Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/497

Rh host of less famous writers widely influential on English thought, must in strictness be reckoned as materialists. All three do, in effect, express the entire man by matter, his intellectual and moral being as well as his corporal frame. All three do, in effect, restrict our knowledge to the phenomenal universe, of which consciousness and will are, for them, fortuitous or necessary products. Now I am far from asserting that there is anything to prevent us from being spiritualists in psychology, while in cosmology we accept the dynamical explanation, and confess that everywhere in the universe are forces and centers of forces. But this is a very different view from that which regards intellect as a mode of motion, or as a manifestation of physical energy. "The faculties of the mind, feeling, and will," writes Mr.Frederic Harrison, "are directly dependent upon the physical organs. To talk to me of mind, feeling, will, in the absence of physical organs, is to use language which to me, at least, is pure nonsense." Mr. Harrison's creed, it would appear, may be summed up in the simple symbol, "I believe in the brain, the viscera, and the reproductive apparatus." Deity without a stomach is inconceivable to him. This very eloquent and very positive writer has the courage of his opinions. But, as it appears to me, the doctrines of Professor Clifford, of Professor Huxley, of Mr.Herbert Spencer, in their ultimate resolution, are substantially at one with his. Whatever differences divide these illustrious men from one another, they all agree in putting aside, as unverifiable, everything which the senses can not verify; everything beyond the bounds of physical science; everything which can not be brought into a laboratory and dealt with chemically. It will be found in the long run that there are two, and only two, great schools of thought, two schools which, in common with the philosophical writers of Germany, France, and Italy, I shall denominate Spiritualism and Materialism, until better terms are forthcoming. Spiritualism seeks the explanation of the universe from within, and with Kant holds it as a fundamental truth that the nature of our thinking being imposes our way of conceiving, of valuing, and even of apprehending sensible things. Materialism maintains that in those sensible things must be sought the explanation of our ideas and of our wills. Spiritualism postulates a First Cause possessing absolute freedom, and recognizes true causality in man also, with his endowment of limited and conditioned liberty of the will. Materialism holds that we can know nothing before the proximate and determining causes of phenomena, and demands, in the words of Mr.Huxley, "the banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity." Spiritualism insists upon the unity of consciousness, upon consciousness of personal identity,