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The recent progress of the biological sciences, and the great popularity which they enjoy, are also very noteworthy circumstances in this con

nection.

The least observant minds can hardly fail to have been struck with the remarkable manner in which these sciences have come to the front during the last twenty or thirty years. It would be easy to indicate the causes of this, but it is its consequences which concern us. Materialism has clearly gained by it in more ways than one. Naturalists and physiologists are more apt, perhaps, to become materialists than natural philosophers, because it is possible for the former to be greatly distinguished in their vocations without requiring ever seriously to ask what matter is, but hardly for the latter, who have to deal with it in its more general and essential nature. The natural philosopher may denounce as metaphysics the question, What is matter? but he is not only always trying to answer the question, but his answer, as a rule, comes so near that of the metaphysician, that he is rarely a materialist. It is in the form of exaggerations of the influence of physical agencies, and of physiological qualities, that materialism is generally made use of as a principle of scientific explanation; and this is done by those whose studies are least fitted to disclose to them what the natural philosopher, and still more, the speculative thinker, are perfectly aware of, that much

more can be said for a mathematical theory of matter or a mental theory of matter, than for a material theory of mind and history.

The advance of science into the various provinces of the organic world has favoured materialism still more by its influence on the character of the scientific spirit. Regions have now been entered, where to proceed rigidly, according to the rules either of deduction or induction, is as yet often impossible; where not a step can be taken which is not conjectural and venturesome; where at every turn a host of hypotheses must be devised and tested. What an enormous number of hypotheses have been suggested and associated with the Darwinian doctrine of development, itself still a hypothesis! This state of things is inevitable, but none the less is there a serious danger in it. Men of science are not unlikely in such circumstances to forget what the demands of scientific method really are, and to allow the plausible often to pass for the probable, and the probable for the proved. What may be called the scientific conscience, or, at least, scientific conscientiousness, runs a serious risk of loss and injury. The risk has, I fear, already largely passed into reality. Is it not painfully obvious that a large number of those who profess to give us scientific instruction in biology, ethnology, sociology, &c., have the very vaguest views of what proof is? Is there not a

very large increase of men, esteemed scientific, who cannot distinguish a process of imagination from one of induction? Is there not rapidly rising up a pseudo-scientific school of savants whose notions of evidence are essentially different from those of the older type of scientific man represented by a Herschell or Faraday, a Brewster, Forbes, or Thomson? It seems to me that these questions must be answered in the affirmative; and that it is almost exclusively from the new school-the school which draws its resources largely from imagination—that the ranks of the so-called scientific materialism of our day are recruited.

Such causes of the spread of materialism as the following might also be dwelt upon, but it must suffice simply to mention them. (a) Political and social dissatisfaction. In some countries and in certain classes this has been a most powerful cause. In proof, I need only refer to secularism in England and to socialism in France and Germany. (b) The growth of rationalism and of aversion to the supernatural. Materialism is the natural and logical culmination of this movement. It is only in and through materialism that the elimination of everything supernatural can be reached. (c) The predominance of material interests, of the mercantile spirit, of the love of wealth, worldly display, and pleasure. The life determines theory even more than theory influences life.

Materialism, it must be added, has another class of causes. It has all the reasons which it can urge on its own behalf. It would be unfair, at this stage, to insinuate that these are either few or feeble. We shall examine them in next

lecture.

LECTURE IV.

CONTEMPORARY OR SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM.

I.

MATERIALISM as a reasoned theory of the universe,―materialism as a philosophy,—is more than two thousand years old. During that long period it has had various fates and fortunes. It has at one time ebbed, and at another flowed; it has suffered many checks and defeats, and has also enjoyed many successes and triumphs. It has never been more than partially and temporarily vanquished; it has sometimes seemed as if it would carry all before it, and leave no foe undestroyed. Its least sympathetic critic must admit that it has shunned neither conflict with the most formidable antagonists nor the scrutiny of the doubting and discussing intellect; that, on the contrary, its course has been a continuous campaign against all kinds of powers and principalities in the name of free thought and scientific truth;

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