Science is not limited to the so-called scientific world. It reaches beyond all classes, it belongs to the full depth and width of life. Science belongs to thinking humanity in its entirety. And so it is with the separation of matter and force. Only a stultified fanaticism can ignore the practical distinction. The miser who accumulates money without adding any wealth to his life process forgets that the valuable element of money resides in its force, which is different from, its substance. He forgets that not mere wealth as such, not the paltry gold substance, lends a reasonableness to the quest for its possession, but its spiritual content, its inherent exchange value, which buys the necessities of life. Every scientific practice, which means every action carried on with a predetermined success and with understood substances, proves that the separation of matter and force, though only performed in thought and existing in thought, is nevertheless not an empty phrase, not a mere hypothesis, but a very fertile idea. A farmer manuring his field is handling "pure" manuring force, in so far as it is immaterial for the abstract conception whether he is handling cow dung, bone dust, or guano. And in weighing bundles of merchandise, it is not the iron, copper, stone, etc., which is handled by the pound, but their gravity.
True, there is no force without matter, no matter without force. Forceless matter and matterless force are nonentities. If idealist naturalists believe in an immaterial existence of forces which, so to say, carry on their goblin-pranks in matter, forces which we cannot see, cannot perceive by the senses and yet are asked to believe in, then we say that such men are to that extent that naturists, but mere speculators, in other words spiritualists. And the word of the materialists who refer to the intellectual separation of matter and force as a mere hypothesis, is quite as brainless.
In order that this separation may be appreciated according to its merits, in order that our consciousness may neither etherealize force in a spiritualist sense nor deny it in a materialist sense, and in order to comprehend it scientifically, we have only to understand the faculty of thought in general or "in itself," that is to say its abstract form. The intellect can not operate without some perceptible material. In order to distinguish between matter and force, these things must exist and be experienced by sense perception. By means of this experience we refer to matter as the expression of force and to force as the expression of matter. The perceptible object which is to be studied is therefore matter and force in one, and since all objects are in their tangible reality such matter and force-things, the distinction made by the mind consists in the general method of brain work, in the derivation of the general unity, from the special multiplicity in any one and in all given objects. The distinction between matter and force is summarized in the universal distinction between the concrete and the abstract. To deny the value of this distinction is equivalent to denying the value of any and all distinction, equivalent to ignoring the function of the intellect altogether.
If we refer to phenomena of sense perception as forces of matter in general, then this generalized matter is nothing but an abstract conception. But if we mean by the term sense perception the various concrete substances, then the general element which embraces the differences of things and pervades and controls them is force producing concrete effects. And whether we say matter or force, the mental which science is studying, not with its hands, but with its brain, the so-called essence, nature, cause, ideal, superior or spiritual, is the generality comprising the special things.
V "PRACTICAL REASON" OR MORALITY
(a) The Wise and Reasonable.
The understanding of the method of science, the understanding of the mind, is destined to solve all the problems of religion and philosophy, to explain thoroughly all the great and small riddles, and thus fully to restore research to its mission of empirically studying details. If we are aware that it is a law of reason to require some perceptible material, some cause, for its operation, then the question regarding the first or general cause becomes superfluous. Human understanding is then seen to be first and last cause of all concrete causes. If we understand that it is a law of reason to require for its operation some given object, some beginning at which to start, then the question of the first beginning must necessarily become inane. If we understand that reason derives abstract units out of concrete multiplicities, that it constructs truth out of phenomena, substance out of attributes, that it perceives all things as parts of a whole, as individuals of some genus, as qualities of some object, then the question regarding a "thing itself," a something which in reality is back of all things, must needs become irrelevant. In brief, the understanding of the interdependence of reason reveals the unreasonableness of the demand for independent reason.