APPENDIX 



NOTE A (p. 250). 



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 mere- 

 ly 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 contempt- 

 ible ; 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 aggrega- 

 tion of millions of particles, moving with inconceivable ve- 

 locity in a dance of infinite complexity yet perfect measure ; 

 harmonic with like performances throughout the solar sys- 

 tem. If there is good ground for any conclusion, there is 

 such for the belief that the substance of these particles has 

 existed and will exist, that the energy which stirs them has 

 persisted and will persist, without assignable limit, either in 

 the past or the future. Surely, as Heraclei -s said of his 

 kitchen with its pots and pans, "Here also a/> the gods." 

 286 



