ABSTRACT
The major features of the materialist outlook—its reliance on scientific method, its recognition of the primacy of matter and its fundamental this-worldliness—are very apparent in its attitude toward human affairs. Materialism sees the universe at large as a flux of existence which needs no fashioning Deity or Universal Mind or all-embracing Purpose to explain it. It looks to nothing beyond the totality of the universe itself for its values and its explanations. Within the universe it has adopted as explanatory principles the best available results of science. It accepts an evolutionary account of the formation of the solar system; it looks to continuities of the organic with the inorganic to explain the origin of life, and to evolution in the animal kingdom to understand the rise of man. And, as we have already seen in Part Three, it treats mind and its works as functions of the body in its environment, physical and social. In human affairs, as against the idealist devotion to eternity, it stresses the need for a dynamic equilibrium in the midst of change.
