OX THE MATERIALISM OF ATOMS AND FORCES. 295 



though it is yet, as Lange, in his History of Materialism, 

 admits, only an ideal aim of science ; even admitting 

 that force is never found dissociated from matter, and 

 that all the various forms of force heat, mechanical, 

 radiant, chemical, electrical, nervous energy, could really 

 produce and reproduce each other without loss through 

 the whole cycle of changes, according to determinate 

 rates of exchange ; even granting all this, still it is only 

 phenomenal force, or energy, that is thus exchanged; 

 for it is only phenomenal heat, electricity, etc. (that is, 

 these energies as they impress our senses), that we ever 

 encounter or ever can encounter. We never meet with 

 real, efficient, ontologic force or matter, and unless the 

 materialist is prepared to go the length of Hume, and 

 deny that there is anything in the universe, either 

 material or mental, but phenomena, the doctrine of 

 the conservation and transmutation of energy will little 

 avail him as a basis for -his materialism. For if he 

 admits, as some materialists incautiously do, that there 

 is something real behind our phenomenal matter and 

 energy, something different from the sensations which 

 alone, according to the idealists, make matter and energy 

 for us, then this something can no more be described as 

 matter than as mind. For matter and mind are only 

 known to us by certain feelings and sensations which 

 are given in our consciousness, and this unknown some- 

 thing is not thus given. That there exist only phenomena, 

 as with Hume, is the only position that a materialist 

 who wishes to be a monist can hold. This, however, 

 is not the position of Kant or Herbert Spencer, the two 

 thinkers of greatest authority at present in the scientific 

 world, both of whom believe in this real something 

 behind and different from phenomena, and both of whom 

 repudiate materialism. 



