Reading Notes: May 17th, 2022

“The menace of Materialism today has abated for the moment, more especially in educated circles, but while the world stands the old battle will assuredly have again to be fought through from time to time. Materialism on the surface is so simple, that its attraction will always be felt. If this be so, we owe an immense debt to the type of philosophy which in the nineteenth century most effectively routed the materialistic hypothesis, and did so with permanently useful weapons. It was from writers like T.H. Green in England, like Royce in America, that leading Christian writers drew their artillery and munitions for the fight. Adopting idealistic lines, they pointed out that if everything is to be construed in terms of matter, you must know matter first; but matter, as it appears in experience, cannot be the source of that which is itself a condition of appearance. What Materialism has invariably done is to take the emptiest and least significant conception we have—that of bare unqualified physical being, than which nothing could be more unlike real experience—and turn it into the very staple of a comprehensive theory of the universe. But, as a witty Frenchman puts it, if there were nothing but matter, there would be no Materialism.” (Mackintosh, Christianity and Absolute Idealism, 16-17)