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Materialism is that method of thought which gives priority to matter, rather than to mind, in its explanations of the universe. Upon this view, material atoms constitute the ultimate and fundamental reality of which all things, rational and irrational, are but combinations and phenomena. Force is regarded as a universal and inseparable property of matter.

The element of truth in materialism is the reality of the external world. Its error is in regarding the external world as having original and independent existence, and in regarding mind as its product.

Materialism regards atoms as the bricks of which the material universe, the house we inhabit, is built. Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) estimates that, if a drop of water were magnified to the size of our earth, the atoms of which it consists would certainly appear larger than boy's marbles, and yet would be smaller than billiard balls. Of these atoms, all things, visible and invisible, are made. Mind, with all its activities, is a combination or phenomenon of atoms. “Man ist was er iszt: ohne Phosphor kein Gedanke”—“One is what he eats: without phosphorus, no thought.” Ethics is a bill of fare; and worship, like heat, is a mode of motion. Agassiz, however, wittily asked: “Are fishermen, then, more intelligent than farmers, because they eat so much fish, and therefore take in more phosphorus?”

It is evident that much is here attributed to atoms which really belongs to force. Deprive atoms of force, and all that remains is extension, which = space = zero. Moreover, “if atoms are extended, they cannot be ultimate, for extension implies divisibility, and that which is conceivably divisible cannot be a philosophical ultimate. But, if atoms are not extended, then even an infinite multiplication and combination of them could not produce an extended substance. Furthermore, an atom that is neither extended substance nor thinking substance is inconceivable. The real ultimate is force, and this force cannot be exerted by nothing, but, as we shall hereafter see, can be exerted only by a personal Spirit, for this alone possesses the characteristics of reality, namely, definiteness, unity, and activity.”

Not only force but also intelligence must be attributed to atoms, before they can explain any operation of nature. Herschel says not only that “the force of gravitation seems like that of a universal will,” but that the atoms themselves, in recognizing each other in order to combine, show a great deal of “presence of mind.” Ladd, Introd. to Philosophy, 269—“A distinguished astronomer has said that every body in the solar system is behaving as if it knew precisely how it ought to behave in consistency with its own nature, and with the behavior of every other body in the same system. … Each atom has danced countless millions of miles, with countless millions of different partners, many of which required an important modification of its mode of motion, without ever departing from the correct step or the right time.” J. P. Cooke, Credentials of Science, 104, 177, suggests that something more than atoms is needed to explain the universe. A correlating Intelligence and Will must be assumed. Atoms by themselves would be like a heap of loose nails which need to be magnetized if they are to hold together. All structures would be resolved, and all forms of matter would disappear, if the Presence which sustains them were withdrawn. The atom, like the monad of Leibnitz, is “parvus in suo genere deus”—“a little god in its nature”—only because it is the expression of the mind and will of an immanent God.

Plato speaks of men who are “dazzled by too near a look at material things.” They do not perceive that these very material things, since they can be interpreted only in terms of spirit, must themselves be essentially spiritual. Materialism is the explanation of a world of which we know something—the world of mind—by a world of which we know next to nothing—the world of matter. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 297, 298—“How about your material atoms and brain-molecules? They have no real existence save as objects of thought, and therefore the very thought, which you say your atoms produce, turns out to be the essential precondition of their own existence.” With this agree the words of Dr. Ladd: “Knowledge of matter involves repeated activities of sensation and reflection, of inductive and deductive inference, of intuitional belief in substance. These are all activities of mind. Only as the mind has a self-conscious life, is any knowledge of what matter is, or can do, to be gained. … Everything is real which is the permanent subject of changing states. That which touches, feels, sees, is more real than that which is touched, felt, seen.”

H. N. Gardner, Presb. Rev., 1885:301, 665, 666—“Mind gives to matter its chief meaning—hence matter alone can never explain the universe.” Gore, Incarnation, 31—“Mind is not the product of nature, but the necessary constituent of nature, considered as an ordered knowable system.” Fraser, Philos. of Theism: “An immoral act must originate in the immoral agent; a physical effect is not known to originate in its physical cause.” Matter, inorganic and organic, presupposes mind; but it is not true that mind presupposes matter. LeConte: “If I could remove your brain cap, what would I see? Only physical changes. But you—what do you perceive? Consciousness, thought, emotion, will. Now take external nature, the Cosmos. The observer from the outside sees only physical phenomena. But must there not be in this case also—on the other side—psychical phenomena, a Self, a Person, a Will?”

