44 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 



perfection, which ordinary mankind could never have 

 attained : though, happily for them, they can feel 

 the beauty of a vision, which lay beyond the reach 

 of their dull imaginations, and count life well spent 

 in shaping some faint image of it in the actual 

 world. 



The horror of " Materialism " which weighs upon 

 the minds of so many excellent people appears to 

 depend, in part, upon the purely accidental connexion 

 of some forms of materialistic philosophy with ethical 

 and religious tenets by which they are repelled ; and, 

 partly, on the survival of a very ancient superstition 

 concerning the nature of matter. 



This superstition, for the tenacious vitality of 

 which the idealistic philosophers who are, more or 

 less, disciples of Plato and the theologians who have 

 been influenced by them, are responsible, assumes 

 that matter is something, not merely inert and 

 perishable, but essentially base and evil-natured, if 

 not actively antagonistic to, at least a negative dead- 

 weight upon, the good. 



Judging by contemporary literature, there are 

 numbers of highly cultivated and indeed superior 

 persons to whom the material world is altogether 

 contemptible ; who can see nothing in a handful of 

 garden soil, or a rusty nail, but types of the passive 

 and the corruptible. 



To modern science, these assumptions are as much 

 out of date as the equally venerable errors, that the 

 sun goes round the earth every four-and-twenty 

 hours, or that water is an elementary body. The 

 handful of soil is a factory thronged with swarms of 

 busy workers ; the rusty nail is an aggregation of 



