1909] The Matter God 231 



Creation is but a metaphysical idea untested by fact. Again, our 

 Natur-Forscher will tell us that Mind is a mere phenomenon of yester- 

 day as compared with Matter, that it sprang therefrom by a gradual and 

 sufficiently marked development, but so gradually that it is impossible 

 to note where it began. Is the actinia a fish or a plant? Where does 

 Mind preponderate over Matter in the brute creation? — in the lower 

 forms of Man himself, der Gipfel der Naturf Der Mensch ist was 

 cr isst. 



The second half of my syllogism was this: " It is a law of human 

 reason (that is to say its universal experience) that the simplest cause 

 is the best. We are bound, as philosophers call it, to aim at unity; 

 two reasons may not be admitted where one suffices ; it is useless to 

 search for the law of the law. Arrived at the Universe we have the 

 law, then why go farther? Here is no knot. Then do not bring in 

 a God to solve it. . . . Thus we see that Nature does not lead us 

 necessarily to believe in God, that its order is rather a proof of its self- 

 existence than of its dependence. The Zusammcnhang shows that it 

 hangs only on itself. Disorder must suppose a Disorderer quite as 

 much as an Arranger, etc." 



Such was the argument of my paper, which is headed Nee Deus 

 intersit nisi vindex judice nodus. I was but twenty when I framed it, 

 a doctrine of pure Materialism with its Monist formula " Mind an 

 accident of Matter " ; and when I wrote the doggerel verse called 

 " Body and Soul." It is an argument I still hold unanswerable in 

 logic, and which, in spite of more than one desperate effort in after 

 life, has ever since dominated my reason. Yet though it satisfied my 

 reason it did not all at once content me. On the contrary, its cruel 

 logic oppressed me with a sense of irreparable loss and I still clung, 

 notwithstanding reason, to an unreasoning belief in God as an inherited 

 instinct of my soul. My last words in this very paper, were " For 

 God's sake and His recognition among men, let us avoid the Natur- 

 Forscher and hold fast by our eternal unreasonable consciousness of a 

 Father who is in Heaven." The Matter God I had imagined in place of 

 the personal God was a thought that made me giddy when it presented 

 itself first to me, as a demon by my incantations out of the forbidden 

 books that I was reading ; and in the middle of my intellectual debauch 

 i I found life unutterably sad. But once evoked I could not evade it or 

 the destruction it involved of that other consoling doctrine of Man's 

 supernatural destiny, his life beyond the grave. I found myself as 

 it were deprived of my soul's birthright, proved to be no lawful heir; 

 no child of God with Heaven for my inheritance and eternal bliss 

 for my reward, but just a common " by-blow " of Nature, undistinguish- 

 able from her humblest offspring the thousand and one forms of the 

 brute beasts that perish — a humiliating and demoralizing thought. 



