NOTE ON MATERIALISM 71 



NOTE ON MATERIALISM. 



Sir Oliver Lodge insists on describing Haeckel's philo- 

 sophy as Materialism. He at times alters it if it is an 

 alteration to Materialistic-Monism, though he says this 

 qualification is hardly necessary in the case of Haeckel. 

 " Half-informed people," he says, have claimed Huxley as a 

 Materialist, but he "was really nothing of the kind." I 

 turn to the obituary notice of Huxley in our chief scientific 

 journal, Nature, and find that he is there described as a 

 Materialist. And the " half-informed " person who wrote it 

 (unfortunately since dead) was no less a scientist than Sir 

 W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, who professed to follow the same 

 philosophy. 



On the main point I can only say that if by a Materialist 

 (a name that Haeckel has always expressly repudiated, 

 though Sir Oliver never mentions that) you mean a philo- 

 sopher who takes matter to be the one fundamental reality, 

 Haeckel is not and never was a Materialist. He believes 

 energy to be as fundamental and even more important than 

 matter. And if the man who believes matter and energy to 

 be the only known fundamental agencies (or aspects of 

 some one fundamental substance) is a " Materialist," the 

 philosophy flourishes exceedingly among men of science 

 to-day. As Professor Ray Lankester writes, in the article 

 on " Zoology " in the Encyclopedia Britannica : "It is the 

 aim or business of those occupied with biology to assign 

 living things, in all their variety of form and activity, to the 



