Material world

“ Most of the sciences, arts, professions, and occupations of life, grow out of our connection with matter. The natural philosopher, the physician, the lawyer, the artist, and the legislator, find the objects or occasions of their researches in matter. The poet borrows his beautiful imagery from matter. The sculptor and painter express their noble conceptions through matter. Material wants rouse the world to activity. The material organs of sense, especially the eye, wake up infinite thoughts in the mind. ”

“ The collection of phenomena must precede the analysis of them, and every new fact, illustrative of the action and reaction between humanity and the material world around it, is another step towards the determination of the great question, whether man is of material nature or above her. ”

“ Peaceful material production is our main purpose, and we learn many lessons of the Will embodied in the material world when we follow this purpose honestly. But before our age could begin, it was necessary for the races to come to personal consciousness. ”

“ How, therefore, shall we satisfy ourselves concerning the cause of that Being whom you suppose the Author of Nature, or, according to your system of anthropomorphism, the ideal world in which you trace the material? Have we not the same reason to trace the ideal world into another ideal world, or new intelligent principle? ”

“ It is no doubt just possible that among the vibrations of the fundamental ingredients of our world—those attenuated forms of matter which are said to be not even 'material,' there may be some which act as vehicles for psychical interchange. If such psychic waves exist, the discovery is wholly in favour of materialism. ”

“ But, as it seems to me, we now know too much about matter to be materialists. The philosophical difficulties in the way of accepting39 a materialistic world-system are notorious—at least to philosophers. But I am not speaking of them. I am thinking of the scientific difficulties, those that cannot but suggest themselves when we consider the breach of continuity involved in the appearance of life, and still more obviously of feeling, at particular points in the long procession of material causes and effects. ”

“ Originating as it did in the necessities of our material nature, which for a long time restricted it to the study of the inorganic world, it has not till now become sufficiently complete or systematic to harmonize well with our moral nature. ”

“ But this actual world of experience, in which we are, and which is in us, remains both the material and the limits of our consideration: a world which is so rich in content that even the most searching investigation of which the human mind is capable could not exhaust it. ”

“ In the school in which I have been trained this is known as Materialism in the strict sense of that word, which I take to be—reasoning about the soul of man, as if its functions were simply those of material units. ”

“ The subjects themselves embrace the whole arcana of the material universe, the mineral and vegetable products of the earth, their properties, manufacture, and varied convertibility to the service and uses of man. ”

“ But, in the first place, those most close to the tradition of materialism maintain that the most significant appearances, the primary qualities, are those which compose a purely quantitative and corporeal world. ”

“ This thin matter is just as material as lead or brass. And such systems are purely materialistic. But they illustrate the extraordinary difficulty that the ordinary mind experiences in attempting to rise from sensuous to non-sensuous thinking. They illustrate the ingrained materialism of man. ”

“ One judges the world by himself; the other judges himself by the world.
To illustrate our meaning: the materialist, looking outward, sees that the world is made up of force-driven matter, of gas, carbon and mineral ”

“ The constitution of matter, speaking now from an admittedly materialistic standpoint, that of the physical sciences, is a subject of vastest interest and importance to mankind, for human existence is material. ”

“ Even our modern scientific Materialism, with its loudly avowed scorn for all merely metaphysical questions, shows by its constant endeavour to reduce all material existence to a succession of changes in a homogeneous medium, both the persistence with which the intellect demands a permanent background for change, and the difficulty of finding logical satisfaction for the demand. ”

“ Let me, for the purposes of this discussion, make a triple division of knowledge into physical, ethical, and æsthetical, according as our thought is concerned with the world of matter, the world of mind, and the world of art or beauty. ”

“ Can mere atoms question how they feel sensation?
Or dust make suggestion of its own creation?
Yet if man were better than his base conditions,
Could things baser fetter his sublime ambitions?
What unknown conjunction of the pure etherial,
With the form and function of the gross material,
Gives the product mortal? whose immortal yearning
Brings him to the portal of celestial learning.
To the portal gleaming, where the waiting sphinxes,
Humoring his dreaming, give him what he thinks is
Key to the arcana—plausible equation
Of the problems many in his incarnation. ”

“ When I built my life on the basis of Materialism I judged all actions by their effect on human happiness in this world now and in future generations, regarding man as an organism that lived on earth and there perished, with activities confined to earth and limited by physical laws. ”

“ A natural and obvious reply to such an inquiry is, that a Being of somewhat similar nature to their own, though larger and more powerful, took the materials of which the world is formed and moulded them, as a workman moulds the materials of his handicraft, into their present shape. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The remainder of the essay endeavors to meet the charge of materialism. The following is the conclusion:—"In itself it is of little moment whether we express the phaenomena of matter in terms of spirit; or the phaenomena of spirit in terms of matter: matter may be regarded as a form of thought, thought may be regarded as a property of matter—each statement has a certain relative truth. But with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way to be preferred. ”

“ We have still to ask whether we are to regard a mind as a structure of material units or not. If we do so regard it, we are, so far as mind is concerned, emergent materialists in view of what we have just decided ”

