Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/285

Rh and truth as materialism tries to make. Facts are the elements of truth much as chemical simples are the elements of chemical compounds. The critical natural-historian recognizes other differences than this between fact and truth but for the present discussion this suffices. All we need to do here is to insist that the cultivators of any domain whatever of natural knowledge who believe they see something in the nature of truth which makes truth's exaltation result in the degradation of fact, are moving over by just so much from the side of true science to that of subjectivism and mysticism, and that they are going by the road of mathematics makes no whit of difference so far as concerns the essence of the thing. I raise the question: Has mathematics any legitimate place in dealing with the objective universe beyond that of helping to "visualize" those portions of it too minute or too transparent or delicate for man's unaided senses? In other words, can it render any real service further than that of helping to make the description of nature more full and accurate and serviceable to man?

The natural history motive is not to "get behind" the actual world in the sense in which materialism would do this, but to get more deeply into the actual world—to move more and ever more of the world into the fold of real knowledge.

Scientific or rational materialism no less than poetic materialism is virtually a system of world-repudiation. The natural history standpoint, on the contrary, is the very antithesis of this, and looking at the two systems still from the standpoint of their treatment of the attributes of objects, we are able to see clearly wherein the materialistic standpoint can not possibly meet the needs of man's deeper nature while the natural history standpoint genuinely and unreservedly accepted and understood seems capable of satisfying these needs. In its determination to reduce all things to one or at least a very few simple material substances or forces and so to explain them, materialism of necessity makes the actual world subordinate to, or, as it sometimes says, a manifestation of these deeper essences and in doing this, of course, must subordinate the good there is in the world as well as the bad to these invisible simples; and when we look at what this means in the light of the part that the attributes of bodies play in the make-up of all our knowledge of nature, the real meaning of the statement made some pages back—that there is something genuinely brutish in materialism—becomes obvious. It means that the higher attributes of man's nature are never taken at their face value; they are nothing but manifestations of something lower clown and more elemental in the scale of beings. The materialistic philosophy is always a philosophy of "nothing but."

The conclusion of the foremost protagonists in our day of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest and natural selection that the esthetic and religious attributes of men are merely by-products of their survival