MODERN MATERIALISM.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4774, 11 July 1876, Page 3

MODERN MATERIALISM.

(From the Canadian Monthly.)

The charm of science to the imagination and its gain to life may be almost measured by thenumber of scattered facts which its analysis can bring inio a common formula. The very sand-grains and raindrops seem to lose in multitude, when the morphological agencies are understood which crystallise and mould them. The greatness of Newton's law lies in the countless host of movements which it swept from all visible space into one sentence and one thought. No sooner does Darwin supply a verified conception which construes the endless differences of organic kinds into a continuous process, than the very relief which he gives to the mind serves, with others if not with himself, as an equivalent to so much evidence. The acoustic reduction of sounds, in their immense variety, to the length, the breadth, and the form of a wave, is welcomed as a happy discovery from a similar love of rational unity. To simplify is the essence of all scientific explanation. If it does not gain this end, it fails to explain. Its speculative ideal is still, as of old, to reach some monistic principle whence all may flow; and in this interest it is, especially to get rid of dualism by dissolving any partnership with mind, that materialism continues to recommend its claims. Does it really bring in our day the simplification at which it aims? Under the eye of modern science matter, pursued into its last haunts, no longer presents itself as one undivided stuff, which can be treated as a continuous substratum absorbent of all number and distinction; but as an infinitude of discrete atoms, each of which might be though all tho rest were gone. The conception of them, when pushed to its hypothetical extreme, brings them no nearer to unity than homogeneity—an attribute which itself implies that they arc separate and comparable members of a genus. And what is the result of comparing them ? They " are conformed," we are assured, " to a constant type with a precision which is not to bo found in the sensible properties of the bodies which they constitute. In the first place, the mass of each individual, and all its other properties, are absolutely unalterable. In the second place, the properties of all of tho same kind are absolutely identical. Here, therefore, we have an infinite assemblage of phenomena of resemblance. But further, these atoms, besides the internal vibration of each, are agitated by movements carrying them in all directions, now along free

j paths, and now into collisions. Here, therefore, we have phenomena of difference in endless variety. And so it comes to this, that our unitary datum breaks up into a genus of innumerable contents, and its individuals are affected both with ideally perfect correspondences and with numerous contrasts oT movement. What intellect can pause and compose itself to rest in this vast and restless crowdof assumptions ? Who can restrain the ulterior question—whence, then, these myriad types of the same letter, imprinted on the earth, the sun, the stars, as if the very mould used here had been lent to Sirius and passed on through the constellations. Everywhere else the likeness of individual things, especially within the same "species"—of daisy to daisy, of bee to bee—have awakened wonder and stimulated thought to plant them in some uniting relation to a cause beyond themselves; and not till the common parentage refers them to the same matrix of nature does the questioning about them subside. They quietly settle as derivative where they never could be accepted as original. Some chemists think, as Mr. Herbert Spencer reminds us, that in the hydrogen atom we have the ultimate simple unit. By means of the spectroscope, samples of it, and of its internal vibrations, may be brought from Sirius and Aldebaran—distances so great that light itself needs twenty-two years to cross the lesser of them—into exact comparison with our terrestrial specimens ; and were their places changed there would be nothing to betray the secret. So long as no A priori necessity is shown for their quantity of matter being just what it is, and always the same at incommunicable distances, or for their elasticity and time of pulsation having the same measure through myriads of instances, they remain unlinked and separate startingpoints ; and if they explain a finite number of resemblances and differences, it is only by assuming an infinite.