ABSTRACT
Materialism is a widespread and persistent type of philosophy, because it springs naturally out of one special kind of experience which comes in some degree to all men and all ages. For materialism is characteristically a creed of the men of science and their followers, rather than of professional philosophers; and the scientists have often held it rather as a working assumption than as an explicitly formulated philosophy. The sciences studying the more complex phenomena have to discover their own principles of explanation independently of the knowledge of simpler phenomena which is given by physics. Physicists and chemists are able to break up into very small parts any physical object that is given them, and to re-combine these parts to make fresh wholes. The materialist philosopher takes the account given by physics as an adequate account of the nature of ultimate reality; and so to him the fundamental physical properties are the essential properties of all that is.