The impossibility of finding in matter, regarded as mere atoms, any of the attributes of a cause, has led to a general abandonment of this old Materialism of Democritus, Epicurus, Lucretius, Condillac, Holbach, Feuerbach, Büchner; and Materialistic Idealism has taken its place, which instead of regarding force as a property of matter, regards matter as a manifestation of force. From this section we therefore pass to Materialistic Idealism, and inquire whether the universe can be interpreted simply as a system of force and of ideas. A quarter of a century ago, John Tyndall, in his opening address as President of the British Association at Belfast, declared that in matter was to be found the promise and potency of every form of life. But in 1898, Sir William Crookes, in his address as President of that same British Association, reversed the apothegm, and declared that in life he saw the promise and potency of every form of matter. See Lange, History of Materialism; Janet, Materialism; Fabri, Materialismus; Herzog, Encyclopädie, art.: Materialismus; but esp., Stallo, Modern Physics, 148–170.

In addition to the general error indicated above, we object to this system as follows:

1. In knowing matter, the mind necessarily judges itself to be different in kind, and higher in rank, than the matter which it knows.

We here state simply an intuitive conviction. The mind, in using its physical organism and through it bringing external nature into its service, recognizes itself as different from and superior to matter. See Martineau, quoted in Brit. Quar., April, 1882:173, and the article of President Thomas Hill in the Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1852:353—“All that is really given by the act of sense-perception is the existence of the conscious self, floating in boundless space and boundless time, surrounded and sustained by boundless power. The material moved, which we at first think the great reality, is only the shadow of a real being, which is immaterial.” Harris, Philos. Basis of Theism, 317—“Imagine an infinitesimal being in the brain, watching the action of the molecules, but missing the thought. So science observes the universe, but misses God.”Hebberd, in Journ. Spec. Philos., April, 1886:135.

Robert Browning, “the subtlest assertor of the soul in song,” makes the Pope, in The Ring and the Book, say: “Mind is not matter, nor from matter, but above.” So President Francis Wayland: “What is mind?” “No matter.” “What is matter?” “Never mind.” Sully, The Human Mind, 2:369—“Consciousness is a reality wholly disparate from material processes, and cannot therefore be resolved into these. Materialism makes that which is immediately known (our mental states) subordinate to that which is only indirectly or inferentially known (external things). Moreover, a material entity existing per se out of relation to a cogitant mind is an absurdity.” As materialists work out their theory, their so-called matter grows more and more ethereal, until at last a stage is reached when it cannot be distinguished from what others call spirit. Martineau: “The matter they describe is so exceedingly clever that it is up to anything, even to writing Hamlet and discovering its own evolution. In short, but for the spelling of its name, it does not seem to differ appreciably from our old friends, Mind and God.” A. W. Momerie, in Christianity and Evolution, 54—“A being conscious of his unity cannot possibly be formed out of a number of atoms unconscious of their diversity. Any one who thinks this possible is capable of asserting that half a dozen fools might be compounded into a single wise man.”

2. Since the mind's attributes of (a) continuous identity, (b) self-activity, (c) unrelatedness to space, are different in kind and higher in rank than the attributes of matter, it is rational to conclude that mind is itself different in kind from matter and higher in rank than matter.

This is an argument from specific qualities to that which underlies and explains the qualities. (a) Memory proves personal identity. This is not an identity of material atoms, for atoms change. The molecules that come cannot remember those that depart. Some immutable part in the brain? organized or unorganized? Organized decays; unorganized = soul. (b) Inertia shows that matter is not self-moving. It acts only as it is acted upon. A single atom would never move. Two portions are necessary, and these, in order to useful action, require adjustment by a power which does not belong to matter. Evolution of the universe inexplicable, unless matter were first moved by some power outside itself. See Duke of Argyll, Reign of Law, 92. (c) The highest activities of mind are independent of known physical conditions. Mind controls and subdues the body. It does not cease to grow when the growth of the body ceases. When the body nears dissolution, the mind often asserts itself most strikingly.

Kant: “Unity of apprehension is possible on account of the transcendental unity of self-consciousness.” I get my idea of unity from the indivisible self. Stout, Manual of Psychology, 53—“So far as matter exists independently of its presentation to a cognitive subject, it cannot have material properties, such as extension, hardness, color, weight, etc. … The world of material phenomena presupposes a system of immaterial agency. In this immaterial system the individual consciousness originates. This agency, some say, is thought, others will.” A. J. Dubois, in Century Magazine, Dec. 1894:228—Since each thought involves a molecular movement in the brain, and this moves the whole universe, mind is the secret of the universe, and we should interpret nature as the expression of underlying purpose. Science is mind following the traces of mind. There can be no mind without antecedent mind. That all human beings have the same mental modes shows that these modes are not due simply to environment. Bowne: “Things act upon the mind and the mind reacts with knowledge. Knowing is not a passive receiving, but an active construing.” Wundt: “We are compelled to admit that the physical development is not the cause, but much more the effect, of psychical development.”

