The Reign of Quantity and The Signs of the Times

14 Mechanism and Materialism

The earliest product of rationalism in the so-called ‘scientific’ field was Cartesian mechanism; materialism was not due to appear until later, for as explained elsewhere, the word and the thing itself are not actually met with earlier than the eighteenth century; besides, whatever may have been the intentions of Descartes himself (and it is in fact possible, by pursuing to the end the logical consequences of his ideas, to extract from them theories that are mutually very contradictory), there is nonetheless a direct filiation between mechanism and materialism. In this connection it is useful to recall that, although the ancient atomistic conceptions such as those of Democritus and especially of Epicurus can be qualified as mechanistic, these two being the only ‘precursors’ from the ancient world whom the moderns can with any justification claim as their own in this field, their conceptions are often wrongly looked upon as the earliest form of materialism: for materialism implies above all the modern physicist’s notion of ‘matter’, and at that time this notion was still a long way from having come to birth. The truth is that materialism merely represents one of the two halves of Cartesian dualism, the half to which its author had applied the mechanistic conception; it was sufficient thereafter to ignore or to deny the remaining half, or what comes to the same thing, to claim to bring the whole of reality into the first half, in order to arrive quite naturally at materialism.

Leibnitz, in opposition to Descartes and his disciples, was very successful in demonstrating the insufficiency of a mechanistic physics, which cannot, owing to its very nature, take account of anything but the outward appearance of things and is incapable of affording the smallest explanation of their true essence; thus mechanism can be said to have a value that is purely ‘representative’ and in no way explanatory; and is not the whole of modern science really in exactly the same position? This is seen to be the case even when an example as simple as that of movement is taken, though movement is ordinarily thought of as being more completely explicable than anything else in purely mechanical terms; but any such explanation, says Leibnitz, is only valid so long as movement is not regarded as involving anything other than a change of situation. From this limited point of view it is a matter of indifference, when the relative positions of two bodies change, whether the first is regarded as moving in relation to the second, or the second in relation to the first, for there is a complete reciprocity between the two; but it is quite another matter when the reason for the movement is taken into account, for if the reason is found to be in one of the two bodies, that one alone must be regarded as moving, while the other plays a purely passive part in the change that has taken place; but any idea of this kind completely eludes conceptions of a mechanistic or quantitative order. Mechanism is limited to giving a simple description of movement, such as it is in its outward appearance, but is powerless to grasp the reason for it and so to express its essential or qualitative aspect, which alone can afford a real explanation. These considerations apply with even greater force in the case of things that may be more complex in character than movement, and where quality may be more predominant over quantity, and that is why a science constituted mechanistically cannot actually be of any value in terms of effective knowledge, even within the confines of the relative and limited domain that encloses it.

The conception which Descartes tried to apply to all the phenomena of the corporeal world is however no less conspicuously insufficient, in that he reduced the whole nature of bodies to extension, and in addition he considered extension only from a purely quantitative point of view; and even at that time, just like the most recent mechanists and the materialists, he made no difference in this connection between so-called ‘inorganic’ bodies and living beings. Living beings are specified, and not organized bodies only, because the being itself is in effect reduced by him to the body alone, in accordance with the all too famous Cartesian theory of ‘animal-machines’, and this is really one of the most astonishing absurdities ever engendered by the systematic spirit. Not until he comes to consider human beings does Descartes feel obliged to point out in his physics that what he has in view is only ‘man’s body’; but what is this concession really worth, seeing that everything that takes place in this body would, by hypothesis, be exactly the same if the ‘spirit’ were absent? And so, as an inescapable result of dualism, the human being is as it were cut into two parts that do not become reunited and cannot form a real composite whole, since they cannot enter into mutual communication by any means, being supposed to be absolutely heterogeneous, so much so that any effective action by one on the other would be rendered impossible. To complete the picture, an attempt was made to explain mechanically all the phenomena that take place in animals, including those manifestations that are most obviously psychic in character; it is reasonable to ask why the same explanations should not apply to man, and whether it may not be permissible to ignore the other side of dualism as contributing nothing to the explanation of things. From this stage to the stage of looking at that other side as a useless complication and in practice treating it as non-existent, and thence to the point of denying it purely and simply, is no long step, especially for men whose attention is constantly turned toward the domain of perception, as is the case with modern Westerners: thus it is that Descartes’ mechanistic physics could not but pave the way for materialism.

