sudden materialisation of mind, the
unlooked-for assertion that consciousness does not exist, has its
justification in the same quarter. In the immediate what appears is
the thing, not the mind to which the thing appears. Even in the
passions, when closely scanned introspectively, you will find a new
sensitiveness or ebullition of the body, or a rush of images and
words; you will hardly find a separate object called anger or love.
The passions, therefore, when their moral essence is forgotten, may be
said to be literally nothing but a movement of their organs and their
objects, just as ideas may be said to be nothing but fragments or
cross-threads of the material world. Thus the mind and the object are
rolled into one moving mass; motions are identified with passions,
things are perceptions extended, perceptions are things cut down. And,
by a curious revolution in sentiment, it is things and motions that
are reputed to have the fuller and the nobler reality. Under cover of
a fusion or neutrality between idealism and realism, moral
materialism, the reverence for mere existence and power, takes
possession of the heart, and ethics becomes idolatrous. Idolatry,
however, is hardly possible if you have a cold and clear idea of
blocks and stones, attributing to them only the motions they are
capable of; and accordingly idealism, by way of compensation, has to
take possession of physics. The idol begins to wink and drop tears
under the wistful gaze of the worshipper. Matter is felt to yearn, and
evolution is held to be more divinely inspired than policy or reason
could ever be.

Extremes meet, and the tendency to practical materialism was never
wholly absent from the idealism of the moderns. Certainly, the tumid
respectability of Anglo-German philosophy had somehow to be left
behind; and Darwinian England and Bismarckian Germany had another
inspiration as well to guide them, if it could only come to
consciousness in the professors. The worship of power is an old
religion, and Hegel, to go no farther back, is full of it; but like
traditional religion his system qualified its veneration for success
by attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really
inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no
difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end
if whatever conquers in the end is the good. Among the pragmatists the
worship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to lo