MATERIALISM AND POSITIVISM. 619 



not a reality to the aesthetic sense. The emotional nature finds its 

 realities in the things that kindle emotion, not in those that furnish 

 matter for intellectual exercise or for physical sensation. Who can 

 ever forget those exquisitely simple words of the poet Tennyson? 



"And the stately ships go on 



To tlieir haven under the hill ; 

 But oh, for the touch of a vanished hand, 

 And the sound of a voice that is still ! " 



The vanished hand, the silent voice, are here but symbols of a thou- 

 sand clustering associations dear to the heart in past times, and dear 

 to the heart still. The physical sensation is the nexus of things that 

 no physical methods could possibly enable us to understand, things 

 known only to the emotional nature. The touch or the voice that 

 thrills one human being will be wholly indifferent to another will, in 

 fact, rank only as a mere physical sensation. The heart of a mother 

 would be rent by the cry of her child in pain or in danger ; but what 

 would that cry be to a devouring beast ? It would have no relation, 

 except as a definite volume of sound, to anything in the beast's nature, 

 and therefore, in all the elements that would speak to a human to 

 say nothing of a mother's heart, would be non-existent. 



It is, however, when we consider man in society that the range of 

 impalpable realities becomes widest, and embraces facts of the deepest 

 import ; and just as society becomes more complex does this truth as- 

 sume deeper significance. In a society like ours, at every step a man 

 takes through life, he encounters forces as real as those of physical 

 nature, but whose seat is in social institutions and in the dispositions 

 of individual men. There are ambitions, interests, customs, prejudices, 

 conventionalities, and a thousand intangible forms of social force, that 

 all react upon the individual man like so many conflicting winds and 

 currents. The individual can and does react against these, and herein 

 he differs from a wave-tossed vessel ; but, steer his course with as firm 

 a hand and as steady an eye as he may, the great composition of social 

 forces will powerfully affect the line of his movement. 



The great practical defect of a materialistic philosophy is that it 

 leads its adherents to underestimate all forces and influences that can 

 not be reasoned about as we reason about the laws of matter. The 

 materialist rests by preference on a relatively low plane of thought ; 

 and he is at a great disadvantage when he has to deal with matters 

 that lie in a higher plane. But many are materialists in this way who 

 would utterly repudiate materialism in theory. In other words, there 

 are many whose methods of judgment are wholly unsuited (through 

 excess of simplicity) to questions involving the higher human motives, 

 or the less obvious conditions of human happiness. Many a man has 

 made a disastrous business failure through a too materialistic way of 

 looking at things. He wants money, let us say, for his business ; he 



