Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/425

Rh other heavy body lifted without taxing any one's muscles, the best way to do it is to hire a medium who will engage a disembodied spirit to do the job. Materialism in the sense above limited, far from threatening any injury to or derogating from the dignity of mind, is the very thing that will most help to bring mind to the highest perfection, while it promotes its dignity by making all material things subservient to it.

But there is another point of view. This doctrine, far from being of a radical and disturbing kind, is eminently conservative and favorable to intellectual order. Why? Because it establishes the truth that mind is not an unconditioned entity, as some are inclined to regard it, but a thing strictly conditioned and limited. The world ought by this time to have got over the old metaphysical notion of the absolute independence of mind, but it has not, in point of fact, got over it; and, strange to say, some of those who hold most strongly to the old error are professed freethinkers. In fact, we are not sure but that the ranks of technical "free thought" are to day the very citadel of that error. It seems to be continually assumed that the vindication of the right of free-thought carries with it an assertion of the competency of every man's thought for all possible intellectual enterprises. Here we see the old idea of the mind as a kind of impalpable essence of absolutely unlimited powers, tethered neither to time, to place, nor to circumstances. But supposing the opposite truth were universally and frankly recognized, that each man's mind was simply what circumstances past and present had made it, a man would not in claiming free thought feel, as so many do now, that he was asserting his right and his competency to deal with all problems in heaven and on earth, but simply that he was asserting his right to exercise that limited activity for which his mind was adapted. A man whose body was in durance would not, in claiming physical liberty, fall under the illusion that if he could once gain his liberty he would be competent with his body to perform all manner of gymnastic feats. No; because he knows what his body is fit for, what it has been trained to, and what lies altogether beyond its powers, natural and acquired. If, when he had obtained his liberty, somebody wanted him to attempt at once, by way of marking and emphasizing his perfect freedom from physical control, some very difficult and dangerous athletic feat to which he had never been accustomed, he would be wise if he turned a deaf ear to the suggestion; or, rather, he would be an extraordinary fool if he listened to it. Yet it will scarcely be maintained that exactly similar folly is not often practiced by way of emphasizing freedom from mental control—that is to say, that men rush at the most difficult intellectual problems without any preliminary consideration of the question of their competency for dealing with them successfully or hopefully. As long as they arrive at some conclusion which they can fling in the faces of their supposed opponents as a trophy of free thought, they are satisfied. The remedy for this kind of folly is plain. It lies in the "materialistic" doctrine, as we claim the right to call it, that the mind is as limited a thing as the body, and that therefore we can not properly assign any more extensive meaning to freedom of the mind than we do to freedom of the body. Both kinds of freedom are good, but neither confers new powers, except in so far as the exercise which freedom makes possible tends to develop power. Power, however, is only developed by rational exercise; bodily growth can be arrested, and the bodily frame twisted out of shape, by excessive or ill-directed exercise; and precisely so with the mind. While, therefore, we have all possible sympathy with the claim for freedom of thought, we wish we could always