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I have been a materialist for all my thinking life, but here, suddenly, is a clear case of man's detachability from matter. One desperate experiment I am about to try. I sit writing here before putting the matter to issue. This morning, with the help of a table-knife that I had secreted at breakfast, I succeeded in breaking open a fairly obvious secret drawer in this wrecked writing-desk.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, we are concerned with a case of thaumaturgic healing. A materialist of the twelfth century could not believe it any more than a materialist of the twentieth century. But a Christian Scientist of the twentieth century can believe it as much as a Christian of the twelfth century. It is simply a matter of a man's theory of things.
George Santayana is a materialist and sceptic who, in his "Reason in Religion," reveals his scepticism and frowns upon personal immortality. "It is pathetic," he comments, "to observe how lowly are the motives that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been drawn.
If this be a more intelligible and plausible supposition than that of one infinite mind, pervading the universe, and producing all physical changes by its irresistible power, the materialist is welcome to the benefit of it.
After that my experience I thought that in our dealings with material men we must be provided with very tangeable arguments. I made shortly before that trial acquaintance with a stubborn materialist in the City of New York. He had great influence upon people of certan classes, and had all his trust in weapons of iron to put down monarchs.
And when it comes to this sort of speculation, the materialist is just as much in the dark as the vitalist, and neither can have any advantage over the other, except as the one may adopt the analytic, and the other the synthetic method.
The materialist has positively no good ground for stating that cerebral changes are the causes of the mental states corresponding to them; indeed, the contrary proposition is far more inherently probable, since it is spirit, and not matter, that "possesses the power of purpose," and may therefore be regarded as the final cause of matter.
This view is excusable in the case of the materialist, if there really be such a person but it is obviously a stupid view for the theologian, who regards this life as the door to spiritual life.
The materialist may think of it as a mechanical process relentlessly working itself out without design or purpose. The theist will accept it as the plan by which Eternal Power steadily works. The devout Christian or Jew will see in it God's method of creation. The idea of development has penetrated every science that has to do with animals or man.
Before discussing what theology has to say of Him let us note in general terms what the civilised world is saying, theology or no theology. I suppose the most out-and-out materialist would admit that in the western world the name of Jesus exercises an influence to which no other is even remotely comparable.
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