Materialism and the notion of infinity.
And finally, materialism, properly so called, has been invaded by a notion which has been at all times peculiarly adapted to satisfy the metaphysical and religious aspirations of mankind; the notion of infinity, whether in the direction of greatness or the opposite. Men of science go to the trouble of estimating the number of molecules in a drop of water; they tell us that the thousandth part of a millimeter of water contains 228,000,000 molecules; they say that a pinhead contains the fourth power of 20,000,000 atoms, and that, if the atoms could be counted a billion every second, it would take 253,678 years to complete the task. But all such calculations are simply arithmetical jeux d’esprit. These figures, which are so great in appearance, really amount to nothing, and a grain of sand, no doubt, contains literally an infinite number of particles.
Final breakdown of materialism.
The argument against the notion of infinity, based on the logical impossibility of an infinite number, is not decisive;[157] it rests upon a begging of the question, namely, that everything in the universe is innumerable—that is to say, is capable of being precisely included within the limits of an intelligence like our own. Logic, on the contrary, insists that in homogeneous matter, like space, time, and quantity, there is no limit to the possibility of division and multiplication, and that, consequently, they may proceed beyond any given number. If so called “purely scientific” materialism does not admit that nature is coextensive with man’s conception of what is possible—if it denies the parallelism between thought and nature—it by that very fact denies also the rationality of nature, which is precisely the principle upon which every philosophy that pretends to be purely scientific ultimately relies. Whoever rejects the notion of infinity is obliged, in the last resort, to suppose a species of contradiction between the activity of the human mind, which is unable to stop at any given point, and nature, which stops, for no reason in particular, at a determinate point in time and space. The conception of infinity may be said to be forced upon materialism, and that very notion contains one of the antinomies against which intelligence, by the very fact of its employment, is ultimately brought to a standstill; it is precisely in the act of counting that intelligence achieves the conception of the innumerable; it is by exhausting every given quantity that it achieves the conception of the inexhaustible; it is by reaching ever beyond the limits of the known that it comes in touch with the unknowable; and all these conceptions mark the point where we feel our intelligence becoming feeble and beyond which our sight grows dim. Back of matter, which thought takes cognizance of, and back of thought, which takes cognizance of itself, lies infinity, which envelops both of them, and which seems the most fundamental aspect of matter itself. It was not without reason that the ancients called matter, abstractly considered, as independent of its diverse forms, the infinite ἄπειρον. Materialism thus leaves us, as other systems do, in the presence of that ultimate mystery which all religions have symbolized in their myths, and which metaphysics will always be obliged to recognize, and poetry to express, by the instrumentality of images.
Apologue.
By the seaside stood a great, upright mountain that pierced the sky like an arrow-head, and the waves beat upon its base. In the morning, when the first light of the sun touched the ancient rocks, they shivered, and a voice rose from the gray stones and mingled with the sound made by the blue sea; and mountain and wave conversed together. The sea said: “The heavens have been mirrored in my shifting waves a million years, and in all that time have held as high aloof from me and stood as motionless.” And the mountain said: “I have climbed toward the heavens a million years, and they are still as high above me as ever.” One day a ray of sun fell smiling upon the brow of the mountain, and the mountain questioned it on the distant heavens from which it came. The ray was about to reply, but was reflected suddenly from the mountain to the sea, and from a scintillating wave back to the heavens from which it came. And the ray is still en route across the infinite, toward the nebulæ of Maïa, in the Pleiades, which were so long invisible, or toward some point farther still, and has not yet replied.
III. Monism. The Fate of Worlds.
Monism.
The word infinite, ἄπειρον, which the ancients applied to matter, the moderns have applied to mind. The reason, no doubt, is that matter and mind are two aspects of one and the same thing. The synthesis of these two aspects is attempted by monism.
Monism to-day prevalent.