Immaterialism

“ And it is curious to see scientific and realist teaching used everywhere as a means of stifling all freedom of investigation as addressed to moral questions under a dead weight of facts. Materialism is the auxiliary doctrine of every tyranny, whether of the one or of the masses. To crush what is spiritual, moral, human so to speak, in man, by specializing him; to form mere wheels of the great social machine, instead of perfect individuals; to make society and not conscience the center of life, to enslave the soul to things, to de-personalize man, this is the dominant drift of our epoch. ”

“ Now, who does not see that the objection of the materialists proves the very thing it is intended to deny? Man distinguishing within himself a spiritual principle and a material principle,—what is this but Nature herself, proclaiming by turns her double essence, and bearing testimony to her own laws? And notice the inconsistency of materialism: it denies, and has to deny, that man is free; now, the less liberty man has, the more weight is to be attached to his words, and the greater their claim to be regarded as the expression of truth. ”

“ The answer is, that to only one of these religions or philosophies is this new revelation absolutely fatal. That is to Materialism. I do not say this in any spirit of hostility to Materialists, who, so far as they are an organized body, are, I think, as earnest and moral as any other class. But the fact is manifest that if spirit can live without matter, then the foundation of Materialism is gone, and the whole scheme of thought crashes to the ground. ”

“ No; the real alternative is materialism, which played so large a part in philosophy fifty years ago, and which, defeated there, has betaken itself to the field of practical affairs. This is the dread alternative of a denial of the great faith of humanity, a blight which would apply a sponge to all the high aspirations and ideals of the race. According to this dogma, the first and last things in the universe are atoms, their number, dance, combinations, and growth. All mind, all will, all emotion, all character, all love is incidental, transitory, vain. ”

“ Any system that does not commend itself to the reason must fall. I do not know exactly what you mean by materialism. I do not know what matter is. I am satisfied, however, that without matter there can be no force, no life, no thought, no reason. ”

“ Old materialism looked upon all previous history as a crude heap of irrationality and violence; modern materialism sees in it the process of evolution of humanity, and aims at discovering the laws thereof. ”

“ For we have no more to deal with the absolute antithesis between idealism and materialism, but with their higher synthesis which has been found in the knowledge that the ideal depends on the material, that divine justice and liberty depend on the production and distribution of earthly goods." [13]
Religions, schools of ethics, philosophy, metaphysics, art, political and juridical institutions are all to be explained in the last analysis by the economic and telluric environments, present and past. This ruthless materialism crushes belief in God, in the Soul, in immortality. ”

“ But the man of science, who, forgetting the limits of philosophical inquiry, slides from these formulæ and symbols into what is commonly understood by materialism, seems to me to place himself on a level with the mathematician, who should mistake the x's and y's, with which he works his problems, for real entities—and with this further disadvantage, as compared with the mathematician, that the blunders of the latter are of no practical consequence, while the errors of systematic materialism may paralyse the energies and destroy the beauty of a life. ”

“ Such apologists for a shallow and ignoble idealism are in the habit of declaring that "the tendency of modern thought" is to render "materialism" unthinkable; but when these people speak of materialism they are thinking of the austere limits of that vast objective spectacle into which we are all born. This spectacle is indeed mysterious. ”

“ A philosophy whose principle is so incommensurate with our most intimate powers as to deny them all relevancy in universal affairs, as to annihilate their motives at one blow, will be even more unpopular than pessimism. Better face the enemy than the eternal Void! This is why materialism will always fail of universal adoption, however well it may fuse things into an atomistic unity, however clearly it may prophesy the future eternity. For materialism denies reality to the objects of almost all the impulses which we most cherish. ”

“ It would, however, imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we contended that all ideas had their origin in the world of senses, and, on the other hand, that a word was worth more than a word; that besides the individual beings known to us by our senses, there existed also beings of a general nature. An immaterial substance is rather the same absurdity as an immaterial body. ”

“ NEVERTHELESS, WE CALL OURSELVES MATERIALISTS Nevertheless, we call ourselves materialists. Yes; not because we believe that matter exists as we see it, but because in this way we may contradict the vain imaginings and all those sacred mysteries which begin so modestly, and always end by extracting the money from our pockets. ”

“ These three propositions are the institutes to which every controversy about the materiality or immateriality of the mind must be referred for settlement. A conception of the mind as immaterial can only be attained by, first of all, conceiving it as that which is the universal part, as contradistinguished from all that is the particular part, of every cognition. Hence the necessity of Proposition VII., which fixes the ego as the universal part of all, and matter, in its various forms, as the particular part of some, cognitions. ”

“ The Materialistic starting-point is from an unauthorized postulate—in common parlance, an unfounded assumption; each step it takes is attended with a fresh need of postulation, amounting at last to the gravest burden of improbability. And when the materializing goal is reached we gain nothing—no treasure is discovered—no vista opened into new realms of intellectual or moral empire. We are only told that our supposed insight was but a dream. We are only warned to dream no more. Materialism has murdered insight. ”

“ The final destruction of all that we name material hasteth. Materialism is self-love, and more opaque than the solidity of material atoms is the condensation of mortal mind; but instead of concentrated matter we find it concentrated error. ”

“ In fact the Materialistic theories which today deify reason and make matter eternal, and which recognize in matter the principle and perfection of every form of life, are the substratum underlying almost every species of modern literature. It is this materialistic philosophy in the trappings of popular literature which is filling the earth with crime and making the lives of men a veritable inferno. Its pernicious influence has been stealing over the minds of men till it has succeeded in shaking to its centre the whole fabric of social life in almost every civilized country. ”

