Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/498

478 upon the ichheit des Ego—the selfhood of the Me—as the original and ultimate facts of man's existence. Materialism dissolves the Ego into a collection of sensations, makes of consciousness an accidental and superficial effect of mechanism, and exhibits man as a mere sequence of action and reaction. Spiritualism maintains the absolute nature of ethics; the immutable distinction between moral good and evil. Materialism refers everything to heredity, temperament, environment, convention. Spiritualism affirms the supersensuous, yes, let us venture upon the word, the supernatural, in man, and finds irrefragable evidence of it in

"... this main miracle, that thou art thou, With power on thine own act, and on the world."

Materialism makes of the soul, with Professor Tyndall, "a poetical rendering of a phenomenon which refuses the yoke of ordinary mechanical laws," explains will and conscience as merely a little force and heat organized, and, in Coleridge's pungent phrase, "peeps into death to look for life, as monkeys put their hands behind a looking-glass." Such are the two great schools of thought which are disputing the intellect of the world.

Now, I take it, that one of the most striking signs of the times is the extent to which materialism has triumphed throughout Europe. Fifty or sixty years ago it might well have seemed as though Kant had made an end in Germany of the doctrine which, derived by the philosophes of the last century from Locke, had been carried to its logical issue by Cabanis and Condillac. In England the school of Reid was, in some sort, doing a similar work. In France the influence of Royer Collard, Maine de Biran, Jouffroy, and Cousin—all, whatever their differences, firmly attached to the main principles of spiritualism—was dominant. In Italy the works of Pasquale Galuppi had diffused some knowledge of the critical philosophy, and Rosmini's "New Essay on the Origin of Ideas" had made its way into many seminaries. Now, all is changed. In Germany a school has arisen based on the empirical doctrines supposed to have been forever discarded, but giving to them a new and more precise form. Of its many able exponents it must suffice here to mention only one, Herr Büchner, whose book on "Matter and Force" has had an immense success in his own country, and has been translated, I believe, into well-nigh all European languages. M.Janet, no mean judge, reckons it as "the tersest, frankest, and clearest system of materialism which has appeared in Europe since the famous 'Système de la Nature.'" It is true that in Germany the influence of these new materialistic doctrines would appear to be on the wane. They are not specially fitted to recommend themselves to the Teutonic mind, with its innate bias to idealism. And they have been vigorously combated by a number of extremely able writers, foremost among whom must be reckoned Lange and Von Hartmann, Ulrici and Lotze. Yet no one can carefully study