Philosophy : its scope and relations an introductory course of lectures / by Henry Sidgwick.

  • Henry Sidgwick
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Philosophy : its scope and relations an introductory course of lectures / by Henry Sidgwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    that Materialism is in one sense philosophical: i.e. that it is the result of that effort after a complete systematising of knowledge which in the first lecture 1 called philosophy. But the jprimd facie disparate- ness of mental facts and nervous changes, the appar- ently total absence of kinship between them, puts in the way of any materialistic systematisation an obstacle difficult to overleap. Indeed I think that instructed thinkers of a materialistic tendency have now ceased to try to leap over this obstacle. At the present time the important issue between such thinkers and their opponents does not relate to the nature of the double facts with which psychology deals, or to the connexion of their disparate elements, psychical and physical— which no one professes to understand—but rather to the causal nexus that links each successive double fact with physical or psychical antecedents or con- sequents. What the materialistic thinker maintains and his opponent denies is that this causal nexfu.s is to be conceived as lying wholly on the physical side; and that psychical facts are merely unexplained efi'ects or epiphenomena, and not in their turn even part- causes of physical facts ; in other words, that study- ing the succession of ps5mho-physical facts—thoughts and feelings accompanied by movements in the nerve-matter of the brain—we ought to conceive the causal nexus of the facts as lying wholly on the physical side, and ultimately to be explained by purely physical laws. This is a problem which is—I think we may say—
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