Consciousness, thus qualified by all the sensible qualities of things, will exercise an irresistible attraction over the supernatural and ideal realm, so that all the gods, all truths, and all ideals, as they have no place among the sufficing causes of experience, will be identified with decaying sensations. And presently those supposed causes themselves will be retraced and drawn back into the immediate vortex, until the sceptic has packed away nature, with all space and time, into the sphere of sensuous illusion, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that it changed with the changes in the human body. The personal idealists will declare that all body is a part of some body’s mind. Thus, by a curious reversion, the progress of reflection has led to hopeless contradictions. Sense, which was discovered by observing the refraction and intermittence to which appearances were subject, in seeming to be quite different from what things were, now tries to subsist when the things it was essentially contrasted with have been abolished. The intellect becomes a Penelope, whose secret pleasure lies in undoing its ostensible work; and science, becoming pensive, loves to relapse into the dumb actuality and nerveless reverie from which it had once extricated a world.
The occasion for this sophistication is worth noting; for if we follow the thread which we have trailed behind us in entering the labyrinth we shall be able at any moment to get out; especially as the omnivorous monster lurking in its depths is altogether harmless. A moral and truly transcendental critique of science, as of common sense, is never out of place, since all such a critique does is to assign to each conception or discovery its place and importance in the Life of Reason. So administered, the critical cathartic will not prove a poison and will not inhibit the cognitive function it was meant to purge. Every belief will subsist that finds an empirical and logical warrant; while that a belief is a belief and not a sensation will not seem a ground for not entertaining it, nor for subordinating it to some gratuitous assurance. But a psychological criticism, if it is not critical of psychology itself, and thinks to substitute a science of absolute sentience for physics and dialectic, would rest on sophistry and end wholly in bewilderment. The subject-matter of an absolute psychology would vanish in its hands, since there is no sentience which is not at once the effect of something physical and the appearance of something ideal. A calculus of feelings, uninterpreted and referred to nothing ulterior, would furnish no alternative system to substitute for the positive sciences it was seeking to dislodge. In fact, those who call ordinary objects unreal do not, on that account, find anything else to think about. Their exorcism does not lay the ghost, and they are limited to addressing it in uncivil language. It was not idly that reason in the beginning excogitated a natural and an ideal world, a labour it might well have avoided if appearance as it stands made a thinkable or a practical universe.
FOOTNOTES:
[B] The term “matter” (which ought before long to reappear in philosophy) has two meanings. In popular science and theology it commonly means a group of things in space, like the atoms of Democritus or the human body and its members. Such matter plainly exists. Its particles are concretions in existence like the planets; and if a given hypothesis describing them turns out to be wrong, it is wrong only because this matter exists so truly and in such discoverable guise that the hypothesis in question may be shown to misrepresent its constitution.
On the other hand, in Aristotle and in literary speech, matter means something good to make other things out of. Here it is a concretion in discourse, a dialectical term; being only an aspect or constituent of every existence, it cannot exist by itself. A state of mind, like everything not purely formal, has matter of this sort in it. Actual love, for instance, differs materially from the mere idea or possibility of love, which is all love would be if the matter or body of it were removed. This matter is what idealists, bent on giving it a grander name, call pure feeling, absolute consciousness, or metaphysical will. These phrases are all used improperly to stand for the existence or presence of things apart from their character, or for the mere strain and dead weight of being. Matter is a far better term to use in the premises, for it suggests the method as well as the fact of brute existence. The surd in experience—its non-ideal element—is not an indifferent vehicle for what it brings, as would be implied by calling it pure feeling or absolute consciousness. Nor is it an act accepting or rejecting objects, as would be implied by calling it will. In truth, the surd conditions not merely the being of objects but their possible quantity, the time and place of their appearance, and their degree of perfection compared with the ideals they suggest. These important factors in whatever exists are covered by the term matter and give it a serious and indispensable rôle in describing and feeling the world.
Aristotle, it may be added, did not adhere with perfect consistency to the dialectical use of this word. Matter is sometimes used by him for substance or for actual beings having both matter and form. The excuse for this apparent lapse is, of course, that what taken by itself is a piece of formed matter or an individual object may be regarded as mere material for something else which it helps to constitute, as wheat is matter for flour, and flour for bread. Thus the dialectical and non-demonstrative use of the term to indicate one aspect of everything could glide into its vulgar acceptation, to indicate one class of things.
[C] It has been suggested—what will not party spirit contrive?—that these variations, called spontaneous by Darwin because not predetermined by heredity, might be spontaneous in a metaphysical sense, free acts with no material basis or cause whatsoever. Being free, these acts might deflect evolution—like Descartes’ soul acting on the pineal gland—into wonderful new courses, prevent dissolution, and gradually bring on the kingdom of Heaven, all as the necessary implication of the latest science and the most atheistic philosophy. It may not be needless to observe that if the variations were absolutely free, i.e., intrusions of pure chance, they would tend every which way quite as much as if they were mechanically caused; while if they were kept miraculously in line with some far-off divine event, they would not be free at all, but would be due to metaphysical attraction and a magic destiny prepared in the eternal; and so we should be brought round to Aristotelian physics again.
[D] The monads of Leibniz could justly be called minds, because they had a dramatic destiny, and the most complex experience imaginable was the state of but one monad, not an aggregate view or effect of a multitude in fusion. But the recent improvements on that system take the latter turn. Mind-stuff, or the material of mind, is supposed to be contained in large quantities within any known feeling. Mind-stuff, we are given to understand, is diffused in a medium corresponding to apparent space (what else would a real space be?); it forms quantitative aggregates, its transformations or aggregations are mechanically governed, it endures when personal consciousness perishes, it is the substance of bodies and, when duly organised, the potentiality of thought. One might go far for a better description of matter. That any material must be material might have been taken for an axiom; but our idealists, in their eagerness to show that Gefuehl ist Alles, have thought to do honour to feeling by forgetting that it is an expression and wishing to make it a stuff.
There is a further circumstance showing that mind-stuff is but a bashful name for matter. Mind-stuff, like matter, can be only an element in any actual being. To make a thing or a thought out of mind-stuff you have to rely on the system into which that material has fallen; the substantive ingredients, from which an actual being borrows its intensive quality, do not contain its individuating form. This form depends on ideal relations subsisting between the ingredients, relations which are not feelings but can be rendered only by propositions.