Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/500

480 eternal series of visible movements, more or less complex, all reducible to invisible movements, obeying the laws of physics. Reason, intelligence, will, personality are for him mere metaphors. He reduces them all to mechanism and movement. The intellect he regards as a thinking machine, just as the stomach is a digesting machine. He will speak of the soul, if you please; but, like Mr.Tyndall, he warns you that you must take it merely as a poetical expression, a rhetorical figure. With reason did Michelet, after reading his admirably written book on Intelligence, exclaim in dismay, "II me prend mon moi." France, after all, is still the country in which the movements of the European mind may be most fruitfully studied. If Germany is the mine of ideas, it is France which mints them and makes them current coin. Intellectually considered, Italy and Spain are merely outlying provinces of France, and her influence upon English and Teutonic thinkers, if less magisterial, is hardly less effective.

I consider, then, that if we survey the higher thought of Europe, as a whole, we must find it largely given over to materialism. And if we turn to the more popular literature, in which is the truest expression of society, the same tale is unfolded. What a portent is that large and ever-growing school of "naturalistic" fiction of which M.Zola is the honored and prosperous chief, and which is so eagerly read, and so largely imitated, throughout the civilized world! "Toute metaphysique m'épouvante" that master tells us. His works, he claims, are conceived in the true "scientific" spirit. Matter is for him the only reality, and in its honor he raises pæsans "like the shrieks of a hyena at discovering that the universe is all actually carrion." But it is not merely in the literature of the erotic passion, and of the genetic impulse, that the mark of the beast is plainly visible. How many a grave writer of our day has acquired a reputation for originality simply upon the strength of a fantastic physical terminology! Instead of intellect, he speaks of nervous centers; instead of life, of the play of cellular activities; instead of mental energy, of cerebral erethism. And his readers, piquing themselves on their distrust of everything outside the sphere of what they call facts, will "wonder with a foolish face of praise." In truth, every branch of intellectual activity bears witness to the advance of materialism in the popular mind; to the dying out of the old spiritual and ideal types. Thus, in politics, we see the domination of the brute force of numbers, of majorities told by head, becoming almost everywhere an accomplished fact. The instincts and passions of the masses, who are little more than matter in motion, are accepted as the supreme law, in the place of justice and virtue, of reason and religion. Art, too, has bowed her sacred head to the materialistic yoke. It has been well remarked that in the pictures of the old masters you have not merely a natural scene, but the soul of the painter who looked upon it. That attribute of soul