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But when the reader lays down this "Strange Story," perhaps he will detect, through all the haze of romance, the outlines of these images suggested to his reason: Firstly, the image of sensuous, soulless Nature, such as the Materialist had conceived it; secondly, the image of Intellect, obstinately separating all its inquiries from the belief in the spiritual essence and destiny of man, and incurring all kinds of perplexity and resorting to all kinds of visionary speculation before it settles at last into the simple faith which unites the philosopher and the infant; and thirdly, the image of the erring but pure-thoughted visionary, seeking over-much on this earth to separate soul from mind, till innocence itself is led astray by a phantom, and reason is lost in the space between earth and the stars.
He suffered too much under a conviction of irremediable folly. He was too severely practical and too idealistic to look upon its terrible humours with amusement, as Martin Decoud, the imaginative materialist, was able to do in the dry light of his scepticism. To him, as to all of us, the compromises with his conscience appeared uglier than ever in the light of failure.
"I think," answered Pan evasively, "that you are a sensationalist, a materialist, a sceptic, a revolutionist; and if you had not sought the assistance of a god, I should have said not much better than an atheist. I also think it is time I thought about some physic for you instead of metaphysics, which are bad for my head, and for your soul."
'Young materialist, he said growling, 'what do you mean at your age by thinking so much about your body? 'It wasn't my body, sir, said David, simply, 'it was just business. If I had got ill, I couldn't have worked; if I had lived like other chaps, I couldn't have saved. So I had to know something about it, and it wasn't bad fun.
The Materialist says, it is an infinite collection of dead unintelligent particles of sand; the spiritualist, that it is the visible and tangible development of an infinite, eternal, omnipresent, thinking, sentient mind. Now, the truth is, Materialists contend that matter as a whole cannot in strictness be considered either dead or living, intelligent or non-intelligent, but simply matter; which matter when in certain well-known states is called dead, and when in other equally well-known states is called living.
The interest never became a passion: it sprang out of his physical growth, and was soon merged in it again. Or, as he put it himself, "I must get fixed up before starting." He was soon fixed up as a materialist. Then he tore up the sixpenny reprints, and never amused Mrs. Failing so much again. About the time he fixed himself up, he took to drink. He knew of no reason against it.
He had reasoned himself into a spell of the blues, and within few hours one could look for the devil within him to be up and stirring. I remembered Charley Furuseth, and knew this man's sadness as the penalty which the materialist ever pays for his materialism. "You've been on deck, Mr. Van Weyden," Wolf Larsen said, the following morning at the breakfast-table, "How do things look?"
If the contention of the scientific materialist were correct, and the thing that makes man, and that Christians call the immortal soul, were but the result of physical processes of growth and differentiation, then slavery would be justifiable, and exploitation a reasonable and inevitable process.
Nor do I now see, any more than I saw then, how any Materialist can rationally avoid the Neo-Malthusian position. For if man be the outcome of purely physical causes, it is with these that we must deal in guiding his future evolution.
But the word "function" is used in a very broad and loose sense when it serves to indicate this relation; and one may employ it in this way without being a materialist at all. In a stricter sense of the word, the brain has no functions that may not be conceived as mechanical changes, as the motion of atoms in space, and to identify mental phenomena with these is inexcusable.
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