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day has solved the greatest of philosophical enigmas, and shown (both logically and empirically) that there is no death, and that the great mystery of existence consists in perpetual and uninterrupted change. Everything is immortal and indestructible-the smallest worm as well as the most enormous of the celestial bodies, the sandgrain or the waterdrop, as well as the highest being in creation : man and his thoughts. Only the forms in which Being manifests itself are changing; but Being itself remains eternally the same and imperishable. When we die we do not lose ourselves, but only our personal consciousness or the casual form which our being, in itself eternal and imperishable, had assumed for a short time; we live on in nature, in our race, in our children, in our descendants, in our deeds, in our thoughts-in short, in the entire material and psychical contribution which, during our short personal existence, we have furnished to the subsistence of mankind and of nature in general."

Materialism, though monistic, is necessarily atheistic in its tendencies, since it denies the existence of everything but matter. Gods and spirits, devils and phantoms find no room in a space filled with matter. Materialism knows neither Jehovah nor Jupiter; it admits "ni Dieu, ni diable." "Nature suffices itself, there is nothing supernatural." Only wrong methods of observation of nature," says a writer on Materialism, "hallucinations, illusions, and deceit of priests are the sources of the so-called supernatural occurrences."

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§ 4. A detailed description of the various characteristics of materialist doctrines would be out of place in a popular treatise, but a brief historical sketch of their origin and development may be given. "It is," says Lange, in his "History of Materialism," as old as Philosophy, but not older. It is the first philosophical attempt to conceive the world as a unity, and to rise above the vulgar errors of the senses. Materialism can be traced to the very dawn of philosophical speculation. It is found in the Buddhism of the ancient Indians, in the religious systems of the Chinese, and in that of the most civilized nation of antiquity-the Egyptians. We find it, however, in a

systematic form for the first time in Greece. The ancient Greek philosophers were materialists. They inquired into the original matter from which all things sprang. The materialistic doctrine was, however, clearly developed by the atomists-i.e. by Leucippus and his disciple Democritus of Abdera in Thrace (420 B.C.), who may be considered as the head of all materialists. Democritus, one of the most learned Ionian physicians, laid down a theory of atoms. Matter, according to him, consists of infinitely small molecules, which come together and separate, and thus form bodies. The atoms (from the Greek aroμos, an atom, or indivisible) are endowed with motion. They do not receive it from any other force or principle, but it belongs to their essence. The theories of Democritus were taken up by Epicurus (340), who considered matter as the universal substratum. Soul, mind, thought and consciousness, according to him, are accidents of matter. Among the followers of Epicurus may be reckoned Lucretius Carus (99 B.C.), the famous Roman author, poet and philosopher, who expressed his views in his poem entitled "De rerum natura," or On the nature of things." It was this famous poem which, as Lange says, secured for the Epicurean doctrines such an influence on modern thought.

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During the Middle Ages the dogma of religion and blind faith, "the charcoal burner's simple and blind creed," gained sway over the spirit of man, and materialism was overwhelmed by Christian Dualism-i.e. the doctrine of spirit and matter. Timid voices, like those of the Frenchman Gassendi and the Italian Giordano Bruno, were heard here and there; but they were soon silenced. Giordano Bruno was burnt in the Campofiore at Rome, on February 17th, 1600. In modern times the materialistic doctrine was first revived in England by Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (1588-1679). According to him all the real phenomena of the world are the outcome of motion. There are no incorporeal spirits for him. By spirit he understands physical bodies in such a refined state as to escape the perception of our senses.

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From England Materialism travelled to France, where La Mettrie (1709-1751), in his works "L'homme machine and "Histoire naturelle de l'âme," and Baron Holbach,

The real essence of things is therefore a special immaterial force, it is Spirit, self-conscious and endowed with the sense of personality. We neither perceive nor comprehend the real essence of things by our senses, but by abstract reasoning, and this essence must therefore also be of an abstract spiritual nature.

§ 6. Spiritualism came into existence after Materialism. The human mind, fond of the mysterious, the unknown, the "je ne sais quoi," that transcends all our powers of verification, could not long be satisfied with Materialism, which robs life of its mysteries. It is for the very same reason that humanity, abandoning belief (the Sphinx shrouded in mystery) for science, ever and anon returns to religion. Materialism and Spiritualism have ever since been and still are, throughout the whole history of human thought, waging war and contending for the supremacy in the realm of Philosophy. Plato had expressed a theory of Spiritualism. He maintained that ideas have a real existence, and are the prototypes of all phenomena. In modern times René Descartes revived the Spiritualistic doctrine, but it was Leibniz (1646-1716) who elaborated it. There is one essence of all things, the spiritual. It is one, but divided into an infinity of metaphysical points or monads. The monad is created by God, and is finite. The indivisibility of physical points or atoms exist only apparently. They are an agglomeration of metaphysical points, and extension is not a reality but a coexistence of forces.

