with things the knowledge of which is impossible, and which, even if we knew them, would not make us a bit happier! Only ignorance of natural forces has made us take refuge in a God. To destroy chance is no proof of the existence of God, because there may very well be something which is neither chance nor God, and which brings forth things as they are—namely, Nature. The world would never be happy until it became atheistic. Then, deaf to all other voices, men would follow their own individual impulses, and these impulses alone would lead them to happiness, along the pleasant path of virtue.

La Mettrie here forgets, that even religion itself, quite apart from any revelation, must be reckoned among the natural impulses of man, and if this impulse leads to all unhappiness, it is not easy to see how all the other impulses, since they have the same natural origin, are to lead to happiness. As to immortality, La Mettrie thinks it is possible. The insect caterpillar has probably never really known it was to develope again into a butterfly. We know only a small part of nature, and as the matter of which we are made is eternal, we do not know what may yet come of it. The life-principle, La Mettrie deduced from physiological observations, as not in the whole, but in the separate parts of the animal body. Each tiny fibre is moved by a principle inhabiting it. Man's happiness rests upon the feelings of pleasure. As we are merely bodies, the highest intellectual delights are also in substance bodily pleasure. He agrees with Hobbes that there is no such thing as virtue in an absolute sense, that anything can be called good or bad only relatively—in relation, in fact, to Society. The distinction between good and bad consists in this, that with the former public interests outweigh private interests, while the contrary is the case with the latter. Society must for its own preservation prosecute the bad.

About a score of years after the publication of La Mettrie's "Man as a Machine," appeared that work which has often been designated as the code of all Materialism-the "System of Nature," (1761), by Holbach. Lagrange the mathematician, Diderot, and Naigeon, a literary assistant of Diderot and Holbach, contributed particular sections to it. "Man is unhappy," so the preface of the book begins, "merely because he misunderstands nature." Nature is the great whole of which man is part, and by which he is influenced. Man is a physical being, and his moral existence is only a special aspect of his physical nature. The world shows us everywhere nothing

but matter and motion; an endless chain of causes and effects. Motion is inherent in matter. Everything in the universe is constantly in motion, and all rest is only apparent. Matter and motion are eternal, and creation out of nothing is an empty phrase. We know nothing of the elements of matter; only some of its properties. Between what are called the three kingdoms of nature there exists a continual exchange and circulation of material particles. This is the invariable course of nature. This interchange or motion originates the parts of the universe, maintains them for a time, destroys them gradually, the one by means of the other; while the sum of existence remains always the same. Nature, in its combining activity, creates suns, creates planets. She will perhaps some day scatter again the particles out of which she formed the wondrous masses, of which man gets only a passing glimpse. As with Epicurus, as with Lucretius and Gassendi, fire is still the life-principle of things. Attraction and repulsion are the forces from which all combination and separation in bodies proceed; they are related to each other as Empedocles had seen, like love and hate in the moral world. There is in nature no such thing as order or disorder. Consequently there can be no such things in nature as miracles. Though we attribute to chance, or intelligence, or purpose those effects whose connection with their causes we cannot see, these are mere notions of human beings-order and disorder and purpose are not in Nature.

But in refusing the title of objectivity claimed for the ideas of Ultimate Cause, of Intelligence in Nature, of Purpose, of Order, and so on, Holbach neglects to account for the universal possession by man of these ideas, and ignores, even when they are not wholly rejected, their value to mankind. And if order and disorder do not exist in Nature, then also the antithesis of the Beautiful and the Ugly rests equally and merely upon human notions. So that, from Holbach's standpoint, the figure of a hunchback is essentially as fine as that of a Venus -a cotton mill equally impressive as a temple or a cathedral. So, too, from this standpoint, Good and Evil become mere names. The "System of Nature," then, exhibits in a clear light the narrow limits in which the Materialistic Philosophy moves. Only a single spiritualist offers to Holbach any difficulty. It is Berkeley, a bishop of the Church of England, who, though dominated by theological views more than Descartes and Leibnitz, yet reached a philosophy more logical, and in principle further from ecclesiastical dogma, than either of

them. "What shall we say," says Holbach, "of a Berkeley, who tries hard to convince us that everything in the world is but a chimerical illusion, and that the whole universe exists only in ourselves and in our imagination?" But how those who deny an immaterial soul are to dispose of Berkeley, Holbach has omitted to set forth, and he confesses that this, the most extravagant of systems, is almost the most difficult to refute.

Materialism obstinately takes the phenomenal world for the world of realities. What weapons has it against him who attacks this main stand-point? Are things as they seem? Are they at all? These are questions that continually recur in the history of Philosophy, and to which only the present time can give a half-satisfactory answer-an answer, indeed, which adopts neither extreme. The circle of fundamental problems remains invariably the same-the same as in truth it already was in the philosophy of the ancients.

ness.

