CHAPTER VIII Meaning of § 102. THE meaning conveyed by any philosophical term consists largely of the distinctions The General which it suggests. Its peculiar qualMaterialism. ity, like the physiognomy of the battlescarred 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 1 PRELIMINARY NOTE. - By naturalism is meant that system of philosophy which defines the universe in the terms of natural science. In its dogmatic phase, wherein it maintains that being is corporeal, it is called materialism. In its critical phase, wherein it makes the general assertion that the natural sciences constitute the only possible knowledge, whatever be the nature of reality itself, it is called positivism, agnosticism, or simply naturalism. 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 Ferkeley'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. Corporeal 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 dif |