Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/278

 iS^ THE FRENCH ILLUMINATION. by the fact that they are all mere negations of that which we know. Experience reveals to us only the extended, the cor- poreal, the divisible — but the mind is to be the opposite of all three, yet at the same time to possess the power (how, no man can tell) of acting on that which is material and of being acted upon by it. In thus dividing himself into body and soul, man has in reality only distinguished between his brain and himself. Man is a purely physical being. All so-called spiritual phenomena are functions of the brain, special cases of the operation of the universal forces of nature. Thought and volition are sensation, sensation is motion. The mov- ing forces in the moral world are the same as those in the physical world ; in the latter they are called attraction and repulsion, in the former, love and hate; that which the moralist terms self-love is the same instinct of self-preserva- tion which is familiar in physics as the force of inertia. As man has doubled himself, so also he has doubled nature. Evil gave the first impulse to the formation of the idea of God, pain and ignorance have been the parents of superstition; our sufferings were ascribed to unknown powd- ers, of which we were in fear, but which, at the same time, we hoped to propitiate by prayer and sacrifice. The wise turned with their worship and reverence toward a more worthy object, to the great All ; and, in fact, if we seek to give the word God a tenable meaning, it signifies active nature. The error lay in the dualistic view, in the distinction between nature and itself, /'. e., its activity, and in the belief that the explanation of motion required a separate immaterial Mover. This assumption is, in the first place, false, for since the All is the complex of all that exists there can be nothing outside it ; motion follows from the existence of the universe as necessarily as its other properties; the world does not receive it from without, but imparts it to itself by its own power. In the second place the assumption is useless; it explains nothing, but confuses the problems of natural science to the point of insolubility. In the third place it is self-contradictory, for after theology has removed the Deity as far away from man as possible, by means of the negative metaphysical predicates, it finds itself necessitated to bring the two together again through the moral attributes — which