Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/511

Rh truth, all schools of materialists are confronted with the initial difficulties of the unity of consciousness, of the individuality and permanency of the Ego. These facts, however complex and obscure—and I fully recognize their complexity and obscurity—are the stumbling-block of every school of materialists, just as they are the adamantine foundation of all spiritual philosophy. And the writer who tries to explain them away, who asks me to believe, upon his ipse dixit, that consciousness is a mere fortuitous result of mechanism, that thought is a mere cerebral secretion, that the Ego is a mere sensation, is a dogmatist who makes far greater demands upon my faith than any Catholic theologian or Jewish rabbi. I know not any article of any creed, which so largely taxes my credulity, as does the proposition that there can be consciousness without personality, memory without identity, duty without liberty.

No sort of compromise, no kind of modus vivendi, appears to me to be possible between these two schools of Spiritualism and Materialism. I admit, indeed, that we may learn much from many teachers whose theories I judge most false. Let us gladly accept their facts. Let us also narrowly scrutinize their arguments. The writers whom I have in view, however admirable in other respects, are assuredly great corrupters of words. Too often they exhibit the smallest power of distinguishing between a nude hypothesis and a proved conclusion. They omit necessary links in their reasoning, as when, for example, they pass at a bound over the unbridged gulf between automatic consciousness and deliberate volition. They tell us, perhaps not quite accurately, that the brain is the origin of thought, and then they proceed to argue as though they had demonstrated that it is the cause of thought, and that intellect is a mere cerebral phenomenon. They talk glibly of causation, as if they knew all about it, overlooking their entire inability to analyze the causal nexus. And what shall we say of the way in which they habitually employ the term law? It really means in physics no more than "an observed uniformity of sequence or co-existence." But they give it a sort of personification, and speak of it as a cause. They confound it with necessity, forgetting that there is all the difference in the world between invariable regularity and necessary regularity. I confess—I trust I may be pardoned for so far yielding to a professional instinct—that I often put down the pompous pages of some of the most famous of them and say to myself: "If only I could have you under cross-examination for half an hour! How easy it would be to turn you inside out to show what a mass of arbitrary assumption, of confused ratiocination, of audacious sophism, all this brilliant rhetoric is!"

But let us remember that philosophy is the science of principles,