The Approach to Philosophy by Ralph Perry

Author:Ralph Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perennial Press

NATURALISM

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§ 102. THE MEANING CONVEYED by any philosophical term consists largely of the distinctions which it suggests. Its peculiar quality, like the physiognomy of the battle-scarred veteran, is a composite of the controversies which it has survived. There is, therefore, an almost unavoidable confusion attendant upon the denomination of any early phase of philosophy as materialism. But in the historical beginnings of thought, as also in the common-sense of all ages, there is at any rate present a very essential strand of this theory. The naive habit of mind which, in the sixth century before Christ, prompted successive Greek thinkers to define reality in terms of water, air, and fire, is in this respect one with that exhibited in Dr. Samuel Johnson’s smiting the ground with his stick in curt refutation of Bishop Berkeley’s idea-philosophy. There is a theoretical instinct, not accidental or perverse, but springing from the very life-preserving equipment of the organism, which attributes reality to tangible space-filling things encountered by the body. For obvious reasons of self-interest the organism is first of all endowed with a sense of contact, and the more delicate senses enter into its practical economy as means of anticipating or avoiding contact. From such practical expectations concerning the proximity of that which may press upon, injure, or displace the body, arise the first crude judgments of reality. And these are at the same time the nucleus of naive philosophy and the germinal phase of materialism.

§ 103. The first philosophical movement among the Greeks was a series of attempts to reduce the tangible world to unity, and of these the conception offered by Anaximander is of marked interest in its bearing upon the development of materialism. This philosopher is remarkable for having defined his first principle, instead of having chosen it from among the different elements already distinguished by common-sense. He thought the unity of nature to consist in its periodic evolution from and return into one infinite sum of material (τὸ ἄπειρον), which, much in the manner of the “nebula” of modern science, is conceived as both indeterminate in its actual state and infinitely rich in its potentiality. The conception of matter, the most familiar commonplace of science, begins to be recognizable. It has here reached the point of signifying a common substance for all tangible things, a substance that in its own general and omnipresent nature is without the special marks that distinguish these tangible things from one another. And in so far the philosophy of Anaximander is materialistic.

§ 104. But the earliest thinkers are said to be hylozoists, rather than strict materialists, because of their failure to make certain distinctions in connection with the processes of matter. The term hylozoism unites with the conception of the formless material of the world (ὕλη), that of an animating power to which its formations and transformations are due. Hylozoism itself was not a deliberate synthesis of these two conceptions, but a primitive practical tendency to universalize the conception, of life. Such “animism” instinctively associates with an object’s bulk and hardness a capacity for locomotion and general initiative.

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