Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/496

476 sayings certainly do not sound like materialism. I think, however, that if we closely examine his writings, we shall find the persistence of force his one formula. With that he will bring for you life out of the non-living; morality out of the unethical; the spiritual out of the physical. The persistence of force! I trust it will not seem to exhibit an unappreciativeness, which I am far from feeling, of the high gifts and unwearied self-devotion of this eminent man, if I say that he has always appeared to me to belong to a class of thinkers aptly described in one of Voltaire's letters: "Des gens que se mettent, sans façon, dans la place de Dieu: qui veulent créer le monde avec la parole." But this autotheism is really materialism in disguise. If all beings, all modes and forms of existence, are but transformations of force, obeying only mechanical laws, the laws of movement—and that is what Mr.Spencer's doctrine amounts to, if there is any meaning in words—what is the universe but a senseless mechanism? Mr.Spencer, indeed, protests against the application to matter of such epithets as "gross" or "brute." He delights to expatiate on its wonderful properties; and in his latest work he speaks of "a universe everywhere alive; alive, if not in a restricted sense, at least in a general sense." Still the fact remains that Mr.Spencer seeks to interpret all things in terms of matter and motion, and holds life to be a mere result of physical forces. There are only two conceivable hypotheses open to us. Either Nature is the outcome of intellect, or intellect is the outcome of Nature. Mr.Spencer's teaching, considered as a whole, is an elaborate argument on behalf of the latter of these hypotheses. And what is this but materialism? I know that Mr.Spencer would call himself a realist. I think that Professor Huxley, in better moments "among the many workings of his mind," would call himself an idealist; and, as we have seen, the friend who has written so well about the late Professor Clifford calls him an idealistic monist. Mr. Pollock, indeed, goes on to observe, "It is hardly worth while to dispute about names, when more serious things remain for discussion." These words seem to me in themselves a revelation, not, indeed, of light, but of darkness; they give us a glimpse of chaos and the void inane. Surely names are the signs of, nay, the substitutes for, ideas; formulas summing up for us, briefly, it may be a train of reasoning, a series of sensations, a multitude of images. Unless we use them as parrots do, which, to be sure, is the habit of many people, they stand to us in the place of things. Hence the immense importance, upon which I have already touched, of exact terminology. If our nomenclature is vague, we shall be continually mistaking one thing for another. "Pantheism or pottheism—what matter, so long as it is true?" Mr.Carlyle asked. But my present inquiry is not if the teaching, whether of the late Mr. Clifford, of Mr.Huxley, of Mr.Herbert Spencer, is true, but what that teaching really is. And my contention is that all these three gifted men, whom I select as types of a