“ He holds that we pass without break from the phenomena of bodily life to the phenomena of mental life, that consciousness arises in the course of the living being’s adaptation to its environment, and that there is a continuous evolution from reflex action through instinct and memory up to reason. He throws out the brilliant suggestion that the experience of the race is in a sense inherited by the individual; which is true in the sense that animal organisms become hereditarily better adapted to perform mental operations, though no proof that any elements of knowledge become a priori. ”

“ Passing from Moleschott to Lyell’s view of the evolution of the earth’s crust and later to Darwin’s theory of natural selection and environment, he reached the general inference that, not God but evolution of matter, is the cause of the order of the world; that life is a combination of matter which in favourable circumstances is spontaneously generated; that there is no vital principle, because all forces, non-vital and vital, are movements; that movement and evolution proceed from life to consciousness ”

“ Thus in presence of the problem which is the crux of materialism, the origin of consciousness, he first propounds a gratuitous hypothesis that everything has mind, and then gives up the origin of conscious mind after all. He is certain, however, that the law of substance somehow proves that conscious soul is a mere function of brain, that soul is a function of all substances, and that God is the force or energy, or soul or spirit, of nature. ”

“ But, in spite of these materialistic tendencies, he followed Hume in reducing matter and everything knowable to phenomena of consciousness; and, supposing that nothing is knowable beyond phenomena, concluded that we can neither affirm nor deny that anything exists beyond, but ought to take up an attitude which the ancient sceptics called Aphasia, but he dubbed by the new name of Agnosticism. Thus Huxley first reduced consciousness to a product of matter, and then matter to a phenomenon of consciousness. By combining materialism with idealism he made consciousness a product of itself. ”

“ The greater part of the process is a change in the facts of nature before consciousness; and in all that part, at all events, the phenomena evolved must mean physical facts which are not conscious affections, but, as they develop, are causes which gradually produce life and consciousness. Moreover, evolution is defined universally as an “integration of matter and dissipation of motion,” and yet mental, social and moral developments are also called evolution, so that, in accordance with the definition, they are also integrations of matter and dissipations of motion. ”

“ He holds that all the time, space, motion, matter known to us are phenomena; and that force, the ultimate of ultimates, is, as known to us, a phenomenon, “an affection of consciousness.” If so, then all we know is these phenomena, affections of consciousness, subjective affections, but produced by an unknown power. So far as this main point of transfigured realism is steadily maintained, it is a compound of idealism and realism, but not materialism. ”

“ In France, again, positivism is not materialism, but rather the refusal to frame a metaphysical theory. Comte tells us that man first gets over theology, then over metaphysics, and finally rests in positivism. Yet in getting over theology he ceases to believe in God, and in getting over metaphysics he ceases to believe in soul. ”

“ Aristotle had imputed to all living beings a soul, though to plants only in the sense of a vegetative, not a sensitive, activity, and in Moleschott’s time many scientific men still accepted some sort of vital principle, not exactly soul, yet over and above bodily forces in organisms. Moleschott, like Lotze, not only resisted the whole hypothesis of a vital principle, but also, on the basis of Lavoisier’s discovery that respiration is combustion, argued that the heat so produced is the only force developed in the organism, and that matter therefore rules man. ”

“ Further, the very existence of conscious beings is the best proof of the distinct or substantial being of the soul, existing in man with body, in God as pure spirit. It seems hopeless to expect that natural science, even with the aid of evolution, can explain by mere body the origin and nature of this fact of consciousness. If so, materialism is not the whole truth of metaphysics. ”

“ On the other hand, scientific men, such as Herschel, Maxwell and Stokes, who approach nature from mathematics and mechanics, and therefore from the universal laws of motion, have the opposite tendency, because they perceive that nature is not its own explanation. In order to exert force, or at all events that force of reciprocal pressure which we best understand, and on which, in impact, the third law of motion was founded, there are always at least two bodies, enduring, triply extended, mobile, each inert, mutually impenetrable or resistent, different yet similar ”

