Mind and Matter

Materialism

With Galileo the modern science of nature reaches maturity. It was he who first laid down clearly and finally the terms on which nature could be an object of adequate and certain scientific knowledge. In a word, these terms were the exclusion of everything qualitative and the restriction of natural reality to a complex of quantities – quantities spatial or quantities temporal, but quantities and nothing more. The principle of science as understood by Galileo is that nothing is scientifically knowable except what is measurable.

We have indicated the steps by which this conception was reached; it remains to estimate the price paid for reaching it. First, nature is no longer an organism but a machine: that is to say, its changes and processes are produced and directed not by final causes but solely by efficient causes. They are not tendencies or efforts; they are not directed or oriented toward the realization of anything not yet existing; they are near movements, produced by the action of bodies already existing, whether this action be in the nature of impact or in the nature of attraction or repulsion. Secondly, that which has been extruded from the concept of nature must find a lodgment somewhere else in metaphysical theory. These homeless entities fall into two main divisions; first, qualities in general; secondly, minds. According to Galileo, whose views on this subject were adopted by Descartes and Locke and became what may be called the orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, minds form a class of beings outside nature, and qualities are explained as appearances to minds: in Descartes’ words they “belong to the union of minds with bodies,” and the senses by which we apprehend them are in general our organ for apprehending that union. This was the two-substance doctrine of mind and matter; but it was never held without strong opposition from a formidable minority. Descartes himself, the best philosophically equipped follower of Galileo, asserted this two-substance doctrine, but recognized that the two substances must have a common source, which he identified as God, and pointed out quite correctly that in that case the term “substance” could be properly applied only to God: for if a substance is something existing in its own right, without the need of anything else (which is his definition of it), matter and mind, being created by God and therefore needing him in order to exist, are not strictly substances at all. They are only substances in a secondary sense of the word.

During Descartes’ own lifetime, however, the pantheistic tendencies of the Renaissance were developed into a new direction. The idea of the world of nature as self-creative and self-regulating, combined with the idea of nature as a machine, gave rise to a materialistic theory of nature. The leader of this movement was the neo-Epicurean, Gassendi, who held that the quantitative and mechanical nature described by Galileo was the only reality, and that mind was merely a peculiar kind of pattern or structure of material elements. This gave a monistic result which was metaphysically attractive; but it could never be worked out in detail, for no one could ever explain (far less demonstrate by experiment) what precise pattern of material elements produced either mind in general, or any particular kind of mental disposition or activity.

Materialism as the heir of Renaissance pantheism continued to live and thrive not only in the seventeenth century but throughout the eighteenth and even the nineteenth centuries, until it was finally destroyed by the new theory of matter which grew up in the late nineteenth century. To the very end it retained the impress of its pantheistic origin. This appears in the outspokenly religious character of its attitude towards the matter which it postulates as the only reality. It denied God, but only because it has transferred the attributes of God to matter, and being the offspring of a monotheistic tradition thinks one God quite enough. The phenomena is so uniform that in a general way we can recognize a materialist author by his habit of using the traditional forms of Christian piety in speaking about the material world. On occasion he will even pray to it. Thus the famous materialist, Holbach (Baron d’Holbach, 1723 – 1789, a native of Hildesheim in Germany, but a writer of the most limpid and elegant French) closes his great work Du Systeme de la Nature with what is nothing more or less than a prayer to matter couched in such language that the alternation of a word here or there would leave any reader to think it an outpouring of Christian piety.

Scientifically speaking, on the other hand, materialism was from the first to last an aspiration rather than an achievement. Its God was always a miracle-working God whose mysterious ways were past our finding out. The hope was always cherished that with the advance of science we should find them out someday; so the scientific credit of materialism was maintained by drawing very large checks in its own favor on assets not yet in hand. Failing experimental confirmation in the laboratory – the kind of confirmation which was provided when biochemists achieved the feat of producing urea synthetically – a statement such as this, that the brain secretes thought in exactly the same way in which the gall-bladder secretes gall might pass as a dogma of religion, but scientifically considered was simple bluff.