36 THE THEORY OF [pt. 



William Blake, but that was a revelation of the poetic or the religious 

 mind. The scientific spirit is as profound as these, but it sets out 

 upon a different path from the very beginning and reaches in the 

 end a country different in every way. It directs its interest from the 

 first to the correlation of differences between phenomena rather than 

 to individual phenomena themselves, and the impulse to classify 

 leads inevitably to the supremacy of the mechanical cause and the 

 mathematical formula. It stands "at diameter and sword's point" 

 with such aphorisms as "Everything is itself and not something else" 

 or "Nothing is ever merely anything". 



R. G. Collingwood has expressed this in a memorable passage: 

 "Mathematics, mechanics, and materialism are the three marks of 

 all science, a triad of which none can be separated from the others, 

 since in fact they all follow from the original act by which the scientific 

 consciousness comes into being, namely, the assertion of the abstract 

 concept. They are all, it may be said, products of the classificatory 

 frame of mind, corollaries from the fact that in this frame of mind 

 the universal and the particular are arbitrarily separated and the 

 universal asserted in its barren an'd rigid self-identity. It is this 

 barrenness and this rigidity which confer their character upon the 

 doctrines of scientific materialism. Hence it is idle to imagine that 

 materialism is justified in some sciences and not in others. It is idle 

 to protest that science ought to surrender its materialistic prejudices 

 when it finds itself face to face with a non-material object such as 

 the soul. No object is material, in the metaphysical sense of the word, 

 except in so far as scientific thinking conceives it so; for materiality 

 means abstractness, subjection to the formulae of mechanical deter- 

 mination and mathematical calculation, and these formulae are 

 never imposed upon any object whatever except by an arbitrary 

 act which falsifies the object's nature. This only appears paradoxical 

 when we fail to see the gulf which separates the common-sense 

 materiaHty of a table, its sensible qualities, from its metaphysical 

 materiality, the abstract conceptual substrate of those qualities. It is 

 this substrate whose transcendent or abstract existence is asserted by 

 materialism. Hence we cannot distinguish objects like tables which 

 are really 'material' from objects in whose presence science must 

 unlearn its materialistic habits of thought. MateriaHsm is no more 

 the truth in physics than in psychology, and no less. It is the truth 

 about any object, just in so far as this object is by abstraction re- 