The great champion of modern philosophy is Immanuel Kant, who lightly overturned the edifice of collective experience, with all the historical and the exact sciences, by the simple assumption that our notions do not regulate themselves according to things, but things according to our notions. The whole objective world is, in a word, not absolute objectivity, but only objectively so for man and other organised beings, while behind the phenomenal world, the absolute nature of things, the "thing-in-itself," is veiled in impenetrable darkConsciousness is not to be explained out of material movements. The relation of external movement to sensation does not account for sensation. Between Man as an object of empirical research, and Man as he is in immediate self-knowledge, there is an impassable gulf. In regard to that selfknowledge, it had been remarked by Philo the Jew, that the mind is like the eye; though it may see all other objects, it cannot see itself, and therefore cannot judge of itself. Before Kant, Berkeley the bishop and D'Alembert the mathematician had the one looked upon the whole world of phenomena as a great illusion of the senses, and the other had doubted whether there exists outside us anything corresponding to what we see.

There is one province of exact physical inquiry that prevents contemporary Materialists from perversely turning away

from the doubt as to the reality of the phenomenal world, and that is the physiology of the sense organs. It leads back to the examination of the Protagorean proposition: That man is the measure of all things. But when it has been once demonstrated that the quality of our sense-perceptions is entirely conditioned by the constitution of our organs, it follows that to another organisation the very same objects may appear quite different. The idea, however, that the phenomenal world is only a picture of real objects runs through the whole history of human thought. It is found among the thinkers of ancient India, as well as among the Greeks. Plato believed in a world of ideas, the eternal and perfect types of earthly phenomena. Among the moderns, Swedenborg believed that Nature was an objective hieroglyph of a corresponding spiritual reality.

If we wish to get a clear grasp of Kant's line of thought, our way lies through David Hume. Hume had proceeded by a rigorous application of Berkeley's reasoning concerning matter to mind, and showed, that according to this reasoning, our conclusions respecting mind were equally as visionary as those respecting matter. If matter was an abstraction, so, by the same process of reasoning, was mind. Hume's process comes to this; As we use the name of body for the sum of the phenomena which make up our corporeal existence, so we employ the name of soul for the sum of phenomena which constitute our mental existence; and we have no more reason in the latter case, than in the former, to suppose that there is anything beyond the phenomena which answers to the name. In his way of thinking, Hume stands as close to Materialism as so decided an universal sceptic ever can. He occupies the ground prepared by Hobbes and Locke. For that weak point of Materialism, that the transition from movement in space to perception and thought is inexplicable, he points out that this same inexplicableness applies to all relations of cause and effect. For example, food taken into the body nourishes the body for certain, but how, we do not know. When a spark ignites gunpowder, we perceive a power in the spark to ignite gunpowder; what that power is, we know not: we only know its effects. And our ignorance is equally great of the gunpowder; what it is, we know not; we only know its appearances Hume declines to admit that because of the existence of one thing, another thing, that is, a Cause, must necessarily exist: he held that a final cause was a product of the imagination. In consciousness, he found nothing but successive per

to us.

ceptions, and mind was nothing but a bundle of such perceptions. Locke had already argued that we are as ignorant of spirit as of substance; and that we know mind only in its manifestation, not as a substratum. Hume's criticism of the doctrine of personal identity was very acute. "For my part," he says, "when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hate, pain or pleasure. never can catch myself at any time without a perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself.... I may venture to affirm of mankind that they are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions." *

I

But the price paid by Materialism for this kind of defence is, indeed, not less than that which the Devil in the legend demands for his aid. The whole cause of Materialism is lost by the admission of the inexplicableness of all natural occurences. If Materialism quietly acquiesces in this inexplicableness, or takes final refuge in Dysteleology, or the doctrine of Purposelessness, it ceases to be a philosophical principle; it may, however, continue to exist as a maxim of scientific research. This is, in fact, the position of most of our modern "Materialists." They are essentially sceptics; they no longer believe that matter, as it appears to our senses, contains the last solution of all the riddles of nature; but they proceed in principle as if it were so, and wait until from the positive sciences themselves the necessity arises to adopt other views.

That Hume produced so profound an impression upon Kant that he never names him but with the utmost respect removes Kant from the number of those who base their capacity for Philosophy upon a measureless contempt for Materialism. Kant agrees with the ordinary Idealism that the phenomenal world does not show to us things as they are, and that physical science will never discover to us the internal constitution of things which is not phenomenon. As soon, however, as the Idealist attempts to teach us something as to the world of "the things-in-themselves," he cannot have a more irreconcileable opponent than Kant. With him all things range themselves according to our organisation. He went so far as to hold that even the strict necessity of the axioms of Euclid in consciousness was merely subjective and to be psychologically explained. The highest degree, then, of certainty in our

* Hume's Works, Edinb. 1826, vol. 1, p. 319.