244 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



off with the reply that matter is that which moves. All 

 we should, then, have done would be to give a name to 

 the moving thing, but in doing so we should not have 

 succeeded in defining or describing it. The reader may, 

 perhaps, imagine that insight into the nature of matter 

 will be gained by consulting the accepted text-books of 

 science. Let us accordingly examine the statements of 

 one or two. 



§ 3. — How the Physicists define Matter 



A first writer says : " Matter is a primary conception 

 of the human vmid" and more than one elementary text- 

 book provides us with practically the same definition. 

 Now the obscurity and paralogism of this statement can 

 only be equalled by the perversities of the metaphysicians.^ 

 Matter, we are told, is what moves in the phenomenal 

 world, and if it were asserted that matter is a primary 

 perception of the human mind we might be no wiser, but 

 at any rate the statement would not be without sense. 

 But perhaps the phrase is not to be taken literally as 

 signifying that a primary conception actually moves 

 among perceptions, but only that we can form intuitively a 

 conception of what moves perceptually — that the percep- 

 tual actually corresponds to the conceptual. In this case we 

 are again thrown back on the fact that conceptual motion 

 is a motion of geometrical ideals, and that these correspond 

 in no accurate sense to our perceptions. Indeed, if matter 

 be a conception at all, like the conception of a circle it 

 ought to be a clear and definite idea, whereas the reader 



* " Matter," says Hegel, " is the mere abstract or indeterminate reflection- 

 into-something-else, or reflection-into-self at the same time as determinate ; it 

 is consequently Thinghood which then and there is, — the subsistence or 

 substratum of the thing. By this means the thing finds in the matters its 

 reflection-into-self; it subsists not in its own self, but in the matters, and is 

 only a superficial association between them, or an external bond over 

 them" {The Logic of Hegel, translated by W. Wallace, Oxford, 1874, p, 

 202). We may smile over such absurdities, but that they should be taught 

 in the last decade of the nineteenth century in our universities, and this to 

 immature minds, and largely at the public expense, is a cause for sorrow 

 rather than amusement. The much -abused schoolmen never rivalled these 

 Hegelian quagmires even before they were transferred to English soil. 



