Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/281

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This process was conceived to have its seat in a single homogeneous substance which was material rather than metaphysical; that is, in brief, was matter. The point to be particularly noted is that such a substance must be behind appearance; it must be a "hidden background"; it must be invisible. In other words the real world must be an invisible world. The obvious reason for this was that the visible world seemed too transitory and insignificant, and as regards men, too evil and worthless to satisfy the deeper longings of the poet's emotional nature.

Modern materialism has undoubtedly taken on a quite different motive from that which gave it birth, for no one would contend for a moment that the materialistic conception of the world in our day is primarily poetic. Its design is unquestionably rational and logical rather than emotional. Viewed historically this poetic motive of materialism has never met the needs in a large and general way, of the emotional side of human nature. The great epochal outbursts of poetic genius throughout the ages have been in one form or another quite the opposite of materialistic. The Dantes and Petrarchs, and Chancers and Spensers, the Miltons and Shakespeares, and Goethes and Brownings, have been men with a strongly ideal or spiritual quality. The poets who by touching the hearts of men mightily have become their universal spokesmen have been of very different mould from Lucretius. Taking the facts which history actually presents to us, materialism as a poetic and philosophic motive has not been superlatively great; it has not met. the deeper needs of the race.

What we now have to consider is whether modernized, that is to say rationalized, materialism is more successful. You will recall my earlier statement that science, like other fields of human endeavor, is rarely if ever capable of self-criticism to the extent of recasting, with no impetus from the outside, fundamental defects and errors into which it may have fallen. I believe science is now face to face with interests and demands from other quarters than its own that will compel a self-examination of its fundamental processes and conceptions, and then a recognition of what is in reality untenable in its materialistic theory of the world. This pressure, one hardly needs to point out, is being brought to bear from the sides of psychology, philosophy, religion and sociology. Summing up the whole situation, no candid observer can fail to acknowledge that the materialistic tendencies of the last twenty-five or fifty years have had something unmistakably brutish about them as regards the affairs of men. The doctrine of survival of the fittest has surely been of this character, and the so-called economic interpretation of human history and society, based avowedly to a considerable extent