H7L0M0RPHISM
594
HTLOZOISM
authorities contain no information as to his having
died a martyr. At his death he was buried on the
Vatican Hill, near the tomb of St. Peter. His feast is
celebrated on 11 January.
Duchesne (ed.), Liber Pontificalis, 1, 131: AdaSS., Jan., I, 665; Habnack, Geschichte der altchristl, Literatur, II: Die Chronoloffie, I (Leipzig, 1897), 144 sq.
J. P. KiRSCH.
Hylomorphism. See Cosmology, sub-title The
constituent causes iif the world; Form; Matter.
Hylozoism (Gr., OX?;, matter + fu^, life), the doc- trine according to which all matter possesses life.
There is a certain hylozoism which is only a childish, inexperienced way of looking on nature. We are naturally inclined to interpret other existences after what we know of ourselves, and so it is that children give life and soul to everything. The result of this personification of nature in primitive races has also been called animism. It is a poetical view of the world. We should therefore not be surprised that the first school of philosophers in Greece, the lonians, conceived of the universe as animated through- out and full of gods: iixfvxov Kal Sat/idvuiv TrXiipr; (Diog. Laer., I, 27). With the progress of thought a more scientific view of nature prevailed. First obscurely by Anaxagoras, then clearly by Plato and Aristotle, matter and mind were separated and their mutual relations delineated. Hylozoism in its primi- tive form disappearctl. But, with the second suc- cessor of Aristotle, Strato of Lampsacus, another kind of hylozoism, clearly materialistic, came into existence. Strato, while repudiating the mechan- icism of the Atomists, nevertheless, in common with them, held bodies to be the only reality and explained life as a property of matter. In the Stoic doctrine also bodies alone are a reality. Bodies are made up of two principles, a pa.ssive principle, matter, and an active principle, form; but form itself is corporeal. It is warm vapour (TrveO/ia), or fire, yet fire distinct from the element of this name; it is primitive fash- ioning fire (irOp rexv^Kdv), God. In order to form the world a part of it changed itself into the elements, fire, air, water, earth, and con.stituted the body of the world, while another part retained its original shape, and in that shape confronts the first as form or soul. This was pure materialism.
But a wave of religious mysticism and panthe- ism was preparing to sweep from the East over the Gra!co-Roman world and dislodge matter from the throne it had usurped. Under this influence the later Peripatetics, the Neo-Pythagoreans and espe- cially the Neo-Platonic school of Alexandria, while accepting the Stoic concept of the world-soul, re- versed the relative importance of its terms, considered the so\il as a spiritual principle emanating from God, and gave matter the inferior rank, if not as al- together evil, at least as most imperfect. Indeed matter was hardly a reality at all; the activities and perfections of material beings proceeded from a dis- tinct principle, the .soul. The universe was an im- mense organism. Everything was animated; and, though life was in itself distinct from matter, it was in fact imparted to all material beings. This was Panthei.stic hylozoism. It survived in the medieval Jewish and Arabian philosophy, and reappeared in Christian countries with the nature philosophers of the Renaissance, Paracelsus, Cardanus, Giordano Bruno, etc. But at the Renaissance it did not come alone. For, under the influence of the enthusiastic return to the study of nature, of the revival of classic literatures with their mythology full of gods and goddesses, and of the sensualism which then invaded morals, the two other forms of hylozoism, the naive and the materialistic, reappeared also, and the three were combined in different proportions by the several writers. In a less degree, even such thinkers as
Richard Cudworth and Henry More, the Cambridge
Platonists, yielded to it, when they devised their
hypothesis of a "plastic nature ", or a sort of inferior
soul, which caused the processes of life in organic
beings and directed in a purpose-like manner the
activity of physical nature.
After Descartes's bold attempt to resolve into motion the operations of physical life, which deprived the word life of much of its meaning and put matter in sharp contrast with the higher life of thought, the concept life was for a while set aside, and specula- tion for the most part dealt with matter as opposed to mind. Yet, in a different form, it was the .same problem over again, viz. the determination of the limits of matter and of its relation to spirit. To this problem Spinoza offered a solution, which, combining materiali.stic with pantheistic hylozoism, held the balance even between matter and mind by reducing both to the rank of mere attributes of tlie one infinite substance. Leibniz, resolving matter into spirit, looked on bodies as aggregates of simple unextended substances or monads, endowed with elementary perception and will. On the contrary, a group of French writers in the eighteenth century, Diderot, Cabanis, Robinet, etc., adhered to a dynamico- materiahstic view of the world which recalls that of Strato.
In the nineteenth century the progress of the biologi- cal sciences again called attention to physical life. Descartes's mechanicism was generally discarded. On the other hand, the craving of reason for unity, which has here characteristically embodied itself m the theory of evolution, tends to consider the world of life — and the world of mind as well — as a mere extension of the world of matter. But then life must be conceived as fundamentally contained in all matter, as one of its essential properties. Thus has hylo- zoism been revived by some thinkers as a postulate of science. Literally taken, it would be materialism, and in that sense is indefatigably advocated by E. Hackel, who identifies mind with organization and life, and life with energy, which he makes a property of the atoms. Matter is for him the only reality. He, moreover, imagines ether to be the primitive sub- stance, a part of which, as was the case with the primi- tive fire of the Stoics, transformed itself through con- densation into inert mass, while another part of it subsists as ether and constitutes the active principle, spirit. Very few thinkers, however, would commit themselves to such a doctrine. But many scientists use it as a postulate without ever incniinng into its mcta-physical implications. Those who have inquired have commonly agreed that at least mental life can by no means be resolved into matter. Consequently they have modified the concept matter itself, and described matter and mind, after the view already set forth by Spinoza, as two manifestations, or two aspects, of one and the same reahty. This reality may be declared different in itself from both matter and mind, and unknowable (II. Spencer); or it may be declared identical with both matter and mind, which are re- spectively its outer and inner sides (Fcchner, Lotze, Wundt, etc.). In either ca.se, hylozoism has passed into psycho -physical parallelism with tendencies towards either materialism or idealism.
From what has been said, then, it follows that it would be an error to see in hylozoism a mere doc- trine of physical life; for instance, the affirmation of spontaneous generation. Physical life may, in the abstract, be separated from mental life and treated independently of it. But in reality the .separation does not hold, and hylozoism has alwiiys extended its conclusions to mental life as well. Even naive hylo- zoism did not stop at granting life to nature, it also endowed nature with soul. Pantheistic hylozoism started with the very concept of mental life. These two forms no longer count in science. On the latter.
