Ten Ways to Weave the World: Matter, Mind, and God, Volume 2: Embodying Mind

By Ross Thompson

In this sequel to Outgrowing Materialism, Thompson explores five conceptual "Worlds" that preceded the dualist v. materialist divide and shows why recent philosophy--often little-known outside of academic circles--is now giving these old ideas a new relevance.
In an approachable way, but without avoiding complexity, Embodying Mind leads the reader through the Worlds of panpsychism, idealism, Aristotelianism, emergence, and information theory, holism, and process theology, examining the ideas of ethics and God, and the difficult questions, accompanying each.
Thompson concludes that causal processes harmonize as in a cosmic counterpoint. The world and its beautiful contents form a seamless material whole. It is not as if Mind or God glints obscurely through ever-narrowing chinks in otherwise seamless nature. There are no chinks, but the whole is full of Mind. Overall, imperfectly, things are moving towards their sustaining good: God is becoming God, surpassing God.
Embodying Mind can be read independently from Outgrowing Materialism, but together the two volumes of Ten Ways to Weave the Word mount a robust, wide-ranging case that nobody interested in the science v. religion debate, or wishing more widely for an integrated understanding of "Matter, Mind and God," can afford to ignore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jan 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781725293298

Ross Thompson

Ross Thompson lives in Melbourne Australia. He is semi-retired after many years of full time and part time involvment in Pastoral and Evangelistic ministry. He was also a Bible college lecturer and has some Theological qualifications. Presently he uses his teaching gift to write for the edification of anybody interested in Christianity and Christians.

Book preview

Introduction to Embodying Mind

This is the second of the two volumes making up Ten Ways to Weave the World. The relation between the two volumes is best understood, perhaps, by looking at the covers. Both feature a picture by William Blake. The first volume, Outgrowing Materialism, had William Blake’s picture, The Ancient of Days, which looks like (though it is not) a picture of God. That volume told the story of how a certain kind of God came to be enthroned within dualism, only to be ousted from the Worlds that followed, including materialism. This volume describes what some have called the re-enchantment of the world,¹ and we see a far more enchanting picture: Blake’s Reunion of the Soul and the Body. This depicts the moment (in Catholic theology) when the soul returns to the body at the resurrection of the dead. The body is depicted as a male rising from the grave, and the soul as a female figure descending from above, but the traditional gender roles are subverted: the male is lowly, half-naked, his arms open to receive, while the female is lofty and energetic as she presses down into his embrace. Both are full of joy. The suggestion is far from the old Platonic idea of body as the prison of the soul, with the soul seeking to be liberated to return to its heavenly home. Just as the soul renders the body alive and happy, so here the body brings joy to the soul, earthing it in the life and experience that come through the senses. As Outgrowing Materialism tells of the alienation of soul and body in dualism and materialism, leaving us in the end with a World of bare structure, deprived of both spirit and matter; so Embodying Mind explores the ways in which an idealist account of the world falls short, and needs the embrace with the material body that Blake depicts.

Recap of Outgrowing Materialism

The first volume, then, had more of a historical structure, and told of how dualism gave way to materialism, but by its own logic, materialism has unravelled into two opposing ways beyond it. The volume began with the ahistorical naïve realism {1}² of those who look on the world with non-philosophical eyes, and take it as it seems to be, identifying how it seems with how it is. In the dualism of {2}, by contrast, this seeming identity begins to be doubted, for both reflection and science tell us that how things are may diverge substantially from how things seem to be. In dualism this divergence becomes a substantial division between matter and mind. It cannot be emphasized enough that materialism {3} emerges precisely from this dualism, by disregarding the world of mind as recalcitrant to scientific study, and leaving only the world of matter. Structural realism {4} then arises as the process of disregarding becomes more and more strict, so that most of the qualities associated with matter are themselves discarded, leaving only the quantities correlated in our mathematical equations. The multiverse {5} emerges as mathematical criteria for reality begin to overtake the empirical ones, such that we allow for the existence of a multiverse because it makes the mathematics simpler, and because it is the easiest way to reconcile the remarkableness of our universe with the elimination of metaphysical factors, as materialism requires. The moral of Volume 1 is that just as modern materialism has a beginning in the kind of doubt that leads also to dualism, so it may have its own logical ending.

