386 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to know them, not by external intuition but by self-perception 

 and self -consciousness. That which has not the properties of the 

 material can not be the form of activity of something which is 

 material. Activity of consciousness and cerebral function always 

 come to be known through different sources of experience. The 

 encroachment of materialism consists in the fact that it effaces 

 this essential distinction. 



Materialism has never observed that, even if all its assertions 

 are admitted to be just, it yet overlooks something which gives 

 rise to a new and for it a terrible problem namely, the circum- 

 stance that movement in space is known to us only as an object 

 of our consciousness. For the theory of knowledge such notions 

 as consciousness, idea, and intuition lie deeper than such notions 

 as matter and movement. For this reason an absolute and de- 

 cided materialism was possible only in ancient times, before the 

 awakening of more deeply penetrating philosophical reflection. 

 Democritus is the only consistent materialist. None of the mod- 

 ern materialistic writers can speak with the calm and the cer- 

 tainty with which Lucretius in his majestic verses sets forth the 

 doctrine of Democritus. Modern materialists for the most part 

 confess that, even if we can reduce everything to matter, yet we 

 can not know what matter is in itself. Thus La Mettrie, Hol- 

 bach, Cabanis, not to speak of the wild and rambling inconsisten- 

 cies of the most recent writers (Buchner, Moleschott). 



But the objection here urged against materialism is not its 

 desire that conscious life shall accept as the only reality some- 

 thing which is given only as an object of consciousness, and can 

 be represented only through the activity of consciousness; but 

 rather that the facts impel us to the result that materialism 

 offends against the conceptions derived from experience itself. 



In treating of monistic spiritualism as the third possible hypothesis, we 

 mnst always hold fast the distinction between an empirical and metaphysical way 

 of looking at things. Very many confusions relative to the problem before us 

 are the result of overlooking this distinction. Monistic spiritualism is the view- 

 according to which the mind is a mental (geistige) substance, and the mental is 

 the only reality ; everything material, all movement in space, is but an outer 

 form of a mental life. It is based on the impossibility of explaining the mental 

 by the material, and on the fact, partly overlooked, partly undervalued, by ma- 

 terialism, that our conception of matter is a mental product, and that apart from 

 our conception of it we do not know what matter is. Thus the mental is a pre- 

 supposition on which all thought rests; and a reasonable hypothesis is formed 

 only by the reduction of the less known to the better known. The mental is 

 properly the only thing fully intelligible to us, for in it we have not only a 

 knowledge of outward circumstances and relations, but a knowledge also of the 

 thing itself. . . . 



But, supposing all this to be true, it is not to the point. For, if it be 

 granted that everything is mental, and that nothing exists except thoughts and 



