EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



human soul will by and by be wholly resolved 

 into an affair of molecules and undulations and 

 unstable equilibria, and so forth ; and accord- 

 ingly all speculations even remotely savouring 

 of physiological psychology, or of the correla- 

 tion of vital with inorganic motions, are forth- 

 with stigmatized as " materialistic." Even the 

 Darwinian theory of the origin of species is 

 said to be materialistic by implication, inasmuch 

 as it is supposed at some point to derive the 

 human soul from the psychical part of a brute 

 animal, and at some other point to derive the 

 psychical part of the brute animal from some- 

 thing that is not psychical. The common re- 

 proach aimed at all such speculations is that in 

 one way or another, either directly or by im- 

 plication, they all tend toward the interpretation 

 of psychical life as a temporary or evanescent 

 condition of matter, and thus in reality banish 

 soul from the universe. The association in the 

 popular mind between materialism and atheism 

 is here obvious enough, and is easily justified. 

 Philosophical materialism holds that matter and 

 the motions of matter make up the sum total of 

 existence, and that what we know as psychical 

 phenomena in man and other animals are to be 

 interpreted in an ultimate analysis as simply the 

 peculiar aspect which is assumed by certain enor- 

 mously complicated motions of matter. This is, 

 I believe, a strictly correct description of mate- 

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