Now if there is no standpoint on offer with comparable simplicity and integrity to the materialist World, it might seem reasonable to hold on to a half-deconstructed materialism. In the same way, it would be reasonable to prefer living in a big and elegant mansion that has been destroyed in some parts and proven to have shaky foundations in others, to living on an empty building site with vague promises of buildings to come in due course. But in this second part I hope to show that there are good, livable-in homes on offer, some of which preceded the building of the materialist mansion, some of which are in the process of construction, and that there are several reasonable alternatives to materialism.

Now materialism and the new atheism that goes with it have tended to present themselves as down-to-earth, no-nonsense alternatives to the flights of fancy that have prevailed in metaphysics and religion. But the first part of this book has argued that the logical trajectory of materialism and atheism takes us into either a World in which matter no longer matters, or a multiverse. Both alternatives are replete with opportunities for metaphysical fantasy, to which no clear limit can be set. It is as if we are travelers who have journeyed on a well-defined and trusted road, only to find that the road divides into a vast array of indistinct pathways petering out in thick, luxuriant forest.³

The wise response—in both the metaphysical and the topographical scenarios—is surely to backtrack, in order to find a different route that will carry you forward on a well-marked way beyond where you have so far reached. This has often been found necessary historically: to get beyond the impasses of the modern, postmodernism first has to seek out the Worlds that predate modernity. To move beyond the colonial—which has sometimes meant the imposition of Christian dualism or secular materialism, or more often an uneasy mix of the two—it is obviously necessary to rehabilitate previously despised Worlds that predate the colonization.

And this is essentially the strategy of this second half of this book, where we examine in turn Worlds, often non-Western, which mostly predate the advent of dualism and materialism, and which have found themselves revived in some radical recent philosophical rethinking about the relation of mind to matter. Volume 2 begins with the animist worldview revived in panpsychism. It then considers the idealisms of the ancient East, revived in nineteenth-century Romantic philosophers but still alive today, though regarded as eccentric; and then the hylomorphism of Aristotle, widely regarded as discredited by the rise of modern science, but rising from the ashes in a new form in the radical fringe of thinking on emergence. The order of these chapters is, in a tentatively Hegelian manner, part historical, part logical, each World arising out of queries regarding the previous one, then giving rise to queries of its own.

The book will argue that, notwithstanding their faults, each of these Worlds has at least as much integrity as modern dualism and materialism. If they are reintroduced into the debate, it becomes much less polarized than a great many recent works allow, much more like a gracious symposium from which truth may emerge. So in this volume, first I dig deeper, to Worlds that existed before the modern Worlds (which is not to say that aspects of the modern Worlds do not have equally early precedents, as discussed). Then I try to reach further, beyond the impasses to which the modern leads us. The final World offers my own conclusions as to which of these Worlds, or combinations of parts of them, makes the best possible sense of the world we are in, and opens the best opportunities for future development.

The Pattern of Embodying Mind

The five Worlds discussed in this second volume are not wholly unrelated to the five discussed in the first. Each World may be seen as preserving some of the tenets of materialism, discussed in {3}, while letting go of others (as indeed Worlds 4 and 5 do). The following outlines the ideas that tend to hang together in each World.

World 6, panpsychism, neutral monism, and related philosophies all affirm with dualism the reality of conscious experience, but reject the dualist disjunction between mind and matter as different substances, seeing mind and matter rather as aspects, always conjoined, of a single reality, properties of one kind of substance. Thereby they are able to hold on both to the reality of consciousness and the intentional, and to the tenet of reductionism, seeing our minds and bodies as assemblies of more primitive elements that have both mental and physical aspects. The result is what {5} called a landscape universe, consisting of diverse elements each with their own history and explanation, forming a kind of whole but having no single explanation; for just as dualism faces a problem regarding how mind and body can interact, and materialism faces the hard problem of explaining consciousness, so panpsychism faces the problem of how atoms of consciousness can combine into the coherent wholes we call minds.

World 7, idealism, resolves this problem of combination by adopting a top-down rather than bottom-up approach to minds, regarding them as fragments of a greater Mind rather than assemblies of little ones. Idealism involves a rapprochement with naïve realism in that it takes appearances as the starting point that cannot seriously be doubted. In contrast with the kind of materialism that eliminates the mental, idealism eliminates the idea of matter behind phenomena. In this way it holds on to the empiricist tenet that starts from experience, offering us a nature that is naturalistic in the sense of self-contained, albeit immaterial. Idealism can result in the necessary universe, seeing the world in Neo-Platonic fashion as an inevitable emanation of the Mind of God, or in Hegelian fashion, as unfolding in history through the necessary laws of logic. However, it is debatable whether such views are necessary to idealism. Idealism, meanwhile, has its own big problems, in accounting for the role of material bodies and brains in experience, for those regularities in experience that seem to be beyond the mind’s control, and for those aspects of ourselves of which we are not aware.

