Modern materialism : its attitude towards theology / by James Martineau.

  • James Martineau
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Modern materialism : its attitude towards theology / by James Martineau. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    the reasonings of Lucretius, and the method of Gassendi.* The1 atomists,” says Lange, “ attributed to matter only the simplest of the various properties of things—those, namely, which are indispensable for the presentation of a something in space and time; and their aim was to evolve from these alone the whole assemblage of phenomena.” “They it was,” he adds, “ who gave the first perfectly clear notion of what we are to understand by matter as the basis of all phenomena. With the positing of this notion materialism stood complete, as the first perfectly clear and consequent theory of all phenomena. ”-(• If there is any difference be- tween this statement of the problem and my “ travesty” of it, I cannot discern it. The indistinctness of which I ventured to complain in Dr. Tyndall’s account of his “primordial” datum, I do not find removed by my pleasant journey with him to the Caribbean Sea and the Alpine snows, or his graceful pic- tures of Cingalese ferns, and of nascent infant life. The whole exposition appears to be dominated by the tacit maxim, “No matter without force, no force without mat- ter”^;—a maxim which may be true in fact, but does not dispense with the necessity of investigating the relation between two fundamental ideas which are not identical or interchangeable. In the natural sciences no harm is done by running them both together, or resorting in varying proportions to the one and to the other. Experimental research and mathematical deduction may go on undis- turbed, by mere use of them as provisional conceptions, and * Starting from the fundamental assumption, “ Principio ergo Uni- versum ex corpore et inani constat, neque enim tertia natura concipi mente prseterea potest.”—Phil. Ejpicur. Syntagma, Op. T. iii. 11. + Geschichte des Materialismus, i. pp. 8, 9. t Buchner: Kraft und Stoff, p. 2 (Aufl. 4).
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