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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



meant is merely physical and physiological sci- 

 ence, not social and moral science. The arrogant 

 attempt to dispose of the deepest moral truths of 

 human nature on a bare physical or physiological 

 basis is almost enough to justify the insurrection 

 of some impatient theologians against science it- 

 self. It is impossible not to sympathize with men 

 who at least are defending the paramount claim 

 of the moral laws and the religious sentiment. 

 The solution 'of the dispute is, of course, that 

 physicists and theologians have each hold of a 

 partial truth. As the latter insist, the grand 

 problems of man's life must be ever referred to 

 moral and social argument ; but then, as the 

 physicists insist, this moral and social argument 

 can only be built up on a physical and physio- 

 logical foundation. The physical part of sci- 

 ence is, indeed, merely the vestibule to social, and 

 thence to moral science ; and of science in all 

 its forms the philosophy of religion alone holds 

 the key. The true materialism lies in the habit 

 of scientific specialists to neglect all philosophical 

 and religious synthesis. It is marked by the 

 ignoring of religion, the passing by on the other 

 side, and shutting the eyes to the spiritual history 

 of mankind. The spiritual traditions of mankind, 

 a supreme philosophy of life and thought, religion 

 in the proper sense of the word, all these have to 

 play a larger and ever larger part in human 

 knowledge ; not as we are so often told, and so 

 commonly is assumed, a waning and vanishing 

 part. And it is in this field, the field which has 

 so long been abandoned to theology, that Posi- 

 tivism is prepared to meet the theologians. We 

 at any rate do not ask them to submit religion to 

 the test of the scalpel or the electric battery. It 

 is true that we base our theory of society and our 

 theory of morals, and hence our religion itself, on 

 a curriculum of physical and especially of biolo- 

 gical science. It is true that our moral and so- 

 cial science is but a prolongation of these other 

 sciences. But, then, we insist that it is not sci- 

 ence in the narrow sense which can order our be- 

 liefs, but philosophy ; not science which can 

 solve our problems of life, but religion. And 

 religion demands for its understanding the reli- 

 gious mind and the spiritual experience. 



Does it seem to any one a paradox to hold 

 ni"h language, and yet to have nothing to say 

 about the immaterial entity which many assume 

 to be the cause behind this spiritual life ? The 

 answer is, that we occupy ourselves with this 

 spiritual life as an ultimate fact, and, consistently 

 with the whole of our philosophy, we decline to 

 assign a cause at all. We argue, with the theolo- 



gians, that it is ridiculous to go to the scalpel for 

 an adequate account of a mother's love ; but we 

 do not think it is explained (any more than it is 

 by the scalpel) by an hypothesis for which not 

 only is there no shadow of evidence, but which 

 cannot even be stated in philosophic language. 

 We find the same absurdity in the notion that 

 maternal love is a branch of the anatomy of the 

 mamma; and in the notion that the phenomena 

 of lactation are produced by an immaterial entity. 

 Both are forms of the same fallacy, that of trying 

 to reach ultimate causes instead of studying laws. 

 We certainly do find that maternal love and lac- 

 tation have close correspondences, and that both 

 are phenomena of certain female organisms. And 

 we say that to talk of maternal love being exhib- 

 ited by an entity which not only is not a female 

 organism, but is not an organism at all, is to use 

 language which to us, at least, is unintelligible. 



The philosophy which treats man as man 

 simply affirms that man loves, thinks, acts, not 

 that the ganglia, or the sinuses, or any organ of 

 man, loves and thinks and acts. The thoughts, 

 aspirations, and impulses, are not secretions, and 

 the science which teaches us about secretions 

 will not teach us much about them ; our thoughts, 

 aspirations, and impulses, are faculties of a man. 

 Now, as a man implies a body, so we say these 

 also imply a body. And to talk to us about a 

 bodiless being thinking and loving is simply to 

 talk about the thoughts and feelings of nothing. 



This fundamental position each one deter- 

 mines according to the whole bias of his intel- 

 lectual and moral nature. But on the positive, 

 as on the theological, method there is ample scope 

 for the spiritual life, for moral responsibility, for 

 the world beyond the grave, its hopes and its 

 duties ; which remain to us perfectly real with- 

 out the unintelligible hypothesis. However much 

 men cling to the hypothesis from old association, 

 if they reflect, they will find that they do not use 

 it to give them any actual knowledge about man's 

 spiritual life ; that all their methodical reasoning 

 about the moral world is exclusively based on the 

 phenomena of this world, and not on the phenom- 

 ena of any other world. And thus the absence 

 of the hypothesis altogether does not make the 

 serious difference which theologians suppose. 



To follow out this into particulars : Analysis 

 of human nature shows us man with a great va- 

 riety of faculties ; his moral powers are just as 

 distinguishable as his intellectual powers ; and 

 both are mentally separable from his physical 

 powers. Moral and mental laws are reduced to 

 something like system by moral and mental sci- 