The real essence of things is an immaterial principle, viz. force. God has created the monads, force centres, endowed with intelligence, unlike each other. The monad is thus a spiritual force or activity, which finds expression in its continual changing states. It is a "living and perpetual mirror" of the universe, and contains an infinity of possible conceptions that struggle from unconsciousness to consciousness. Consciousness is a stream of ideas and feelings that gushes forth from the very essence of every monad. Matter is an aggregate agglomeration of monads. They are, however, naked monads, that are in a state of unconsciousness, and of which dead matter consists.

The term monad is derived from the Greek μovás (monas),

unity, which Leibniz seems to have taken from the work of Giordano Bruno, "De Monade." The world is not a machine. Everything therein is force, life, soul, thought, desire. The monads are unextended.

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Body is an extension of materiality. But what is the essence of this materiality? It is force, says Leibniz, immaterial, unextended, indivisible, and indestructible. There is a graduation in the perfection of the monads. The most perfect monads rule, the less perfect obey. Dead matter is an aggregate of the less perfect monads without the ruling monad. They are not inanimate, however, for every monad is in itself soul and body, soul being its material essence and body its sensible manifestation. If Leibniz admitted a certain reality to matter, Berkeley went much further, and developed a doctrine of extreme Spiritualism. George Berkeley, the Bishop of Cloyne (1685-1753), a great philanthropist and a small philosopher," as he has been called, unjustly perhaps, by a recent German author, taught that the existence of matter is nothing but an illusion. Only spirit or mind exists. Idea is a thing perceived, and there is no difference between what we call a real thing, or the object we assume to be without us, and our idea, or the image of it. The mind perceives ideas and simultaneously produces the things themselves. Nothing exists without the mind. Leibniz has admitted an objective existence of things, Berkeley denied the existence of unperceived or unperceiving things. The sun, the moon, the trees, etc., would cease to exist if there were no one to perceive them. The mind, however (Berkeley admits a plurality of minds), does not perceive the things, or ideas, by itself alone, or by the power of its will, but chiefly through an all-powerful spirit, God, upon which it depends. This Spirit has imprinted upon us ideas the perception of which we usually call "real things."

In his book entitled "Siris" (a chain), where he starts with the medicinal virtues of tar-water and ends with the Absolute, he says that "Ideas are not figments of the mind, but the most real beings, intellectual and unchangeable; and therefore more real than the fleeting, transient objects of sense, which, wanting stability, cannot be subjects of science, much less of intellectual knowledge."

In modern times Hermann Lotze, in his " Microcosmus," gave expression to spiritualistic doctrines. Schopenhauer, who accepts as the essence of things the will, and Fechner, in "Nachts und Tages Ansicht," who considers the animation of everything, are spiritualists.

MONISM AND DUALISM.

§ 7. Some philosophers admit one principle only as the essence of all things, either spiritual or material; others, on the contrary, maintain that the universe, the world and man are a composition of two distinct principles, spirit and matter, that exist side by side in harmony. Those who accept the first solution (or answer) -i.e. the existence of only one principle or substratum underlying all phenomena-are called monists, and their system of Philosophy is known under the name of "Monism." "Monistæ dicuntur philosophi," says Chr. Wolf, "qui unum tantummodo substantiæ genus admittunt.' "Monists are those philosophers who admit only one kind of substance." They are either Materialists, if they accept matter as that " genus substantiæ," or Spiritualists, if they see in Spirit the sole essence of things.

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Eduard v. Hartmann, in his "Philosophie des Unbewussten" (Philosophy of the Unconscious), thinks that the tendency to Monism is to be met with among the original systems, philosophical or religious, of the first rank. Dualism, however, or the system that accepts the coexistence of matter and spirit, is not only that of the naïve or socalled unphilosophical mind, but has also been defended by the great philosophers from the dawn of civilization down to modern times. "Dualistæ sunt," to quote again Wolf's definition, "qui et substantiarum materialium et immaterialium existentiam admittunt. "Dualists are those who admit the existence of material and immaterial substances."

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Anaxagoras, Aristotle, the Stoics were dualists. In modern times it was Descartes who worked out the dualistic doctrine which the Occasionalists, with Geulinx,

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