means these, when he speaks of them, and not something else of which the physiologist alone knows or thinks he knows. Or will the physiologist stop talking of thoughts and feelings after his science will have acquired more exact information concerning the bodily processes, and will be, instead, speak only of what they are at bottom and in reality or objectively considered, that is, movements? Will he, in case he should happen to fall in love, no longer confess his love, but mention the corresponding vaso-motor processes or, in the words of Tyndall, discourse on the righthanded spiral motion of the molecules of the brain? Does that tell the whole story? How nonsensical!"

It is evident (though many folk seem not aware of it) that materialism of the cruder sort is dead-and waked and buried, for the matter of that. But there has arisen in its stead a new system which rejects the old name, but which is the same in all practical results. concerning knowledge, ideals, views of life, freedom, immortality, God. It is less loyal to physics than its predecessor, but it is materialism just the same.

It is a new answer to the old problem: how to account for everything in the cosmos to-day by elements in the primitive nebular mass -everything from Orion and the Pleiades to

"Shoes and ships and sealing-wax

And cabbages and kings."

The old scientific materialism had no difficulty with the constellations, but it stopped short when it came to the “cabbages and kings." The new unscientific monism meets the difficulty by chopping those useful objects up fine and distributing them piecemeal through chaos. The argument is simple:-They must have come from the nebular mass;. true, we cannot detect them in it, but let us put them there and then we can go and find them there. Just suppose that every atom has a shred or tag of life or consciousness attached to it somehow, and the trick is done. This is known as the "double-aspect" or "mind. stuff" theory.

Now it may seem harsh language, but this sort of thing is only a bit of metaphysical "bunco-steering." Certain enterprising fellowcitizens of ours in the Western States have invented an ingeniousmethod of obtaining the superfluous wealth of their brethren in the effete East or their confiding cousins from across the seas. They select a worked out gold mine and inject into it gold dust and slugsof quartz. Then they lead the confiding investor to the mine, and

Introduction to Philosophy, pp. 82-83.

thence, laden with specimens, to the assayer's office. The result is generally satisfactory-to the ingenious Westerner. The process is called "salting the mine." The monists have made use of the trick on a magnificent scale-they have "salted" the universe.

It would be unpardonable to turn a serious system into a joke if there were a single particle of proof in the whole inorganic universe to support its claims. Indeed, if it goes beyond a joke, if it insists. on being taken as anything more than a passing play of fancy, more especially if it be proposed as the results of "science," it merits more serious rebuke. As Father Maher says,' the advocate of this system "has to make an absolutely incredible assumption without a scrap of evidence in its favor. In order to do away with the souls of a few living beings, who do not constitute the one-hundred-millionth part of the mass of the physical world, he has to assign a mental life to every grain of sand and drop of water on the earth. He has to ascribe to every molecule of matter in the universe something the nature of which cannot be imagined, and of the existence of which neither the experiments of science nor the observation of mankind has ever discovered the slightest trace. Such is the modest demand on our powers of faith made by scientistswho can, when it suits them, be so exacting in their demands for proof. Even Tyndall, sympathetic though he be with such views, is forced to declare: 'It is no explanation to say that objective and subjective are two sides of one and the same phenomenon. Why should the phenomenon have two sides? There are plenty of molecular motions which do not exhibit this two-sidedness. Does water think or feel when it rises into frost ferns upon a window-pane? If not, why should the molecular motions of the brain be yoked to this mysterious companion consciousness?""

In fact, the new monism lends itself much more to the requirements of humor than to those of philosophic thinking. Professor Haeckel (on the lack of saving humor in the Professor and his school see Chesterton's Heretics) unconsciously supplies a theme for wit and fancy. Speaking of chemical affinities, he says: "Every shade of inclination, from complete indifference to the fiercest passion, is exemplified in the chemical relation of the various elements towards each other, just as in the psychology of man, and especially in the life of the sexes." Here is a field for someone possessing the genius. for the absurd of Lewis Carroll or the imagination of Poe or Fitzjames O'Brien. Such a writer could chronicle the loves of Mr. Carbon and Miss Oxygen. He could picture the affinities, the domestic broils and explosions of the atoms, their tribal wars and coalitions,

the rise and fall of empires. And this would be an outcome of exact science! Father Michael Maher-as one might expect from his namedoes not miss the suggestion of humor in the theory. This mindstuff, he says, must be conscious or unconscious. If the latter, "how is it like our mortal life?. Does a multiplicity of unconscious acts constitute an act of conscious intelligence? If, on the other hand, we ascribe real but incipient consciousness to the molecules of matter, and if mental life is the outcome of their combinations, it would seem that a mental existence ought to belong to all material objects with which experience presents us.... Is a new steam-tug a thing of joy to itself? What are the emotions of a deserted coal-mine? Or is it only very small lumps of coal that have minds?"

