Article April 23, 1910 Issue

To have lived through the age of materialism is a matter...

Liverpool (Eng.) Post and Mercury

To have lived through the age of materialism is a matter for satisfaction, and to have reached a day when a materialist does not exist, save a few youthful members of secularist societies who are fond of harrowing the souls of the frequenters of their favorite pothouses by the ignorant volubility of their atheism. Who that can recall the intellectual tone of the "sixties" and "seventies," with theology butting against a message of science that it misunderstood and recklessly misinterpreted, ever hoped to see the dawn of such a day? Huxley, whom Dr. Campbell Macfie, in his "Science, Matter, and Immortality" (Williams and Norgate), well calls "that great spiritual teacher," foresaw it when he said, "The honest and rigorous following up of the argument which leads us to materialist inevitably carries us beyond it." The same foreknowledge was present in the mind of Herbert Spencer when, speaking of matter, he said, "That which persists unchanging in quantity, but ever changing in form under these sensible appearances which the universe presents to us, transcends human conception, is an unknown and unknowable power which we are obliged to recognize as without limit in space and without beginning or end in time;" a sentence which Dr. Macfie finely paraphrases, "Evolution and dissolution are merely the systole and diastole of the heart of God." But those great men probably did not foresee that within a few years their disciples would admit God to be the inevitable corollary of the consciousness of man, and the ultimate reality of matter to be an idea in the divine Mind. "The substance of te schoolment," says Dr. Macfie, "the noumenon, the Ding an sich of the German philosophers, the points of force of Boscovitch, the ether of the modern physicist, can also be conceived as power, and conceived emotionally as a conscious power, as the power that makes beauty and love."Even "as certain forces result in the concept matter, so the result of all the forces which constitute conscious life result in the concept of God." The dogmatic materialists of fifty years ago were wont to sneer at love and beauty as mere transient ideals, but the philosopher of today knows them to be eternal realities, limbs of the cosmic consciousness, existences compared with which a Dreadnought is as gossamer-like as the tail of a comet. If we ascend up into heaven, they are there; if we make our bed in hell, behold they are there. If we take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall their hand lead us, and their right hand shall hold us.

The children of men too long have been misled by the apparent reality of matter. The rough-and-ready materialist says: "A steam-engine I know; my spirit I do not know, for I have never seen it, touched it, or smelled it." And therein he makes a great mistake, for his spirit he does know, and it is the only thing he knows to exist, for as Stanley Redgrove, author of "The Calculation of Thermo-Chemical Constants." remark's in his "Matter, Spirit, and the Cosmos" (Rider and Son): "It is not matter, but spirit, that we know: and by this be it understood that I know myself as such, and the external world as an ideal construction in my mind. We do not know matter in itself; what we do know and experience are changes in states of consciousness." If it be objects that this is mere idealism, then listen to Huxley, who, commenting on Berkeley's argument that matter and motion are known to us only as forms of consciousness, remarked: "I conceive that this reasoning is irrefragable. And, therefore, if I were obliged to choose between absolute materialist and absolute idealism, I should feel compelled to accept the latter alternative." Matter, says Dr, Macfie, is force, and nothing but force—nothing but mental effects of a certain kind, produced by forces which are neither visible nor ponderable. All the whirling worlds, all the dancing atoms, are merely our subjective projections of various forms of force impinging upon us, and "we cannot empty the idea of force of its psychical significance. The term and the idea are derived from our own conscious action. The moment we identify matter with force, we identify it with conscious will and conscious being. There is no way out of it. What was formerly called the substance of matter is now known to be force, and force is recognized to be the soul or will of God." This is only an old truth newly expressed. The atoms of Lucretius had free will; the monads of Leibnitz had perception and apperception. To matter was will made perceptible and visible. Haeckel endowed his atoms with sensation and will, and W. K. Clifford considered them bits of mind-stuff.

Thus God and the life of the world to come are facts, not merely hopes, and death, with all his terrors, vanishes before the new evangle. Says Dr. Macfie: "Death cannot be the end. The scientific logic that would say so is easily refuted by philosophy, and philosophy can easily go farther; it can show that when we talk of beginnings and ends of consciousness we talk nonsense. Birth and death are only finite terms useful enough for the finite judgments required for every-day life, but used with respect to consciousness they are meaningless. The question is not even fit to be discussed." We are facts in the Mind of God, and we cannot perish.

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