398 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 



SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM.* 1868, 



Here, indeed, we arrive at the barrier which needs to be perpetually 

 pointed out; alike to those who seek materialistic explanations of 

 mental phenomena, and to those who are alarmed lest such expla- 

 nations may be found. The last class prove by their fear, almost as 

 much as the first prove by their hope, that they believe Mind may 

 possibly be interpreted in terms of Matter; whereas many whom they 

 vituperate as materialists are profoundly convinced that there is 

 not the remotest possibility of so interpreting them. HERBERT 

 SPENCER. 



THE celebrated Fichte, in his lectures on the" Voca- 

 tion of the Scholar," insisted on a culture which should 

 be not one sided, but all-sided. The scholar's intellect 

 was to expand spherically, and not in a single direction 

 only. In one direction, however, Fichte required that the 

 scholar should apply himself directly to nature, become a 

 creator of knowledge, and thus repay, by original labors of 

 his own, the immense debt he owed to the labors of others. 

 It was these which enabled him to supplement the knowledge 

 derived from his own researches, so as to render his culture 

 rounded and not one-sided. 



As regards science, Fichte's idea is to some extent illus- 

 trated by the constitution and labors of the British Asso- 

 ciation. We have here a body of men engaged in the 

 pursuit of Natural Knowledge, but variously engaged. 

 While sympathizing with each of its departments, and 

 supplementing his culture by knowledge drawn from all 

 of them, each student among us selects one subject for the 

 exercise of his own original faculty one line, along which 

 he may carry the light of his private intelligence a little 

 way into the darkness by which all knowledge is surrounded. 

 Thus, the geologist deals with the rocks; the biologist 

 with the conditions and phenomena of life; the astronomer 

 with stellar masses and motions; the mathematician with 

 the relations of space and number; the chemist pursues 

 his atoms; while the physical investigator has his own 

 large field in optical, thermal, electrical, acoustical, and 

 other phenomena. The British Association then, as a 



* President's Address to the Mathematical and Physical Section 

 of the British Association at Norwich. 



