Biassed judgments inspired by moral inertia.
The emotions and the moral principles that are naturally allied to materialism suffer an eclipse when materialism, which is properly a primary or dogmatic philosophy, breathing courage and victory, appears as a destructive force and in the incongruous rôle of a critic. One dogmatism is not fit to criticise another; their conflict can end only in insults, sullenness, and an appeal to that physical drift and irrational selection which may ultimately consign one party to oblivion. But a philosophy does ill to boast of such borrowed triumphs. The next turn of the wheel may crush the victor, and the opinions hastily buried may rise again to pose as the fashionable and superior insights of a later day. To criticise dogmatism it is necessary to be a genuine sceptic, an honest transcendentalist, that falls back on the immediate and observes by what principles of logical architecture the ultimate, the reality discovered, has been inferred from it. Such criticism is not necessarily destructive; some construction and some belief being absolutely inevitable, if reason and life are to operate at all, criticism merely offers us the opportunity of revising and purifying our dogmas, so as to make them reasonable and congruous with practice. Materialism may thus be reinstated on transcendental grounds, and the dogma at first uttered in the flush of intelligent perception, with no scruple or self-consciousness, may be repeated after a thorough examination of heart, on the ground that it is the best possible expression of experience, the inevitable deliverance of thought. So approached, a dogmatic system will carry its critical justification with it, and the values it enshrines and secures will not be doubtful. The emotions it arouses will be those aroused by the experience it explains. Causes having been found for what is given, these causes will be proved to have just that beneficent potency and just that distressing inadequacy which the joys and failures of life show that the reality has, whatever this reality may otherwise be. The theory will add nothing except the success involved in framing it. Life being once for all what it is, no physics can render it worse or better, save as the knowledge of physics, with insight into the causes of our varied fortunes, is itself an achievement and a new resource.
Positive emotions proper to materialism.
A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion, merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror may not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into everything that we know. Materialism has its distinct æsthetic and emotional colour, though this may be strangely affected and even reversed by contrast with systems of an incongruous hue, jostling it accidentally in a confused and amphibious mind. If you are in the habit of believing in special providences, or of expecting to continue your romantic adventures in a second life, materialism will dash your hopes most unpleasantly, and you may think for a year or two that you have nothing left to live for. But a thorough materialist, one born to the faith and not half plunged into it by an unexpected christening in cold water, will be like the superb Democritus, a laughing philosopher. His delight in a mechanism that can fall into so many marvellous and beautiful shapes, and can generate so many exciting passions, should be of the same intellectual quality as that which the visitor feels in a museum of natural history, where he views the myriad butterflies in their cases, the flamingoes and shell-fish, the mammoths and gorillas. Doubtless there were pangs in that incalculable life, but they were soon over; and how splendid meantime was the pageant, how infinitely interesting the universal interplay, and how foolish and inevitable those absolute little passions. Somewhat of that sort might be the sentiment that materialism would arouse in a vigorous mind, active, joyful, impersonal, and in respect to private illusions not without a touch of scorn.
To the genuine sufferings of living creatures the ethics that accompanies materialism has never been insensible; on the contrary, like other merciful systems, it has trembled too much at pain and tended to withdraw the will ascetically, lest the will should be defeated. Contempt for mortal sorrows is reserved for those who drive with hosannas the Juggernaut car of absolute optimism. But against evils born of pure vanity and self-deception, against the verbiage by which man persuades himself that he is the goal and acme of the universe, laughter is the proper defence. Laughter also has this subtle advantage, that it need not remain without an overtone of sympathy and brotherly understanding; as the laughter that greets Don Quixote’s absurdities and misadventures does not mock the hero’s intent. His ardour was admirable, but the world must be known before it can be reformed pertinently, and happiness, to be attained, must be placed in reason.
The material world not dead nor ugly,
Oblivious of Democritus, the unwilling materialists of our day have generally been awkwardly intellectual and quite incapable of laughter. If they have felt anything, they have felt melancholy. Their allegiance and affection were still fixed on those mythical sentimental worlds which they saw to be illusory. The mechanical world they believed in could not please them, in spite of its extent and fertility. Giving rhetorical vent to their spleen and prejudice, they exaggerated nature’s meagreness and mathematical dryness. When their imagination was chilled they spoke of nature, most unwarrantably, as dead, and when their judgment was heated they took the next step and called it unreal. A man is not blind, however, because every part of his body is not an eye, nor every muscle in his eye a nerve sensitive to light. Why, then, is nature dead, although it swarms with living organisms, if every part is not obviously animate? And why is the sun dark and cold, if it is bright and hot only to animal sensibility? This senseless lamentation is like the sophism of those Indian preachers who, to make men abandon the illusions of self-love, dilated on the shocking contents of the human body. Take off the skin, they cried, and you will discover nothing but loathsome bleeding and quivering substances. Yet the inner organs are well enough in their place and doubtless pleasing to the microbes that inhabit them; and a man is not hideous because his cross-section would not offer the features of a beautiful countenance. So the structure of the world is not therefore barren or odious because, if you removed its natural outer aspect and effects, it would not make an interesting landscape. Beauty being an appearance and life an operation, that is surely beautiful and living which so operates and so appears as to manifest those qualities.
nor especially cruel.
It is true that materialism prophesies an ultimate extinction for man and all his works. The horror which this prospect inspires in the natural man might be mitigated by reflection; but, granting the horror, is it something introduced by mechanical theories and not present in experience itself? Are human things inwardly stable? Do they belong to the eternal in any sense in which the operation of material forces can touch their immortality? The panic which seems to seize some minds at the thought of a merely natural existence is something truly hysterical; and yet one wonders why ultimate peace should seem so intolerable to people who not so many years ago found a stern religious satisfaction in consigning almost the whole human race to perpetual torture, the Creator, as Saint Augustine tells us, having in his infinite wisdom and justice devised a special kind of material fire that might avail to burn resurrected bodies for ever without consuming them. A very real truth might be read into this savage symbol, if we understood it to express the ultimate defeats and fruitless agonies that pursue human folly; and so we might find that it gave mythical expression to just that conditioned fortune and inexorable flux which a mechanical philosophy shows us the grounds of. Our own vices in another man seem particularly hideous; and so those actual evils which we take for granted when incorporated in the current system strike us afresh when we see them in a new setting. But it is not mechanical science that introduced mutability into things nor materialism that invented death.
Mechanism to be judged by its fruits.