Article December 23, 1922 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Frank Palmer Speare, Zeeman, Burns, Canon Barnes, Robert Blatchford

["Passing of Materialism," from the Grand Rapids Press, Grand Rapids, Mich.]

Materialism is not a pleasant philosophy at best; it is against human nature, and it requires quite a will to maintain it. Men need religion. And science itself, heretofore the refuge and the fortress of the materialist, has of late been going back on him shamefully. Most interesting reading on this question is contained in a recent book called "Death and Its Mystery," by Flammarion, the great French author—a book so powerful in its scientific reasoning that Blatchford, formerly one of the most renowned materialists in the world, is quoted in the London Spectator as saying that it forced him to change his mind completely.

"How can one hold to materialism if there is no material?" he asks. "If, as we have just discovered, the infinitesimal atom is divisible into millions of electrons, there is no such thing as material substance. What is more, unless I am mistaken, the latest trend of science is toward the belief that matter is motion. Thus the foundations of my philosophy have been destroyed. Can a brain see? A brain is a mass of creamy substances, and is composed of about two table-spoonfuls of dust and some ounces of water. Does that mixture see? That seems to me a very vital question, because if we do not see with our brain, with what do we see? Flammarion says it is the soul that sees; and however we may think about that, the folly of a sneering materialism has never been greater than in this age when science is steadily kicking out the props from the anti-religious philosophies which formerly relied upon it."

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