474 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



MATERIALISM AND MOEALITY. 



Br W. S. LILLY. 



" TTTORDS are grown so false that I am loath to prove reason with 

 V V them," says Viola in " Twelfth Night." The saying constant- 

 ly comes to my mind in dealing with the philosophical controversies 

 of the present day. Rigorous definition, careful analysis, precise 

 classification, are no longer in favor. It is an age of loose thinking, 

 and of looser writing ; of " idle words, servants to shallow fools." 

 Never, perhaps, was there an age in which the trade of the sophist, 

 whose business it is " to make the worse reason appear the better," 

 was carried on so successfully. Never was there an age in which a 

 writer who feels that he is "a teacher, or nothing," had greater need 

 of well-considered and accurate language. Hence it is that in the 

 papers which I have from time to time contributed to this " Review " I 

 have sought, before entering upon my argument, to state clearly the 

 sense in which I employ my principal terms. Most necessary is it 

 that I should do this in respect of such a word as materialism. There 

 are those who would restrict it to a doctrine which is now discredited 

 for higher minds. "What we know of living forces, of the real proper- 

 ties of bodies, has made an end of the old notion of matter reduced 

 merely to solidity and extension. Our better acquaintance with the 

 physiology of the sense-organs has been fatal to the sensism which 

 Professor Clifford contemptuously calls " the crass materialism of the 

 savage." It lingers, indeed, in the lower intellectual regions. Nay, 

 more, it is still widely held there. "II y a dcs morts qu'il faut tuer 

 encore." And this is one of them. My present point, however, is 

 that this coarse and vulgar theory is by no means the only form of 

 materialism. Nor is it the form under which materialism is most po- 

 tently working in the world just now. The more subtile doctrines 

 which have arisen upon the ruins of the old materialistic hypothesis 

 are, in all essentials, identical with it. Positivism, determinism, and 

 much that passes current as agnosticism, are mere varieties of mate- 

 rialism ; sublimated expressions of it, perhaps, but true expressions, 

 having in them the root of the matter. Now here I am conscious of 

 a difficulty. Is it fair, one may be asked, to impose the name of mate- 

 rialist upon those who, more or less energetically, repudiate it? I 

 think it is fair, and, more, that it is a duty, if the name truly describes 

 them. Take, for example, the late Mr. Clifford. As we have just 

 seen, he rejects emphatically " the crude materialism of the savage," 

 but only to substitute a materialism which is, indeed, more refined, 

 but which is also, as it seems to me, more irrational. His biographer, 

 Mr. Frederick Pollock, claims that his view is, in truth, "idealistic 

 monism, a very subtile form of idealism," and points out that his con- 