“ As Paul Janet truly remarked, positivism contains an unconscious metaphysics in rejecting final causes and an immaterial soul. Now, when in surrendering theology and metaphysics we have also to surrender God and the soul, we are not free from materialism. Positivism, however, shelters itself behind the vague word “phenomena.” Lastly, in England we have not only an influence of positivism, but also, what is more important, the synthetic philosophy of Herbert Spencer. The Spencer.point of this philosophy is not materialism, but realism. ”

“ It will have asserted the evolution of man and his consciousness out of the phenomena of his consciousness. The truth is that his theory of evolution can be carried through the whole process without a break, only by giving the synthetic philosophy a materialistic interpretation, and by adhering consistently to Spencer’s own materialistic definition of evolution; otherwise there will be a break at least between life and mind. ”

“ In the second place, having declared the noumenal power, which causes phenomena, or conscious affections, to be unknowable, and having left anybody who pleased to make it a god and an object of religion, he proceeds to describe it as if it were known force, and known in two respects as persistent and as resistant force. He supposes that the law of evolution is deducible from the law of persistent force, and includes in force what is now called energy. ”

“ Similarly, both in First Principles and in the Principles of Psychology, he assigns to us, in addition to our definite consciousness of our subjective affections, an indefinite consciousness of something out of consciousness, of something which resists, of objective existence. Thus it turns out that the objective agency, the noumenal power, the absolute force, declared unknown and unknowable, is known after all to exist, persist, resist and cause our subjective affections or phenomena, yet not to think or to will. ”

“ These advances in natural science, which pointed to a unity and gradual evolution in nature, were accompanied by a growth in commerce, manufactures and industrialism; the same kind of spirit showed itself in the revolutionary upheaval of 1848, and in the materialistic publications which immediately followed, while these publications have reacted on the industrial socialism of our own time. Meanwhile, philosophic forces to counteract materialism were weak. Realism was at a low ebb. ”

“ The close dependency of all mental operations on brain also tempts them to the conclusion that brain is not only an organ, but the whole organ of conscious mind. [1] It appears also that Darwin, having extended his theory of evolution as far as the rational and moral nature of man, in the Descent of Man, ended in his Autobiography by declaring his attitude to first and final causes to be that of an agnostic. ”

“ These causes, scientific, industrial and philosophical, led to the domination of materialism in the middle of the 19th century in Germany, or rather to its revival; for in its main position, that matter and motion are everything and eternal, it was a repetition of the materialism of the 18th century in France. ”

“ Materialism Proper.—Materialism in its modern sense is the view that all we know is body, of which mind is an attribute or function. Several causes, beginning towards the end of the 18th century, gradually led up to the materialism of Moleschott, Vogt and Büchner, which flourished in the middle of the 19th century. ”

“ Still, his agnosticism meant that, though he did not assert that there is no God, he did assert that we cannot know whether there is or is not. To the evolutionary biologist brain is apt to appear to be the crowning object of knowledge. ”

“ On the strength of the consilience of arguments for evolution in the organic world, he carries back the process in the whole world, until he comes to a cosmology which recalls the rash hypotheses of the Presocratics. ”

“ But, under the influence of Trendelenburg’s attempt to reconcile thought and being by assigning motion to both, his Wirklichkeitsphilosophie, in a similar effort after a unity of being, lands him in the contention that matter is absolute being, the support of all reality underlying all bodily and mental states. ”

“ The author himself says that it is transfigured realism—which is realism in asserting objective existence as separate from subjective existence, but anti-realism in denying that objective existence is to be known. ”

“ Hence, when he returns to organisms, it does not surprise us that he assigns to ova and spermatozoa cell-souls, to the impregnated ovum germ-soul, to plants tissue-souls, to animals nerve-souls; or that he regards man’s body and soul as born together in the impregnated ovum, and gradually evolved from the bodies and souls of lower animals. ”