The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

by Jean-Marie Guyau

Materialism difficult to define.

We shall say but a few words on the subject of pure materialism, because of all systems of thought materialism is the farthest removed from those which give rise to religious and to metaphysical theories. Absolute materialism is somewhat difficult to define, because matter is one of the vaguest of words. To aim at representing the ultimate elements of matter as wholly independent of thought, of consciousness, of life, is evidently chimerical; such an effort leads straight to the pure indeterminism of matter as conceived by Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel; to an indefinite dyad, to a theory of virtuality and of the identity of non-being. Also materialists are obliged to regard as determinate and material the primitive force of which the world constitutes simply a development. If, for example, according to the most recent theories, all matter should prove to be reducible to hydrogen, materialism would regard hydrogen as constituting a sort of material or substantial unity in the world. Variety would exist only in the forms displayed by the primitive element, hydrogen, or, if you prefer, pre-hydrogen.

Materialism criticised.

It must be confessed that this conception is somewhat naïve and nominalistic; the word material or chemical can never express more than the outside, than the exterior properties of the primordial element. The hydrogen atom itself is probably in a high degree composite, is itself probably a world of little worlds, held in place by gravitation. The very conception of an indivisible atom is philosophically infantine. Thomson and Helmholtz have shown that our atoms are little vortices of energy, and have succeeded in producing experimentally analogous vortices formed of vapour; for instance, of the vapour chlor-hydrate of ammonia. Each vortex is composed always of the same particles; no one particle can be separated from the others; each vortex possesses, therefore, a stable individuality. When the attempt is made to cut the vortices, they fly the blade or bend about it, and prove to be indivisible. They are capable of contraction, of dilation, of partial interpenetration and distortion, but never of dissolution. And certain men of science have thence inferred that we possess thus a material proof of the existence of atoms. And so indeed we do, providing an atom be understood to be something as complex, as little primordial, and as relatively enormous as a nebula. Atoms are indivisible as a nebula is indivisible by a knife blade, and the atom of hydrogen is about as simple as the solar system. To explain the universe by hydrogen is like explaining it by the sun and the planets. The rise of the actual world out of hydrogen can be conceived only on condition of ascribing to the alleged atoms of hydrogen something more than physicists and chemists know them to possess. Materialism, therefore, must enlarge its principle if it is to prove productive: enlarge, as Diderot would say, your atheism and your materialism.

Must be supplemented by some theory to account for life.

But the instant materialism is “enlarged,” the universal element must at once be regarded as alive and is not what is called brute matter. Every generation of physicists, as Mr. Spencer says, discovers in so called brute matter forces the existence of which the best informed physicist would some years previous have disbelieved. When we perceive solid bodies, sensitive in spite of their inertia to the action of forces, the number of which is infinite; when the spectroscope proves to us that terrestrial molecules move in harmony with molecules in the stars; when we find ourselves obliged to infer that the innumerable vibrations traverse space in all directions, the conception which is forced upon us is not that of a universe of dead matter but rather that of a universe everywhere alive; alive in the general sense of the word, if not in the restricted.[156] The notion of life is perhaps more human and more subjective, but after all more complete and concrete than the notion of movement and of force; for we cannot hope to discover the truth at any great distance from the subjective, since subjectivity is the necessary form in which truth appears to us.

Must be supplemented by some sort of mind-stuff theory.

The second emendation to which materialism must submit, if it is to satisfy the metaphysical instincts of mankind, is to include in the primordial element not only life but some germ of mind. But primitive matter conceived as a force capable of living and ultimately of thinking is not what is scientifically and vulgarly regarded as matter, far less as hydrogen. The pure materialist, thumping the rotundity of the earth with his fist, and relying grossly on his sense of touch, cries: “Matter is everything,” but matter is analyzable into force, and force is simply a primitive form of life. Materialism therefore issues into a sort of animism; in the presence of the circling world, the materialist is obliged to say it is alive. Nor can he stop there; the world is force, is action, is life—and something more; for in and by me the world thinks. E pur si pensa!

Passes readily into idealism.

Behold us landed once more in idealism. And, indeed, as Lange and M. Taine have well shown, materialism easily passes to idealism; pure materialism results in an abstract mechanism, which is analyzable into the laws of logic and of thought. And the basis of this mechanism—atoms and motion—consists in enfeebled subtilized and rarefied tactual and visual sensations, taken ultimately as the expression of the final reality. The alleged foundation of objective reality is simply a residuum of our most essential sensations. Materialism is advocated in the name of positive science; but it, not less than idealism, belongs really to the poetry of metaphysics; its poetry is recorded simply in terms of atoms and motion, instead of in terms of the elements of consciousness. Materialistic symbols are more matter of fact, more neighbour to the visible reality, possess a wider compass and generality, but they are none the less symbols simply. Materialism is in some sort a tissue of metaphor in which scientific terms lose their scientific signification, and gain a metaphysical signification in its stead, transferred, as they are, to a domain that lies beyond the range of experience. The man of science who speculates thus upon the nature of things is, unknown to himself, a modern Lucretius.