There is an increased flow of blood to the head in times of mental activity. Sometimes, in intense heat of literary composition, the blood fairly surges through the brain. No diminution, but further increase, of physical activity accompanies the greatest efforts of mind. Lay a man upon a balance; fire a pistol shot or inject suddenly a great thought into his mind; at once he will tip the balance, and tumble upon his head. Romanes, Mind and Motion, 21—“Consciousness causes physical changes, but not vice versa. To say that mind is a function of motion is to say that mind is a function of itself, since motion exists only for mind. Better suppose the physical and the psychical to be only one, as in the violin sound and vibration are one. Volition is a cause in nature because it has cerebration for its obverse and inseparable side. But if there is no motion without mind, then there can be no universe without God.”… 34—“Because within the limits of human experience mind is only known as associated with brain, it does not follow that mind cannot exist without brain. Helmholtz's explanation of the effect of one of Beethoven's sonatas on the brain may be perfectly correct, but the explanation of the effect given by a musician may be equally correct within its category.”
Herbert Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 1:§ 56—“Two things, mind and nervous action, exist together, but we cannot imagine how they are related” (see review of Spencer's Psychology, in N. Englander, July, 1873). Tyndall, Fragments of Science, 120—“The passage from the physics of the brain to the facts of consciousness is unthinkable.” Schurman, Agnosticism and Religion, 95—“The metamorphosis of vibrations into conscious ideas is a miracle, in comparison with which the floating of iron or the turning of water into wine is easily credible.” Bain, Mind and Body, 131—There is no break in the physical continuity. See Brit. Quar., Jan. 1874; art. by Herbert, on Mind and the Science of Energy; McCosh, Intuitions, 145; Talbot, in Bap. Quar., Jan. 1871. On Geulincx's “occasional causes” and Descartes's dualism, see Martineau, Types, 144, 145, 156–158, and Study, 2:77.
4. The materialistic theory, denying as it does the priority of spirit, can furnish no sufficient cause for the highest features of the existing universe, namely, its personal intelligences, its intuitive ideas, its free-will, its moral progress, its beliefs in God and immortality.
Herbert, Modern Realism Examined: “Materialism has no physical evidence of the existence of consciousness in others. As it declares our fellow men to be destitute of free volition, so it should declare them destitute of consciousness; should call them, as well as brutes, pure automata. If physics are all, there is no God, but there is also no man, existing.” Some of the early followers of Descartes used to kick and beat their dogs, laughing meanwhile at their cries and calling them the “creaking of the machine.”Huxley, who calls the brutes “conscious automata,” believes in the gradual banishment, from all regions of human thought, of what we call spirit and spontaneity: “A spontaneous act is an absurdity; it is simply an effect that is uncaused.”
James, Psychology, 1:149—“The girl in Midshipman Easy could not excuse the illegitimacy of her child by saying that ‘it was a very small one.’ And consciousness, however small, is an illegitimate birth in any philosophy that starts without it, and yet professes to explain all facts by continued evolution. … Materialism denies reality to almost all the impulses which we most cherish. Hence it will fail of universal adoption.” Clerk Maxwell, Life, 391—“The atoms are a very tough lot, and can stand a great deal of knocking about, and it is strange to find a number of them combining to form a man of feeling. … 426—I have looked into most philosophical systems, and I have seen none that will work without a God.” President E. B. Andrews: “Mind is the only substantive thing in this universe, and all else is adjective. Matter is not primordial, but is a function of spirit.” Theodore Parker: “Man is the highest product of his own history. The discoverer finds nothing so tall or grand as himself, nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is at the small end of the telescope—the star that is looking, not looked after, nor looked at.”
Materialism makes men to be “a serio-comic procession of wax figures or of cunning casts in clay” (Bowne). Man is “the cunningest of clocks.” But if there were nothing but matter, there could be no materialism, for a system of thought, like materialism, implies consciousness. Martineau, Types, preface, xii, xiii—“It was the irresistible pleading of the moral consciousness which first drove me to rebel against the limits of the merely scientific conception. It became incredible to me that nothing was possible except the actual. … Is there then no ought to be, other than what is?”Dewey, Psychology, 84—“A world without ideal elements would be one in which the home would be four walls and a roof to keep out cold and wet; the table a mess for animals; and the grave a hole in the ground.” Omar Khayyám, Rubaiyat, stanza 72—“And that inverted bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling coop'd we live and die, Lift not your hands to It for help—for it As impotently moves as you or I.” Victor Hugo: “You say the soul is nothing but the resultant of bodily powers? Why then is my soul more luminous when my bodily powers begin to fail? Winter is on my head, and eternal spring is in my heart. … The nearer I approach the end, the plainer I hear the immortal symphonies of the worlds which invite me.”
Diman, Theistic Argument, 348—“Materialism can never explain the fact that matter is always combined with force. Coördinate principles? then dualism, instead of monism. Force cause of matter? then we preserve unity, but destroy materialism; for we trace matter to an immaterial source. Behind multiplicity of natural forces we must postulate some single power—which can be nothing but coördinating mind.”Mark Hopkins sums up Materialism in Princeton Rev., Nov. 1879:490—“1. Man, who is a person, is made by a thing, i.e., matter. 2. Matter is to be worshiped as man's maker, if anything is to be (Rom. 1:25). 3. Man is to worship himself—his God is his belly.” See also Martineau, Religion and Materialism, 25–31, Types, 1: preface, xii, xiii, and Study, 1:248, 250, 345; Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief, 145–161; Buchanan, Modern Atheism, 247, 248; McCosh, in International Rev., Jan. 1895; Contemp. Rev., Jan. 1875, art.: Man Transcorporeal; Calderwood, Relations of Mind and Brain; Laycock, Mind and Brain; Diman, Theistic Argument, 358; Wilkinson, in Present Day Tracts, 3:no. 17; Shedd, Dogm. Theol., 1:487–499; A. H. Strong, Philos. and Relig., 31–38.
II. Materialistic Idealism.
Idealism proper is that method of thought which regards all knowledge as conversant only with affections of the percipient mind.
Its element of truth is the fact that these affections of the percipient mind are the conditions of our knowledge. Its error is in denying that through these and in these we know that which exists independently of our consciousness.
The idealism of the present day is mainly a materialistic idealism. It defines matter and mind alike in terms of sensation, and regards both as opposite sides or successive manifestations of one underlying and unknowable force.
Modern subjective idealism is the development of a principle found as far back as Locke. Locke derived all our knowledge from sensation; the mind only combines ideas which sensation furnishes, but gives no material of its own. Berkeley held that externally we can be sure only of sensations—cannot be sure that any external world exists apart from mind. Berkeley's idealism, however, was objective; for he maintained that while things do not exist independently of consciousness, they do exist independently of our consciousness, namely, in the mind of God, who in a correct philosophy takes the place of a mindless