time: the refreshing river 



Haldane's pre- 19 14 Oxford. And it seemed to me that to discuss 

 materialism now in much the same way as it would have been dis- 

 cussed thirty or even sixty years ago was just unrealistic. 



f 

 Religion and the Forms of Materialism. 



Even at the first paragraph I was brought up sharply.^ "To many 

 persons in modern times," he began, "it seems as if the only reality 

 is what can be interpreted in terms of the physical sciences, with the 

 addition, however, that certain physical processes occurring in the 

 brain are mysteriously accompanied by consciousness, the quality of 

 which depends on the nature of these processes. This belief is known 

 as materialism, and for those holding it, religion is necessarily no 

 more than an illusion based on ignorance." "This belief is known as 

 materialism." But to speak in this way is to make no distinction 

 between materialisms, of which there may be more than one. Most 

 of Haldane's criticism bore against traditional mechanistic or meta- 

 physical materialism only. Dialectical materialism he in no way 

 considered. 



The character of mechanical materialism is, I suppose, the belief 

 that all changes in living and non-living objects are ultimately re- 

 ducible to changes in the position of invisible particles which simply 

 are?' These particles and their motions are quite independent of our 

 thought. The degrees of complicatedness in the world are illusory, or 

 if not illusory, are degrees of complexity only, not of organisation. 

 All should be reducible to atomic laws. But the essence of dialectical 

 materialism, on the contrary, is the acceptance of the existence of 

 diverse levels of complexity and organisation, and the interpretation 

 of them as successive stages of a world-process the nature of which 

 is synthetic or dialectical. Order and organisation are fully allowed for. 



As far as metaphysics is concerned, many scientists have always 

 felt a strong disinclination to take up a position in the classical philo- 

 sophical controversy between realism which asserts the primacy of 

 the object, and idealism which asserts the primacy of mental cognition. 

 This controversy seemed uninteresting and academic. They were 

 loath to make the old sharp distinction of the philosophers between 

 the world of spirit and the world of matter. After all, for the biologist 

 there is no strict separation. In animal and human behaviour there is a 



^ The full text of J. S. Haldane's paper will be found in the Proceedings of the World 

 Congress of Faiths, 1936. 



^ L. J. Russell's phrase, Aristotelian Society Symposium, 1928, 



122 



