Materialism And Spiritualism - Part 2

Spiritualism and Supernatural

Spiritualism is the way of interpreting things which regards the spiritual as prior to the material, where as materialism regards the material as prior. Spiritualism supposes that everything material is dependent on and determined by something spiritual, where as materialism recognises that everything spiritual is dependent on and determined by something material. And this difference manifests itself both in general and philosophical conceptions of the world as a whole, and in conceptions of particular things and events.

At the bottom, spiritualism is religion, theology. All spiritualism is the continuation of the religious approach to questions, even though particular spiritualist theories have shed their religious skin. Spiritualism is inseparable from superstition, belief in the supernatural, the mysterious and unknowable. The roots of the spiritualist conception of things are then the same as those of religion. Materialism on the other hand seeks for explanation in terms belonging to the material world, in terms of factors which we can verify understand and control.

Conceptions of the supernatural and religious ideas in general owe their origin first of all to the helplessness and ignorance of men in face of the forces of nature. Forces, which men cannot understand, are personified – they are represented as manifestations of the activity of spirits. From the most primitive times men personified natural forces in this way. With the birth of the class society when men were impelled to act by the social relations which dominated them and which they did not understand, they further invented supernatural agencies doubling, as it were, the state of society. The gods were invented superior to mankind just as kings and lords were superior to the common people. All religion, and all spiritualism, has at its heart this kind of doubling of the world. It is spiritualistic and invents a dominating ideal or supernatural world over against the real mankind.

Very characteristic of spiritualism are such antitheses as soul – body, god –man, heavenly kingdom – earthly kingdom; the forms and idea of things grasped by the intellect and the world of material reality, perceptible by the senses. For spiritualism there is always a higher, more real, more material world - which is prior to the existing material world, is its ultimate source and cause and to which the material world is subject. For materialism, on the other hand, there is one world, the material world.

For nearly 300 years there has been put forward a variety of philosophy known as “subjective spiritualism”. This teaches that the material world does not exist at all. Nothing exists but the sensations and ideas in our minds, and there is no external material reality corresponding to them. And then again this subjective spiritualism is put forward in the form of a doctrine concerning knowledge: it denies that we can know anything about objective reality outside ourselves, and says that we can have knowledge of appearances only and not of “things in themselves”. This sort of spiritualism has become very fashionable today. It even parades as extremely “scientific”. They say that the real world is unknowable, the area of mysterious forces which pass our comprehension. It is not difficult to see that the fashion for such doctrines is just a symptom of the decay of society.