The reduction to the quantitative had already taken place theoretically in Descartes’ time as far as everything that properly belongs to the corporeal order was concerned, in the sense that the actual constitution of Cartesian physics implied the possibility of such a reduction; it remained to extend the same conception to cover the whole of reality as it was then conceived, but reality had by that time become restricted to the domain of individual existence alone, in accordance with the postulates of rationalism. Taking dualism as point of departure, the reduction in question could not fail to appear as a reduction from ‘spirit’ to ‘matter’, taking the form of a relegation into the latter category alone of everything that Descartes had included in either, so as to be able to bring all things indifferently down to quantity. And so, after having previously relegated the essential aspect of things to a position ‘above the clouds’ as it were, this last step served to suppress it completely, so that thereafter nothing needed to be taken into account but the substantial aspect of things, for ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ respectively correspond to these two aspects, though they only suggest a much diminished and distorted picture of them. Descartes had brought half the world as he conceived it into the quantitative domain, and it was doubtless in his eyes the more important half, for in his secret thoughts, whatever may appear on the surface, he wanted above all to be a physicist; materialism in its turn claimed to bring the whole world into its own domain; there was then nothing more to do but to strive to bring the reduction to quantity into effect by means of theories progressively better adapted to that end, and that was the task to which modern science was destined to apply itself, even when it made no open declaration of materialism.

Besides avowed and formal materialism, there is also what may be called a factual materialism, the influence of which extends much further afield, for many people who regard themselves as being by no means materialists nonetheless behave as such in practice in all circumstances. There is in fact a relationship between these two materialisms rather like that referred to earlier between philosophical rationalism and popular rationalism, except that the merely factual materialist does not generally parade that quality and would often protest if it were attributed to him, whereas the popular rationalist, even when he is philosophically the most ignorant of men, is all the more anxious to proclaim himself a rationalist, while at the same time he proudly adorns himself with the title of ‘free-thinker’, all unconscious of irony, for all the time he is but the slave of all the current prejudices of his period. However that may be, just as popular rationalism is a product of the diffusion of philosophic rationalism among the ‘public at large’, with all the inevitable consequences of its being put ‘within the reach of all’, so materialism properly so called is the starting-point of factual materialism, in the sense that the former has made a diffusion of its characteristic state of mind generally possible and has effectively contributed to its formation; but it must not be forgotten that all these separate happenings can always be fully explained by the development of the same tendencies, the tendencies that constitute the very foundation of the modern spirit. It is obvious that a scientist, in the modern sense of the word, even if he does not profess materialism, will be influenced by it to the extent that all his special training is oriented in that direction; and even if, as sometimes happens, this scientist believes himself to be not without the ‘religious spirit’, he will find the means to separate his religion from his scientific activity so completely that his work will in no way be distinguishable from that of the most overt materialist, and so he will play just as important a part as the latter in the ‘progressive’ building up of a science as exclusively quantitative and as grossly materialistic as it is possible to imagine. In this sort of way does anti-traditional action succeed in using to its own profit even those who ought to be its adversaries, and who might be so if the deviation of the modern mentality had not so shaped beings that they are full of contradictions yet incapable even of becoming aware of the fact. Here again the tendency to uniformity finds its realization, since in practice all men end by thinking and acting in the same way, and the things in respect of which they nevertheless still differ have no more than a minimum of influence, and are not translated into any reality in the outer world. Thus, in such a world, and with the rarest exceptions, a man who professes himself a Christian does not fail to behave in practice as if there were no reality whatever outside corporeal existence alone, and a priest who does ‘a little science’ does not differ perceptibly from a university materialist; when things have reached this stage, have they much further to go before the lowest point of the ‘descent’ is reached at last?