_Moral_, or _ethical Materialism_, is something quite distinct from scientific materialism, and has nothing whatever in common with the latter. This real materialism proposes no other aim to man in the course of his life than the most refined possible gratification of his senses. It is based on the delusion that purely material enjoyment can alone give satisfaction to man; but as he can find that satisfaction in no one form of sensuous pleasure, he dashes on weariedly from one to another. The profound truth that the real value of life does not lie in material enjoyment, but in moral action—that true happiness does not depend upon external possessions, but only in a virtuous course of life—this is unknown to ethical materialism. We therefore look in vain for such materialism among naturalists and philosophers, whose highest happiness is the intellectual enjoyment of Nature, and whose highest aim is the knowledge of her laws. We find it in the palaces of ecclesiastical princes, and in those hypocrites who, under the outward mask of a pious worship of God, solely aim at hierarchical tyranny over, and material spoliation of, their fellow-men. Blind to the infinite grandeur of the so-called “raw material,” and the glorious world of phenomena arising from it—insensible to the inexhaustible charms of Nature, and without a knowledge of her laws—they stigmatize all natural science, and the culture arising from it, as sinful “materialism,” while really it is this which they themselves exhibit in a most shocking form. Satisfactory proofs of this are furnished, not only by the whole history of the Catholic Popes, with their long series of crimes, but also by the history of the morals of orthodoxy in every form of religion. In order, then, to avoid in future the usual confusion of this utterly objectionable Moral Materialism with our Scientific Materialism, we think it necessary to call the latter either _Monism_ or _Realism_. The principle of this _Monism_ is the same as what Kant terms the “principle of mechanism,” and of which he expressly asserts, that _without it there can be no natural science at all_. This principle is quite inseparable from our Non-miraculous History of Creation, and characterizes it as opposed to the teleological belief in the miracles of a Supernatural History of Creation.