities, connected with ordered intellectual action, render the phenomena of the universe the manifestation of an authority possessed of every char- acteristic the Christian ascribes to his God. In the attempt to reduce 'spirit' to 'matter,' matter is itself transfigured and becomes spirit."
To apply the same argument in a particular case,—in what sense can the "struggle for existence," which Mr. Darwin has found to be so efficient .a cause in superseding lower by higher forms of life, —in other words, in producing a "survival of the fittest,"— be said to contain the "promise and potency" of the higher forms of human pity and sympathy, except only in this, that as a matter of fact, the one can be traced back in lineal descent to the other, though it so far transcends and indeed disguises the features of its ancestor, that the two are more like deadly antagonists than near relations? You can trace the steps of the descent, but it is mere folly to say in this case that the antecedent in any true sense carried within it the essential life of the consequent. And so, too, what spiritualists maintain, they maintain on strictly rational grounds. Man, as a speculative being, finds it reasonable to recognise in such transformations as these the maulding power of a Mind which sees the end from the beginning, rather than the magic transformations of a force which is always adding to its own conquests, without any pre- tence of being guided by the intellectual plan of a conqueror, and which is always improving on its former achievements without any standard by which to measure the better and the worse, or any goal at which its endeavours are aiming. To go back once more to the atomic theory, with which Mr. Martineau in this paper has chiefly dealt, it seems to us that he has really justified Sir John Herschel and Professor Clerk Max- well in their assertion that even assuming the atomic hypothesis to be so elaborated and established as to account for the phe- nomena of chemistry,—which as yet it is far from being,—the atoms so assumed must be regarded as resembling much more closely "manufactured articles,"—i.e., articles full of properties carefully induced in them,—than those bare and blank units of solidity which the true materialistic hypothesis requires. In other words, the different atoms must already be distinguished by such remarkable differences of form and capacity for vibration, that it is certainly not wonderful that they result in different qualitative properties, if they result in qualitative properties at all. Yet the fact that difference in form and vibratory character, is a note of some coming difference of quality, remains just as inexplicable, and as in need of a philosophic assumption to explain it, as the fact that the law of conflict and competition ultimately results in a law of sympathy and compassion. "No connection," says Mr. Crosskey, in the admirable sermon to which we have already referred, "that may be established between the act of thinking and the peculiarities of our bodily organisation, can alter the fact that to exist as beings capable of thought and moved by passion, implies relationships which the elements into which our flesh and blood may be resolved, do not share." And till Pro- fessor Tyndall can show that it is not a more legitimate intel- lectual inference to refer the less to the greater, than it is to refer the greater to the less, he will hardly be able to justify his own strange teaching that religion is concerned only with the region of emotion, and that he who tries to evolve a religious creed from the operations of all the higher faculties of man, instead of from mere blind feeling, is on a false scent, in which he will only
mislead mankind, and prepare for himself a heavy disappoint- ment.
• The Religious Worth and Glory of Scientific Research_ A Discourse delivered in the Lewin's Mead Chapel, Bristol, on Sunday, August 29th, 1875, on Occasion of the Forty-fifth Meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. By Henry William Crosskey, Fa.S. London: Whitfield.
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