Some Difficulties of Modern Materialism [pp. 344-372]

SOME DIFiICULTIES OF MODERV MA TERIALISM. 359
thus mind was brought into line with all below it. He also apparently greatly increased the resources of associationalism by
his doctrine of heredity, whereby a race-experience was exchanged for an individual experience. In this way the system
gained time for its transformations. This is very clear in appearance, but rather confused in fact. In order to learn from
experience, there must be something which learns; whereas on
the materialistic theory the learner is the experience itself. We
learn from experience by remembering the past and deducing
principles for present and future guidance. But this is impossible where there is no rational subject which stands apart from
the experience and draws inferences from it. Now according
to materialism we do not have ideas, we are the ideas. And
these ideas are not the product of some past experience, but are
the outcome of the organism as it is. An organism made at
first hand from the inorganic would have precisely the same
ideas, feelings, recollections, and general insight. The only
way, therefore, in which experience can affect our mental life is
by modifying the organism; it can directly teach us nothing.
Nor is it in any sense our mental experiences which modify the
organism; these by hypothesis are powerless. And the mental
manifestations of the organism are in no sense learned from experience, but are the expression of what the organism is. We
may speak of a gradual development of the organism and a corresponding development of mental manifestation, but we cannot
speak of experience in the philosophical sense of the word.
The same considerations apply to heredity in a materialistic
system. Experience cannot be inherited because no one has it,
and there is no one to inherit it. We are the experience, and
the experience is the outcome of the organism. The experience from which we are supposed to learn is of course mental
experience, and this by hypothesis never reacts on the organ.
ism. From another standpoint, also, this alliance between empiricism and materialism appears as impossible. The elements
from which the materialist builds everything are subject to fixed
laws. In all their inorganic manifestations they manifest not
their habits but their inner nature. Chemical affinity and molecular combination in general are not the outcome of experience,
but of the nature of the atoms themselves. We should expect,