Ubi tres physici, ibi duo athei,—the proverb is something musty. Natural science is and always has been materialistic. The explanation is simple. There is as great antagonism between chemical research and metaphysical speculation, as there is between what
“Youthful poets dream,
On summer’s eve by haunted stream,”
and book-keeping by double entry, and nothing is more customary than to deny what we do not understand. Of late years this scientific materialism has been making gigantic strides. Since the imposing fabric of the Hegelian philosophy proved but a house built on sands, the scales and metre have become our only gods.
Germany—mystic, metaphysical Germany—strange to say, leads the van in this crusade against all faith and all idealism. Vogt, the geologist, Moleschott, the physiologist, Virchow, the greatest of all living histologists, Büchner, Tiedemann, Reuchlin, Meldeg, and many others, not only hold these opinions, but have left the seclusion of the laboratory and the clinic to enter the arena of polemics in their favor. We do not mention the French and English advocates of “positive philosophy.” Their name is Legion.
It is not our design to enter at all at large into these views, still less to dispute them, but merely to give the latest and most approved defence of a single point of their position, a point which we submit is the kernel of the whole controversy, and which we believe to be the very Achilles heel and crack in the armor of their panoply of argument—that is, the Theory of the Absolute. Demonstrate the possibility of the Absolute, and materialism is impossible; disprove it, and all other philosophies are empty nothings,—vox et præterea nihil. Here, and only here, is materialism brought face to face with metaphysics; here is the combat à l’outrance in which one or the other must perish. No one of its apostles has accepted the proffered glaive more heartily, and defended his position with more wary dexterity, than Moleschott, and it is mainly from his work, entitled Der Kreislauf des Lebens, that we illustrate the present metaphysics of materialism.
Our first question is, What is the test of truth, what sanctions a law? Until this is answered, all assertion is absurd, and until it is answered correctly, all philosophy is vain. The response of the naturalist is: “The necessary sequence of cause and effect is the prime law of the experimentalist—a law which he does not ask from revelation, but will find out for himself by observation.” The source of truth is sensation; the uniform result of manifold experience is a law. Here a double objection arises: first, that the term “a necessary sequence” presupposes a law, and begs the question at issue; and, secondly, that, this necessity unproved, such truth is nothing more than a probability, for it is impossible to be certain that our next experiment may not have quite a different result. Either this is not the road to absolute truth, or absolute truth is unattainable. The latter horn of the dilemma is at once accepted; we neither know, nor can know, a law to be absolute; to us, the absolute does not exist. Matter and force with their relations are there, but what we know of them is a varying quantity, is of this age or the last, of this man or that, dependent upon the extent and accuracy of empirical science; we cannot speak of what we do not know, and we know no law that conceivable experience might not contradict.
But how, objects the reader, can this be reconciled with the pure mathematics? Here seem to be laws above experience, laws admitting no exception.
The response leads us back to the origin of our notions of Space and Time, on the the former of which mathematics is founded. The supposition that they are innate ideas is of course rejected by the materialist; for he looks upon innate ideas as fables; he considers them perceptions derived positively from the senses, but they do not belong to the senses alone, nor are they perceptions merely; “they are ideas, but ideas that without the sensuous perceptions of proximity and sequence could never have arisen. Nay, more—the perception of space must precede that of time,” for it is only through the former that we can reach the latter. The plainest laws of space, those which were the earliest impressions on the tabula rasa of the infant mind, and which the hourly experience of life verifies, are called, by the mathematician, axioms, and on these simplest generalizations of our perceptions he bases the whole of his structure. Axioms, therefore, are the uniform results of experiments, the possible conditions of which are extremely limited, and the factors of which have been subjected to all these conditions.
It follows from a denial of the absolute that all existence is concrete. Indeed, we may say that the corner stone of the edifice of materialism is embraced in the terse sentence of Moleschott—all existence is existence through attributes. Existence per se (Fürsichsein) is a meaningless term, and substance apart from attribute, the ens ineffabile, is a pedantic figment and nothing more. Finally, there can be no attribute except through a relation.