THE WORLD VERSUS MATTER 281 



and truth as materialism tries to make. Facts are the elements of truth 

 much as chemical simples are the elements of chemical compounds. The 

 critical natural-historian recognizes other differences than this between 

 fact and truth but for the present discussion this suffices. All we need 

 to do here is to insist that the cultivators of any domain whatever of 

 natural knowledge who believe they see something in the nature of truth 

 which makes truth's exaltation result in the degradation of fact, are 

 moving over by just so much from the side of true science to that of 

 subjectivism and mysticism, and that they are going by the road of 

 mathematics makes no whit of difference so far as concerns the essence 

 of the thing. I raise the question : Has mathematics any legitimate place 

 in dealing with the objective universe beyond that of helping to " visu- 

 alize" those portions of it too minute or too transparent or delicate for 

 man's unaided senses? In other words, can it render any real service 

 further than that of helping to make the description of nature more 

 full and accurate and serviceable to man ? 



The natural history motive is not to "get behind" the actual 

 world in the sense in which materialism would do this, but to get more 

 deeply into the actual world — to move more and ever more of the world 

 into the fold of real knowledge. 



Scientific or rational materialism no less than poetic materialism is 

 virtually a system of world-repudiation. The natural history stand- 

 point, on the contrary, is the very antithesis of this, and looking at the 

 two systems still from the standpoint of their treatment of the attributes 

 of objects, we are able to see clearly wherein the materialistic stand- 

 point can not possibly meet the needs of man's deeper nature while the 

 natural history standpoint genuinely and unreservedly accepted and 

 understood seems capable of satisfying these needs. In its determina- 

 tion to reduce all things to one or at least a very few simple material 

 substances or forces and so to explain them, materialism of necessity 

 makes the actual world subordinate to, or, as it sometimes says, a mani- 

 festation of these deeper essences and in doing this, of course, must sub- 

 ordinate the good there is in the world as well as the bad to these invisi- 

 ble simples; and when we look at what this means in the light of the 

 part that the attributes of bodies play in the make-up of all our knowl- 

 edge of nature, the real meaning of the statement made some pages back 

 — that there is something genuinely brutish in materialism — becomes 

 obvious. It means that the higher attributes of man's nature are never 

 taken at their face value ; they are nothing but manifestations of some- 

 thing lower clown and more elemental in the scale of beings. The mate- 

 rialistic philosophy is always a philosophy of " nothing but." 



The conclusion of the foremost protagonists in our day of the doc- 

 trine of the survival of the fittest and natural selection that the esthetic 

 and religious attributes of men are merely by-products of their survival 



