Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/282

Rh forms of monism now extant. The purely materialistic monism, for which the hard and extended atoms of naive realism are already and in themselves potentially mind, the old-fashioned materialism of days when Mind-Stuff and physiological psychology were alike undreamed of, may indeed be neglected. That doctrine needed not critical philosophy, of more than a very undeveloped sort, to do away with it once for all. Modern monism knows of supposed atoms that are in their ultimate nature psychical; and of supposed psychical forces or agents that, when seen from without, behave much like extended atoms. But the old fragment of matter that, being no more than what every blacksmith knows as matter, was yet to be with all its impenetrability and its inertia a piece of the soul, has been banished from the talk of serious philosophers. There remain, then, the numerous efforts that see in the world the expression of psychical powers as such, not mere mind-stuff atoms, but organized wholes, related in nature to what we know by internal experience as mind, yet higher or lower, subtler or mightier, wiser or more foolish, than the human intelligence. These views may be divided into two classes: those that see in nature the manifestations of a logical or intelligent power, and those that see in it the manifestations of an alogical or blind, though still psychical power. Each of these classes again may be subdivided according as the power is conceived as conscious or as unconscious in its working. How do these ontological efforts stand related to critical thought?

First let us consider logical monism. Since hu-