“ There are some who understand these descriptions literally, and who suppose that, being raised in material, though glorified bodies, the redeemed will inhabit a material heaven—either this earth transformed, or some other planet—and will be surrounded with glorious material objects, the most beautiful and precious of nature’s productions, fashioned like to art’s best accomplishments. ”

“ As industrial art regards its facts as mere contrivances that have no life of their own, but that merely express their human artificer’s intents, so a philosophy of Nature, founded solely upon our special sciences, tends to treat the facts of Nature (regarded in the light of our cunningly contrived conceptions) as having no inner meaning, and as being mere embodiments of our formulas. ”

“ Man's organism was material,—why should not his mind, his most intimate self, follow the same analogy, and be material too? Hence its materiality was assumed. The word, indeed, by which the thinking principle is designated in all languages bears evidence to the inveteracy of the superstition that the conception of mind might be formed by conceiving a material substance of extreme fineness and tenuity. ”

“ When we grant that the material universe contains in itself no creative energy, and that all the manifold laws by which seemingly blind atoms rise by intelligent coordination to organic conditions, and thus to intellectual activities, have not created themselves, we have exhausted the argument for materialism as a possible explanation of First Cause. And now we appeal to an Infinite Intelligence, a spiritual essence, superior to material conditions, and attempt to satisfy reason by making the universe the sequence of a Sovereign Will? ”

“ Physical properties, vital phenomena, psychical facts, all have their foundation in this immanent activity. Material activity is a minimum of soul or thought which, by continuous gradation and progressive complexity, without solution of continuity, without an abrupt transition from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, rises through the series of living beings to the dignity of the human soul. ”

“ Both our art and our sciences are due, however, quite as much to our conflict with the facts that our experience directly furnishes, as to any essential plasticity of these facts, either to the practical purposes of our art, or to the ideal purposes of our science. Nature permits us to mine metals and to Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901) .djvu/228 of our experience. It is our interest in social organization that has given us both industrial art and empirical science. ”

“ Natural productions were set forth as images of the world, over which a flame was to burn, signifying the aspirations of man's heart towards his Maker. He brought out of the collection of natural objects which he possessed, and which had been increased as chance directed, the best ores and other specimens. ”

“ The same principle prevails not only throughout the inorganic or world of matter, but throughout the organic or world of life, and specially throughout its highest manifestations in human life and character, and in the highest products of its evolution, in societies, religions, and philosophies. ”

“ We advance step by step from the most solid to the most ethereal of material creations, and we examine a series of extraordinary effects produced by powers which we know not whether to regard as material or immaterial, so subtile are they. ”

“ I will call this natural philosophy ‘materialism.’ Not only were men of science materialists, but also adherents of all schools of philosophy. The idealists only differed from the philosophic materialists on question of the alignment of nature in reference to mind. But no one had any doubt that the philosophy of nature considered in itself was of the type which I have called materialism. ”

“ The first series we call physical laws, or those which act upon the material universe, and upon ourselves as a part of that universe. The second we call organic, or those which regulate the origin, growth, well-being and dissolution of organized beings. ”

“ From our examination of the above arguments, we perceive that the materialist uses both the concomitance of consciousness with material processes, and, again, the sequence of particular conscious states upon material processes, as proof of the subordination and passivity or dependence of consciousness, as proof that the latter is effect of the material as cause ”

“ The discrepancy between the materialistic mechanism of science and the moral intuitions, which are presupposed in the concrete affairs of life, only gradually assumed its true importance as the centuries advanced. ”

“ Not until the nature of substance could be proved and classified in contrast with the mass of ignorant notions which clogged ancient thought was the amazing mechanical, economic, and scientific advance of the last century possible. ”

“ Directly in connection with the material body, but consisting of something distinctly different in kind, higher, finer, and interior to it, is the natural mind, but these two, the natural mind and the material body, work together as a unit. ”

“ The realistic systems which seek everywhere for the causal connection of actuality, and accordingly inquire under what conditions aught arises, endures, and perishes, in their explanations arrive at special ‘constructions of matter,’—that is to say, at attempts at comprehending how materiality is constituted out of certain reciprocal effects or activities of elements that are in themselves non-material but real. ”

“ Do not the magnificent profusion of radical materials, the gems without number which we everywhere discover, the immense amount of matter susceptible of transformation and assimilation by the living being, the mysteries of generation in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, all indicate to us that there are scattered over the universe an infinite number of vital principles, which exercise their activity in very different ways, and over a scale of astonishing extent? ”

“ If we consider the impressions of sense as the mere materials of our experience, such materials may be accumulated in any quantity and in any order. But if we suppose that this matter has a certain form given it, in the act of being accepted by the mind, we can understand how it is that these materials are subject to inevitable rules;—how nothing can be perceived exempt from the relations which belong to such a form. ”

“ Those principles lead straight to the theory of a materialistic, mechanistic nature, surveyed by cogitating minds. After the close of the seventeenth century, science took charge of the materialistic nature, and philosophy took charge of the cogitating minds. ”

“ This energy of nature, which, together with the other, higher and divine principle of human destiny, is inherent in mankind, displays itself even in the sphere of intellect, and particularly in the flourishing eras of art and science. ”

“ The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.
All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption ”