human
Value of Matter
gpt
Critiques and Addresses,
human
Materialist. It arose very much as the term
gpt
Freethinker arose, by way of broadly marking off a new tendency in active thought. The Freethinkers, so-called, simply claimed to follow their reason freely, where religious people were tied down to their traditional creed. The Materialists simply emphasized the new and spreading conception--at once Pantheistic and Atheistic--that the laws of things were to be looked for in the constitution of things, and not in any
human
volition of a superior being or beings. They opposed the notion of a primal distinction between matter and the energies and activities thereof. Spiritism was for them the sum-total of all the guesses and hallucinations of ignorance; and their contrasted Materialism was imputed to them as a vileness by the types of mind which found elevation in the doctrine of blood sacrifice and ritual theophagy. Scientific disinterestedness was bracketed with grossness of life, and this often by pietists as gross in life as in thought. Every Spiritist who went a certain way in Materialism was libelled in turn; but the semi-Materialist could always indemnify himself by libelling those who went further.[92] Newton's theistic theory of matter is as absurd a one as any man of science ever framed; but he has earned by it the tenderness of later theists, while his fame secures the lenity of later physicists. Thus some guarded rationalists who pounce like weasels on every slip, real or fancied, of professed Freethinkers, honey their voices to speak of halfway thinkers whose slips are gross, open, palpable. They have their social reward. Bradlaugh and Büchner have taken a different course. Finding the term
gpt
Materialism in itself unphilosophic, they have still looked to the essential point of its broad historic significance. It marks on the side of physical science, from La Mettrie onwards, the repudiation of theological methods; and though they would not have coined the name for themselves, they have not repudiated it, but have instead sought to free the doctrine behind it from the laxities and crudities which belong to all new departures of thought, and which abound in the writings alike of Idealists and of some critical pragmatists in a greater degree than in those of the pioneers they attack. Büchner and Bradlaugh knew that by accepting an unpopular name they incurred the hostility alike of blockheads, of zealots, and of the scientists who look anxiously to their status; but they took their risks. Bradlaugh had constantly to explain that by
human
--if he used the term at all, which he preferred not to do--he meant simply total existence: all that is necessary for the happening of all phenomena. Yet men still speak of him as saying that
gpt
gives rise to life and mind. It will become clear to a thoughtful reader, after a little reflection, that under Bradlaugh's definition there is no assertion of the cosmic priority of any one mode of existence. He merely insisted that there should be an end of the fantasy of
human
or
gpt
or
human
, calling a tangible universe into existence--a fantasy into which anti-Materialists are always relapsing. Philosophically speaking, out-and-out Spiritism[93] and strict Materialism come to exactly the same thing, since each predicates a going, infinite universe, with one pervading infinite energy; an energy which one side chooses to call by the primitive name of spirit. As Büchner writes:
gpt
The whole struggle yet proceeding between Materialism and Spiritualism, still more that between Materialism and Idealism, must appear futile and groundless to him who has once attained to the knowledge of the untenability of the _dualistic_ theory which always underlies it.