Essays Upon Some Controverted QuestionsHuxley, Thomas Henry
Religion
Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
I understand the main tenet of Materialism to be that there is nothing in
the universe but matter and force; and that all the phenomena of nature are
explicable by deduction from the properties assignable to these two
primitive factors. That great champion of Materialism whom Mr. Lilly
appears to consider to be an authority in physical science, Dr. Büchner,
embodies this article of faith on his title-page. _Kraft und Stoff_--force
and matter--are paraded as the Alpha and Omega of existence. This I
apprehend is the fundamental article of the faith materialistic; and
whosoever does not hold it is condemned by the more zealous of the
persuasion (as I have some reason to know) to the Inferno appointed for
fools or hypocrites. But all this I heartily disbelieve; and at the risk of
being charged with wearisome repetition of an old story, I will briefly
give my reasons for persisting in my infidelity. In the first place, as I
have already hinted, it seems to me pretty plain that there is a third
thing in the universe, to wit, consciousness, which, in the hardness of my
heart or head, I cannot see to be matter or force, or any conceivable
modification of either, however intimately the manifestations of the
phenomena of consciousness may be connected with the phenomena known as
matter and force. In the second place, {221} the arguments used by
Descartes and Berkeley to show that our certain knowledge does not extend
beyond our states of consciousness, appear to me to be as irrefragable now
as they did when I first became acquainted with them some half century ago.
All the materialistic writers I know of who have tried to bite that file
have simply broken their teeth. But, if this is true, our one certainty is
the existence of the mental world, and that of _Kraft und Stoff_ falls into
the rank of, at best, a highly probable hypothesis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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