“ The real enemies of society always have been, and always will be, the ignorant and the fanatical, and it must be frankly owned that, if these exist within the pale of materialism, there are quite enough of them outside. The danger in the doctrine which reverses the natural relation of things, and asserts that spirit is a product of matter, when in truth matter is a product of spirit, this danger is of another kind; materialism is fatal to the development of the experimental sciences themselves. ”

“ Civilization, society, and morals, are like a string of beads, whose fastening is the belief in the immortality of the soul. Break the fastening, and the beads are scattered.
Materialism is the scourge of our day, the origin of all the evils of European society. Now, materialism is fiercely fought in this book, which might be entitled, "Spiritualism Demonstrated by Science." ”

“ We have already shown that, in adhering to experience, the immaterialist must first of all go and ascertain the fact respecting these phenomena—do they inhere in matter, or do they not—before he is entitled to predicate that they cannot inhere in it, lest while he is steering his argument in one direction, the fact should be giving him the lie in another. ”

“ These splendid efforts are made in defiance of materialism, without the remotest hope of gain, just to keep, to save from destruction, a possession felt instinctively to be the most precious thing of all, far above gold and rubies in price. ”

“ So we go on, bruised and broken, and at length buried and forgot, most of us never grasping these unseen things, not even having a hint of their immaterial presences. It is only as the jest-loving fates have it that, once in a while, something in revolutionary thought drops to earth, is caught by some materialistic mind, bred up by some materialistic hand. ”

“ To attempt to conceive it as some particular thing, by affixing to it some peculiar or distinctive mark, would be to reduce it from universality to particularity—in other words, would be to destroy the conception of mind in the very act of forming it.
The materialist's error consists in his holding mind to be particular.11. This observation brings us to close quarters with the fundamental error both of the materialist and the spiritualist. The fundamental error of the materialist does not consist in his holding the mind, or ego, to be a material substance or a material result. ”

“ It is this assumption that I call ‘scientific materialism.’ Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as 25being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived. It is not wrong, if properly construed. If we confine ourselves to certain types of facts, abstracted from the complete circumstances in which they occur, the materialistic assumption expresses these facts to perfection. But when we pass beyond the abstraction, either by more subtle employment of our senses, or by the request for meanings and for coherence of thoughts, the scheme breaks down at once. ”

“ I knew a philosopher of this kidney, who was accustomed briefly to sum up his experience of human nature in saying, “Mankind is a damned rascal:” and the natural corollary is pretty sure to follow,—“The world lives by humbug, and so will I.”
The abstractionist and the materialist thus mutually exasperating each other, and the scoffer expressing the worst of materialism, there arises a third party to occupy the middle ground between these two, the skeptic, namely. He finds both wrong by being in extremes. He labors to plant his feet, to be the beam of the balance. ”

“ Modern miracles were laughed out of court. But materialism has supernaturalism for its nemesis. An abstract science, erecting itself into a false philosophy, leaves half our nature unsatisfied, and becomes morally bankrupt before its intellectual errors are exposed. Supernaturalism is the refuge of the materialist who wishes to make room for ideal values without abandoning the presuppositions of materialism. ”

“ The materialist respects sensible masses, Society, Government, social art, and luxury, every establishment, every mass, whether majority of numbers, or extent of space, or amount of objects, every social action. The idealist has another measure, which is metaphysical, namely, the rank which things themselves take in his consciousness; not at all, the size or appearance. Mind is the only reality, of which men and all other natures are better or worse reflectors. Nature, literature, history, are only subjective phenomena. ”

“ All that is left of the whole structure of nineteenth century materialism has crumbled away to that word “bits.” We cannot as yet imagine or think without resting somewhere on “bits.” Our minds like our feet need a solid something beneath them. ”

“ On one side, a gross materialism, of which the shameless maxims would revolt his soul; impure resting-places offered to the bastard characters of a century by the unworthy complacency of philosophers; on the other side, a pretended system of perfectibility, not less suspicious, which, to realize the chimera of a general perfection common to the whole universe, would not be embarrassed for a choice of means. ”

“ Here we have the whole philosophy of materialism. Does any one imagine that political bargains are reduced to writing? It would be injurious to the conscience. They are made by the merest hints on all sides. Every one is left free. ”

“ It may well be that the intransigent materialism of the 19th century is merely an episode, an aberration rather, in the history of biology—an aberration brought about by the over-rapid development of a materialistic and luxurious civilisation, in which man's material means have outrun his mental and moral growth. ”

“ On that day the tap-root of materialism was wounded, and materialism itself has been an invalid of increasing languor and desuetude ever since. On the other hand, supernaturalism in every form was left in little better plight. ”

“ We need not fear that either the new notion of Deity forced upon us by the extension of our knowledge, even should this destroy the last vestige of anthropomorphism, or the involved application of a positive method to ethics, will lead to what is dreaded as materialism. If materialism be not a mere name, it is feared because it is thought to imply egotism, immersion in sensuality, and indifference to ideas. But what is the prospect unrolled before us by science? ”

“ Materialism is the murderous outlaw of the age, an enemy that goes bullying through the land, outraging our finer natures, overturning our ideals, polluting our ambitions. I hope I am not envious of his followers. ”