Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2): With an Account of his Parliamentary Struggle, Politics and Teachings. Seventh EditionRobertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Religion
Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2): With an Account of his Parliamentary Struggle, Politics and Teachings. Seventh Edition
Robertson, J. M. (John Mackinnon)
Bradlaugh, Charles, 1833-1891
In this connection it is difficult to deal with the position taken
up by Mrs Besant, the valued friend of Bradlaugh and of the present
writer. Mrs Besant has greatly perplexed her old friends by professing
to repudiate the Materialism she formerly taught, on the score that
it gives "dead matter" as the source of life and mind. They can
only conclude that she has undergone a psychological change which
affects her knowledge of her former positions. We have seen that
Bradlaugh's and Büchner's teaching was fundamentally different from
what she represents materialism to be; and there is no other school
of Materialism in question. The strange thing is that Mrs Besant
herself translated from the German, carefully and well, Büchner's
"Force and Matter" (as also his "Mind in Animals"), in which the
doctrine is flatly contrary to her present account of it. Büchner even
uses unguarded language--as it is very difficult to avoid doing--in
insisting on the perpetual activity of matter. "Matter," he writes, "is
not dead, inanimate, or lifeless, but is in motion everywhere, and is
full of most active life." Bradlaugh more warily pointed to the danger
of giving ambiguity to the term "life," which is properly the name
for the broad classes of the phenomena of plants and animals. But he
never taught or fancied that certain of the mere forms of existence in
themselves originated other forms of existence. By "matter" he did not
mean to specialise rocks any more than protoplasm or ether.
A more defensible argument has been used by Mrs Besant and others
against Materialism: the argument, namely, that it is impossible
to think of a transition from physical action to the phenomenon of
thought. A number of physicists--among them Tyndall--can be quoted
as declaring that there is a "great gulf fixed" between molecular
motion and the state of consciousness. Tyndall once laid it down
that the demand for "logical continuity between molecular forces and
the phenomena of consciousness" is "a rock on which Materialism must
inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy
of the human mind." But this loud-sounding affirmation on analysis
resolves itself into the popular rhetoric to which Tyndall was too
much given. What is meant by a "complete philosophy of the human
mind"? If Materialism asserts that certain constant correlations
remain nevertheless "mysterious," it does not thereby cease to be
a complete philosophy of the human mind. The statement that our
whole knowledge of causation is just a knowledge of correlation is
_part_ of the complete philosophy of the human mind--that is, of the
systematic and exact statement of our tested knowledge. To say that
human faculty is strictly limited is not an avowal of incompleteness
in the philosophy which says it. And as a matter of fact, the
statement as to the "discontinuity" between "molecular forces" and
the "phenomena of consciousness" is a statement which, so far as
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