Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/495

Rh of the ultimate reality is "mind, not mind as we know it in the complex form of thought and feeling, but those simpler elements of which thought and feeling are built up." Well, of course, materialism affects to be monistic, for it seeks to explain the whole universe in terms of matter. But how is Mr.Clifford's monism idealistic? The element of which "even the simplest feeling is a complex" he calls "mind-stuff." "Matter," he tells us, "is the mental picture of which mind is the thing represented. Reason, intelligence, and volition are properties of a complex, which is made up of elements, themselves not rational, not intelligent, not conscious." Is it possible, Mr.Pollock himself being judge, to call this doctrine idealism? This "mind-stuff," which, we are told, is the thing-in-itself, of which "a moving molecule of organic matter possesses a small piece," and which, "when matter takes the complex form of a living human brain, takes the form of a human consciousness, having intelligence and volition"—how is it possible to account for this "mind-stuff" as anything but matter? Again, consider the teaching of Professor Huxley. With whatever rhetorical ornaments he may gild it, what is its practical outcome but materialism? I am well aware of his opinion that the question "whether there is really anything anthropomorphic, even in man's nature," will ever remain an open one. I do not lose sight of his recognition of "the necessity of cherishing the noblest and most human of man's emotions by worship, for the most part of the silent sort, at the altar of the Unknown and Unknowable." But, on the other hand, I remember his positive declaration that "consciousness is a function of nervous matter, when that nervous matter has attained a certain degree of organization." I remember, too, his confident anticipation that "we shall sooner or later arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, just as we have arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat." And I do not forget that singularly powerful passage in his "Lay Sermons"—who that has once read it can forget it?—in which he enforces what he deems "the great truth," that "the progress of science has in all ages meant, and now more than ever means, the extension of the province of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant gradual banishment, from all regions of human thought, of what we call spirit and spontaniety"; that "as surely as every future grows out of the past and present, so will the physiology of the future gradually extend the realm of matter and law until it is coextensive with knowledge, with feeling, with action." Once more. Let us turn to a teacher more widely influential, perhaps, than even Mr.Huxley. I mean Mr.Herbert Spencer. He, too, recognizes "an unknown and unknowable power without beginning or end in tirae." He tells us expressly in his "Psychology" that consciousness can not be a mode of movement, and that if we must choose between these two modes of being, as the generative and primitive mode, it would be the first, and not the last, which he would choose. These