Materialism is the legitimate consequence of positivism. The positivist sect, at the beginning of its career, pretended to take hold of materialism with a superb indifference and dogmatic insolence, in presence of those eternal problems which, to the honor of humanity, have always puzzled and tormented it. But it is easy to show that most of the definitions and teaching of positivist philosophy correspond with the materialist dogmas, from which positivism pretended to hold itself aloof. How could it be otherwise? Those supreme questions and their answers are not isolated facts, distinct from our particular knowledge, regarding the things of this world. They penetrate necessarily into all our cognitions; become incarnate and visible under the form of all the particular existences which we analyze. We cannot give the character of one of those existences, without this definite character implying a corresponding solution of the primary truths, which were supposed to be entirely forgotten. All the special science of positivism is identical with materialistic interpretation; and one would have wished that the human mind had not tried to ascend from these special sciences to general and primary science and explain it like them. Was this possible? No; and hence illusion is no longer possible. Positivism has logically terminated in materialism.
To demonstrate this inevitable fusion, M. Caro examines one of the absolute precepts of positivism, namely, the subjection of psychology to cerebral physiology. He proves that this subjection is only an indirect method of resolving both psychology and cerebral physiology by materialism. Stuart Mill has been rejected by the positivists for not having followed the founder of the positivist school, resumed in the principle that there is no psychology outside of biology. "Psychology, we are told," writes M. Caro, "is identical with biology; faculties, consciousness which observes them, attention which analyzes them, and, thanks to memory, classes them; all these are in the dependence of the organs on each other. This dependence is called by a very expressive word: the affective and intellectual faculties become, in positivist language, the cerebral faculties. The rest follows. We are assured that there is identity between those two relations: the intellectual and moral manifestations are to the nervous substance what weight is to matter, that is to say, an irreducible phenomenon, which in the actual state of our knowledge is its own explanation. 'Just as the physician observes that matter is heavy, so the physiologist proves that the nervous substance thinks, without either of them being able to explain why the one is heavy and the other thinks.'" [Footnote 107]
[Footnote 107: M. Littré, préface au livre intitulé Matérialisme et Spiritualisme.]
"Let it be so," continues M. Caro; "yet which of the materialists has ever pretended to explain why the nervous substance thinks? They merely attest the existence of the fact. The real question is to know if it is the nervous substance which thinks, and if it can think. To affirm that it thinks is to close the question. I take as witness M. Moleschott, whose teaching is not doubtful, and which has been published with applause. What does he say in a discourse recently delivered at Zurich? 'The identification of spirit and matter is not an explanation; it is a fact, neither more nor less simple, more nor less mysterious, than any other fact; it is a fact like weight. No one assuredly pretends to explain gravitation by means of distinctions between it and matter.' Is there, I ask, an appreciable difference on this question between the language of the present chief of the positivists and that of the most decided positivists?"
A journal, devoted to the defence and propagation of scientific materialism, La Pensée Nouvelle, proclaimed the same doctrine: "The positivist school is a sect which proceeds from materialism; it has no value or aim except through materialism."
II.
Materialism absorbs, therefore, the positivist school. It tries to resolve the important questions regarding the origin and end of man. It does not proscribe metaphysics on the pretence that it wishes to know the eternal unknown, and approach the inaccessible. It admits neither unknown nor inaccessible. It substitutes for the primary causes of metaphysics, considered as pure chimeras, other causes the reality of which it pretends to prove. This is a bold but frank attitude, and preferable in every respect to the constrained position of positivism.
How has materialism tried to solve the questions it proposes? It cannot appeal to pure reason or to the revealing faculties of the human understanding, affirming or denying God as primary cause of existences, and the soul as secondary cause of the human person. Where would be the authority of materialism if its process of demonstration, if its methods were not separated from the process and methods of traditional spiritualism? The latter cannot be conquered on its own ground; it would always find there the height of its moral inspirations, and the power of its demonstrations. Materialism has felt this, and pretends to repudiate both the methods and the doctrines of the old metaphysics. Instead of asking the understanding for imaginary means of demonstration, it proclaims its adherence to infallible experience, its belief in the senses alone, and the analysis of sensations. Just like positivism, it calls itself the immediate production of the experimental method, and attributes to itself the certitude which belongs to the positive and experimental sciences. The old doubt should thus be dissipated, and man would enjoy the full brightness of this universe, whose secrets would no longer be redoubtable, and whose eternal and necessary laws would be opposed to all idea of a higher origin, and government regulated by any exterior will.
But let us leave aside for a moment the examination of those sad illusions and past solutions and the part which experience has in them. Let us consider at first, from the stand-point of method alone, those problems of origin which materialism pretends to resolve. How are those problems capable of being solved by the experimental method? Such is the true question, and it is this one the study of which completes the beautiful book of M. Caro. "We shall not be opposed," says the eloquent author of the Idée de Dieu, "by any unprejudiced savant, when we assert that, in the actual state of science, no positivist dogma authorizes conclusions like those of materialism on the problem of the origin and ends of beings, on that of substances and causes; that to give exact knowledge on these points is contrary to the idea of experimental science; that this science gives us the actual, the present, the fact, not the beginning of things; at most, the immediate how, the proximate conditions of beings, and never their remote causes; finally, that from the moment materialism becomes an express and doctrinal negation of metaphysics, it becomes itself another metaphysics; it falls immediately under the control of pure reason, which may be freely used to criticise its hypotheses, as it uses them itself to establish them and bind them together."