Paul Carus, Soul of Man, 52–64, defines soul as “the form of an organism,” and memory as “the psychical aspect of the preservation of form in living substance.” This seems to give priority to the organism rather than to the soul, regardless of the fact that without soul no organism is conceivable. Clay cannot be the ancestor of the potter, nor stone the ancestor of the mason, nor wood the ancestor of the carpenter. W. N. Clarke, Christian Theology, 99—“The intelligibleness of the universe to us is strong and ever present evidence that there is an all-pervading rational Mind, from which the universe received its character.” We must add to the maxim, “Cogito, ergo sum,” the other maxim, “Intelligo, ergo Deus est.” Pfleiderer, Philos. Relig., 1:273—“The whole idealistic philosophy of modern times is in fact only the carrying out and grounding of the conviction that Nature is ordered by Spirit and for Spirit, as a subservient means for its eternal ends; that it is therefore not, as the heathen naturalism thought, the one and all, the last and highest of things, but has the Spirit, and the moral Ends over it, as its Lord and Master.” The consciousness by which things are known precedes the things themselves, in the order of logic, and therefore cannot be explained by them or derived from them. See Porter, Human Intellect, 22, 131, 132. McCosh, Christianity and Positivism, chap. on Materialism; Divine Government, 71–94; Intuitions, 140–145. Hopkins, Study of Man, 53–56; Morell, Hist. of Philosophy, 318–334; Hickok, Rational Cosmology, 403; Theol. Eclectic, 6:555; Appleton, Works, 1:151–154; Calderwood, Moral Philos., 235; Ulrici, Leib und Seele, 688–725, and synopsis, in Bap. Quar., July, 1873:380.

3. Mind rather than matter must therefore be regarded as the original and independent entity, unless it can be scientifically demonstrated that mind is material in its origin and nature. But all attempts to explain the psychical from the physical, or the organic from the inorganic, are acknowledged failures. The most that can be claimed is, that psychical are always accompanied by physical changes, and that the inorganic is the basis and support of the organic. Although the precise connection between the mind and the body is unknown, the fact that the continuity of physical changes is unbroken in times of psychical activity renders it certain that mind is not transformed physical force. If the facts of sensation indicate the dependence of mind upon body, the facts of volition equally indicate the dependence of body upon mind.

The chemist can produce organic, but not organized, substances. The life cannot be produced from matter. Even in living things progress is secured only by plan. Multiplication of desired advantage, in the Darwinian scheme, requires a selecting thought; in other words the natural selection is artificial selection after all. John Fiske, Destiny of the Creature, 109—“Cerebral physiology tells us that, during the present life, although thought and feeling are always manifested in connection with a peculiar form of matter, yet by no possibility can thought and feeling be in any sense the product of matter. Nothing could be more grossly unscientific than the famous remark of Cabanis, that the brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile. It is not even correct to say that thought goes on in the brain. What goes on in the brain is an amazingly complex series of molecular movements, with which thought and feeling are in some unknown way correlated, not as effects or as causes, but as concomitants.”

Leibnitz's “preëstablished harmony” indicates the difficulty of defining the relation between mind and matter. They are like two entirely disconnected clocks, the one of which has a dial and indicates the hour by its hands, while the other without a dial simultaneously indicates the same hour by its striking apparatus. To Leibnitz the world is an aggregate of atomic souls leading absolutely separate lives. There is no real action of one upon another. Everything in the monad is the development of its individual unstimulated activity. Yet there is a preëstablished harmony of them all, arranged from the beginning by the Creator. The internal development of each monad is so adjusted to that of all the other monads, as to produce the false impression that they are mutually influenced by each other (see Johnson, in Andover Rev., Apl. 1890:407, 408). Leibnitz's theory involves the complete rejection of the freedom of the human will in the libertarian sense. To escape from this arbitrary connection of mind and matter in Leibnitz's preëstablished harmony, Spinoza rejected the Cartesian doctrine of two God-created substances, and maintained that there is but one fundamental substance, namely, God himself (see Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 172).

There is an increased flow of blood to the head in times of mental activity. Sometimes, in intense heat of literary composition, the blood fairly surges through the brain. No diminution, but further increase, of physical activity accompanies the greatest efforts of mind. Lay a man upon a balance; fire a pistol shot or inject suddenly a great thought into his mind; at once he will tip the balance, and tumble upon his head. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 21—“Consciousness causes physical changes, but not vice versa. To say that mind is a function of motion is to say that mind is a function of itself, since motion exists only for mind. Better suppose the physical and the psychical to be only one, as in the violin sound and vibration are one. Volition is a cause in nature because it has cerebration for its obverse and inseparable side. But if there is no motion without mind, then there can be no universe without God.”… 34—“Because within the limits of human experience mind is only known as associated with brain, it does not follow that mind cannot exist without brain. Helmholtz's explanation of the effect of one of Beethoven's sonatas on the brain may be perfectly correct, but the explanation of the effect given by a musician may be equally correct within its category.”

Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 1:§ 56—“Two things, mind and nervous action, exist together, but we cannot imagine how they are related” (see review of Spencer's Psychology, in N. Englander, July, 1873). Tyndall, Fragments of Science, 120—“The passage from the physics of the brain to the facts of consciousness is unthinkable.” Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 95—“The metamorphosis of vibrations into conscious ideas is a miracle, in comparison with which the floating of iron or the turning of water into wine is easily credible.” Bain, Mind and Body, 131—There is no break in the physical continuity. See Brit. Quar., Jan. 1874; art. by Herbert, on Mind and the Science of Energy; McCosh, Intuitions, 145; Talbot, in Bap. Quar., Jan. 1871. On Geulincx's “occasional causes” and Descartes's dualism, see Martineau, Types, 144, 145, 156–158, and Study, 2:77.

4. The materialistic theory, denying as it does the priority of spirit, can furnish no sufficient cause for the highest features of the existing universe, namely, its personal intelligences, its intuitive ideas, its free-will, its moral progress, its beliefs in God and immortality.

Herbert, Modern Realism Examined: “Materialism has no physical evidence of the existence of consciousness in others. As it declares our fellow men to be destitute of free volition, so it should declare them destitute of consciousness; should call them, as well as brutes, pure automata. If physics are all, there is no God, but there is also no man, existing.” Some of the early followers of Descartes used to kick and beat their dogs, laughing meanwhile at their cries and calling them the “creaking of the machine.”Huxley, who calls the brutes “conscious automata,” believes in the gradual banishment, from all regions of human thought, of what we call spirit and spontaneity: “A spontaneous act is an absurdity; it is simply an effect that is uncaused.”

James, Psychology, 1:149—“The girl in Midshipman Easy could not excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying that ‘it was a very small one.’ And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continued evolution. … Materialism denies reality to almost all the impulses which we most cherish. Hence it will fail of universal adoption.” Clerk Maxwell, Life, 391—“The atoms are a very tough lot, and can stand a great deal of knocking about, and it is strange to find a number of them combining to form a man of feeling. … 426—I have looked into most philosophical systems, and I have seen none that will work without a God.” President E. B. Andrews: “Mind is the only substantive thing in this universe, and all else is adjective. Matter is not primordial, but is a function of spirit.” Theodore Parker: “Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so tall or grand as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end of the telescope—the star that is looking, not looked after, nor looked at.”

Materialism makes men to be “a serio-comic procession of wax figures or of cunning casts in clay” (Bowne). Man is “the cunningest of clocks.” But if there were nothing but matter, there could be no materialism, for a system of thought, like materialism, implies consciousness. Martineau, Types, preface, xii, xiii—“It was the irresistible pleading of the moral consciousness which first drove me to rebel against the limits of the merely scientific conception. It became incredible to me that nothing was possible except the actual. … Is there then no ought to be, other than what is?”Dewey, Psychology, 84—“A world without ideal elements would be one in which the home would be four walls and a roof to keep out cold and wet; the table a mess for animals; and the grave a hole in the ground.” Omar Khayyám, Rubaiyat, stanza 72—“And that inverted bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help—for it As impotently moves as you or I.” Victor Hugo: “You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of bodily powers? Why then is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my head, and eternal spring is in my heart. … The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me.”

Diman, Theistic Argument, 348—“Materialism can never explain the fact that matter is always combined with force. Coördinate principles? then dualism, instead of monism. Force cause of matter? then we preserve unity, but destroy materialism; for we trace matter to an immaterial source. Behind multiplicity of natural forces we must postulate some single power—which can be nothing but coördinating mind.”Mark Hopkins sums up Materialism in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1879:490—“1. Man, who is a person, is made by a thing, i.e., matter. 2. Matter is to be worshiped as man's maker, if anything is to be (Rom. 1:25). 3. Man is to worship himself—his God is his belly.” See also Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 25–31, Types, 1: preface, xii, xiii, and Study, 1:248, 250, 345; Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 145–161; Buchanan, Modern Atheism, 247, 248; McCosh, in International Rev., Jan. 1895; Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1875, art.: Man Transcorporeal; Calderwood, Relations of Mind and Brain; Laycock, Mind and Brain; Diman, Theistic Argument, 358; Wilkinson, in Present Day Tracts, 3:no. 17; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:487–499; A. H. Strong, Philos. and Relig., 31–38.