Immaterial substance has evidently taken a complete revenge on its assailants. It is but a little thing, said the atoms, and we shall reduce it to the position of a petty province of our domain. And when the war is ended, we find them offering to it an equal share even in the vast territory in which they had claimed undisputed sway. But in vain. It possesses a spirit of pride and independence. It consents to an alliance only where it can maintain its superiority.

Matter is not spiritual any more than spirit is material. If any confidence whatever can be placed in human powers of knowing, the spiritual and the material are two different sorts of things. Experience testifies indeed that they act on each other, but reason forbids us to hold that either is the other. But, perversely enough, this new double-aspect Identity-hypothesis, rejecting, as we think, both experience and reason, says that matter and mind are so different that they cannot act on each other, but are still only phases of the same thing. It begins to look as if logical consistency had been sent the same road as experience and rational inference. We can conceive of two different entities which can act on each other; we can conceive that there might be two things so absolutely different or apart that neither could influence the other; but what are we to make of two things so essentially at twain in their operations, and yet so inextricably at one in their being? Have we here two entities or one? If one, we are back to materialism"-a system that is consistent at any rate, even though it does burke the facts. If two (and the whole argument points to two) why not admit dualism without more ado?

'Psychology, p. 511.

10 We

We are not considering here the answer of Idealistic Monism.

Monism has been driven to this self-destructive position partly by its recognition of the essential difference between the facts of physics and the facts of consciousness, and partly by its allegiance to the law of the Conservation of Energy. This law was used first against freedom of the will. If the will could affect energy from without, it was argued, then the sum of energy would be increased, and the law set at naught. But it did not take much reflection to see that the law could not be consistently applied without denying all interaction between mind and matter. Once granted that the mental and physical facts are on different planes, it follows that if the mental activities affect the physical in any way, the sum of energy is increased; and if motion passes out of its own plane to produce thought, the amount of energy is diminished. Here is not the place to discuss this use of the law of conservation. In passing we may remark that if we examine the kind and extent of the proof for it even in the physical world, we shall be justified in saying that it is a bit of impertinence to use it as a basis for deduction in psychology. But we must take monism as we find it. And monism must accept the consequences of its position.

Matter and its changes never affect consciousness. They are not merely strangers

"hedged with alien speech

And lacking all interpreter."

They cannot get into touch at all. I have a sensation of being burned. But I have no right to say that it was caused by fire, or even by the reaction of my nervous system-these things belong to another world. On "scientific" grounds one might more reasonably claim that the rings of Saturn are the cause of the Hudson River, for these are both in the physical order, and might at least conceivably be connected. And so too the sensations of sight and hearing, of smiting or being smitten, have no relation to the movements of light or air or the more ponderable things of the physical universe. The two series run parallel, they never meet or collide. Passing over the more evident objections which everyday experience offers to this theory, we ask what becomes of science itself if it be held. If the material world stands so completely aloof from my consciousness, how can I claim to know anything about it?

And if we turn to the other half of the theory, the difficulties are no less overwhelming. We need not delay over them. The following quotation from Professor James will suffice to indicate the

final results of a system which has been proposed as a scientific presentation of the facts of experience.

"To comprehend completely the consequences of the dogma so confidently enunciated, one should unflinchingly apply it to the most complicated examples. The movements of our tongues and pens, the flashings of our eyes in conversation, are of course events of the material order, and as such their casual antecedents must be exclusively material. If we knew thoroughly the nervous system of Shakespeare, and as thoroughly all his environing conditions, we should be able to show why at a certain period of his life his hand came to trace on certain sheets of paper those crabbed little black marks which we shall for shortness' sake call the manuscript of Hamlet. We should understand the rationale of every erasure and alteration therein, and we should understand all this without in the slightest degree acknowledging the existence of the thoughts in Shakespeare's mind. The words and sentences would be taken, not as signs of anything beyond themselves, but as little outward facts, pure and simple. In like manner we might exhaustively write the biography of those two hundred pounds, more or less, of warmish albuminoid matter called Martin Luther, without ever implying that it felt.""

If monism be considered the best that human reason can do to solve the relations between matter and mind, it is small wonder that many fall back on agnosticism. This is of course Mr. Spencer's final solution of the problem, although he makes tentative efforts towards some more definite theory. We have seen that he recognized the difference between motion and feeling to be one that "transcends all other differences." This statement would make an excellent basis for a system of dualism. On the other hand his theory of evolution draws him in the direction of monism. In fact Professor James is able to quote certain passages from the Synthetic Philosophy in which Mr. Spencer seems to be asserting the evolution of consciousness from the unconscious. And in answer to Mr. Spencer's disclaimer that he never really meant to explain how consciousness is evolved, James says in his delightfully impudent way: "That, when a critic calls attention to the inanity of his words, Mr. Spencer should say that he never meant anything particular by them, is simply an example of the scandalous vagueness with which this sort of 'chromophilosophy' is carried on."

But the ultimate solution of Mr. Spencer and his school is that mind and matter are twin manifestations of the one Unknowable Reality. This theory is not without its serious logical defects. As 11 Psychology, I. pp. 132-133.

12 Psychology, I. p. 149. Footnote.