ticise another; their conflict can end only
in insults, sullenness, and an appeal to that physical drift and
irrational selection which may ultimately consign one party to oblivion.
But a philosophy does ill to boast of such borrowed triumphs. The next
turn of the wheel may crush the victor, and the opinions hastily buried
may rise again to pose as the fashionable and superior insights of a
later day. To criticise dogmatism it is necessary to be a genuine
sceptic, an honest transcendentalist, that falls back on the immediate
and observes by what principles of logical architecture the ultimate,
the reality discovered, has been inferred from it. Such criticism is not
necessarily destructive; some construction and some belief being
absolutely inevitable, if reason and life are to operate at all,
criticism merely offers us the opportunity of revising and purifying our
dogmas, so as to make them reasonable and congruous with practice.
Materialism may thus be reinstated on transcendental grounds, and the
dogma at first uttered in the flush of intelligent perception, with no
scruple or self-consciousness, may be repeated after a thorough
examination of heart, on the ground that it is the best possible
expression of experience, the inevitable deliverance of thought. So
approached, a dogmatic system will carry its critical justification with
it, and the values it enshrines and secures will not be doubtful. The
emotions it arouses will be those aroused by the experience it explains.
Causes having been found for what is given, these causes will be proved
to have just that beneficent potency and just that distressing
inadequacy which the joys and failures of life show that the reality
has, whatever this reality may otherwise be. The theory will add nothing
except the success involved in framing it. Life being once for all what
it is, no physics can render it worse or better, save as the knowledge
of physics, with insight into the causes of our varied fortunes, is
itself an achievement and a new resource.

[Sidenote: Positive emotions proper to materialism.]

A theory is not an unemotional thing. If music can be full of passion,
merely by giving form to a single sense, how much more beauty or terror
may not a vision be pregnant with which brings order and method into
everything that we know. Materialism has its distinct aesthetic and
emotional colour, though this may be strangely affected and even
reversed by contrast with systems