Essays Upon Some Controverted QuestionsHuxley, Thomas Henry
Religion
Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
The growth of science, not merely of physical science, but of all science,
means the demonstration of order and natural causation among phenomena
which had not previously been brought under those conceptions. Nobody who
is acquainted with the progress of scientific thinking in every department
of human knowledge, in the course of the last two centuries, will be
disposed to deny that immense provinces have been added to the realm of
science; or to doubt that the next two centuries will be witnesses of a
vastly greater annexation. More particularly in the region of the
physiology of the nervous system, is it justifiable to conclude from the
progress that has been made in analysing the relations between material and
psychical phenomena, that vast further advances will be made; and that,
sooner or later, all the so-called spontaneous operations of the mind will
have, not only their relations to one another, but their relations to
physical phenomena, connected in natural series of causes and effects,
strictly defined. In other words, while, at present, we know only the
nearer moiety of the chain of causes and effects, by which the phenomena we
call material give rise to those which we call mental; hereafter, we shall
get to the further end of the series. {229}
In my innocence, I have been in the habit of supposing that this is merely
a statement of facts, and that the good Bishop Berkeley, if he were alive,
would find such facts fit into his system without the least difficulty.
That Mr. Lilly should play into the hands of his foes, by declaring that
unmistakable facts make for them, is an exemplification of ways that are
dark, quite unintelligible to me. Surely Mr. Lilly does not hold that the
disbelief in spontaneity--which term, if it has any meaning at all, means
uncaused action--is a mark of the beast Materialism? If so, he must be
prepared to tackle many of the Cartesians (if not Descartes himself),
Spinoza and Leibnitz among the philosophers, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas,
Calvin and his followers among theologians, as Materialists--and that
surely is a sufficient _reductio ad absurdum_ of such a classification.
The truth is, that in his zeal to paint "Materialism," in large letters, on
everything he dislikes, Mr. Lilly forgets a very important fact, which,
however, must be patent to every one who has paid attention to the history
of human thought; and that fact is, that every one of the speculative
difficulties which beset Kant's three problems, the existence of a Deity,
the freedom of the will, and immortality, existed ages before anything that
can be called physical science, and would continue to exist if modern
physical science were swept away. All that physical science has done has
been to make, as it were, visible and tangible some difficulties that
formerly were more hard of apprehension. Moreover, these difficulties {230}
exist just as much on the hypothesis of Idealism as on that of Materialism.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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