584 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



sufficient to leave this essential factor in a shadowy 

 background, as Schelling did with his " Absolute," Hart- 

 mann with his " Unconscious," and Herbert Spencer with 

 his " Unknowable." ^ The term must have a deeper 

 meaning, and this meaning must be founded on some 

 subjective or psychical experience accessible to every 

 thinking person, and possessing as much immediate 

 evidence and intuitive certainty as those fundamental 

 data — such as space, time, motion, and mass — upon 

 which exact science builds up her theories. 



' To this we might add Haeckel's 

 " Law of Substance "—which as a 

 cosmological first principle includes 

 the conservation of matter and 

 energy — wei'e it not for the fact 

 that this contains really no new 

 idea, but reminds us only of 

 Spinoza and other pi-ecursors 

 (such as Biichner) whose opinions 

 Haeckel partially adopts. It may 

 here be remarked that it is not 

 pre-eminently among such natural 

 philosophers as define and handle 

 the fundamental principles of the 

 mechanical view with the greatest 

 accuracy and efficiency that we find 

 the materialistic view of the world 

 prominently put forward. It is 

 rather by those thinkers— notably 

 biologists — who are forced by train- 

 ing and habit to use such terms as 

 mass, force, energy, cause, and pur- 

 pose in a wider and more pregnant 

 sense tlian a purely mechanical de- 

 finition would permit, that we find 

 these conceptions employed to ex- 

 plain both mechanical and mental 

 phenomena and the claim put for- 

 ward to establish a monistic creed. 

 Mathematicians such as Gauss, 

 Cauchy, Kelvin, Hertz, and others 

 have always laid down their me- 

 chanical principles with the great- 

 est caution, indicating or distinctly 

 expressing the conviction that the 



phenomena of life and mind belong 

 to an entirely different sphere of 

 thought and research. A remark- 

 able expression in this direction 

 will be found in H. Hertz's post- 

 humously published ' Principles of 

 Mechanic*' (1894) : "It is certainly 

 a justified caution with which we 

 confine the realm of mechanics 

 expressly to inanimate nature and 

 leave the question open how far its 

 laws can be extended beyond. In 

 truth, the matter stands thus, that 

 we can neither maintain that the 

 internal phenomena of animated 

 beings obey the same laws nor 

 that they follow other laws. Ap- 

 pearance and common-sense favour 

 a fundamental difference. And 

 the same feeling which induces us 

 to relegate as foreign to the 

 mechanism of the lifeless world 

 every purpose, every sensation of 

 pleasure and pain, the same feeling 

 makes us hesitate to deprive our 

 view of the animated world of 

 these richer and more varied at- 

 tributes. Our principle, sufficient 

 perhaps to describe the motion of 

 lifeless matter, appears at least 

 prima facie to be too simple and 

 limited to describe the manifold- 

 ness of even the lowest phenomena 

 of life " (p. 45). 