World 8, the hylomorphism of Aristotle, and medieval successors such as Aquinas, gives much more weight to the material embodiment of experience, in that it sees the world as consisting of realities that are a unity of matter with form or idea. Matter is no longer pitted against a logically independent mind or soul, but rather, inseparably⁴ informed and shaped by form, pattern, or soul. This approach affirms the materialist tenets of empiricism—for all knowledge comes through the senses—and the search for underlying laws of nature. But Aristotle, unlike Plato, had little time for mathematics, and neither reductionism nor naturalism can apply in {8}, since this World involves kinds of explanation other than the purely mechanical, and is grounded in a Necessary Being. The crucial problem for hylomorphism is historical rather than logical: whether it is anchored in a pre-scientific, religious worldview that is now unbelievable, as many assume.

World 9 combines a variety of recently developed themes: emergence, information theory, holism, and a new monism. Many of these themes arise from a kind of rapprochement between Aristotle and modern science, or a rediscovery of various features that are recognizably Aristotelian, whether the authors recognize this or not. In different ways they represent further alternatives to dualism and materialism: ways of doing justice to the meaning in matter, especially in living organisms and ecologies. Proponents generally hold on to naturalism, in that they look for a purpose that is immanent in the universe rather than deriving from a transcendent intention. Empiricism survives, but not reductionism or the insistence on mathematical quantification. {9} offers a universe that is grounded in immanent teleological necessity, and its fundamental problem is how purpose can be thoroughly immanent. How can higher and lower levels interact, and what exactly can emergence and wholes that are greater than parts mean, without invoking what some would dismiss as magic, and others welcome as evidence of divine intervention?

World 10 represents my own attempt to bring together the best of the nine worlds into a coherent approach. In particular {10} brings together two major ideas. One is the idea that top down and bottom up forms of explanation can fuse, in a manner pioneered by Aristotle and brought into line with current science by way of emergence and a new monism, into the notion of a diasynchronic process in which a whole emerges in time from the parts it grounds. The other is the Platonic understanding that the ultimate ground of the diasynchronic process that is the universe is goodness itself. The universe is seen as a process both grounded in and realizing itself in the good. This suggests the panentheistic God of process theology, who surpasses and realizes Godself through creation. Though different in crucial respects from classical theology, such an understanding actually interilluminates⁵—better than the classical view does—with the traditional Christian doctrines of Trinity and incarnation, while providing better bridges with understandings found in other faiths.

As in Volume 1, these Worlds are linked with spiritualities associated with different stories of the world, making considerable use of the typology of Christopher Booker;⁶ and the Worlds are not seen as necessitating or proving any particular theology, but as being readily associated with and interilluminating with certain theological approaches rather than others.

Does This Volume Stand Alone?

You may have acquired this volume as a sequel to the first volume, but if not, you may be wondering whether this volume can be read without having first read that one, as probably that one could without this. The answer is: for meaning, yes; for assessment, no.

I have tried to make this volume understandable without reference to Volume 1, providing brief summaries where necessary. In addition, this book cites the arguments of a different range of philosophers, being largely either older (as with Aristotle and the early idealists) or newer (referring to the amazing—some would say crazy—boldness of several twenty-first-century philosophers, largely unfamiliar outside philosophical circles). By contrast, Volume 1 cited arguments from Descartes to the mid-late twentieth century, which are those largely taught in university courses. If you are not philosophically trained, still you will probably find the major figures and movements somehow familiar, and I have tried not to clutter the texts with too much complexity, while indicating where the complexities lie.

On the other hand, to assess the truth or otherwise of the argument as a whole, you do need to have read Volume 1, and further, to have read for yourself some of the articles and arguments cited, especially in the many questions. For the book stands or falls not through particular, closely defended and watertight arguments, but by way of the broad and cumulative drift of many arguments, working by way of a complex web of interconnections. The book tries to construct a broad map of the philosophical Worlds that are conceivable, indicating clearly where my own route through the Worlds lies. You may find some arguments weak, and others you may feel you could improve on and make stronger. In addition, you will have, as everyone does, your own preferred aesthetic as to what makes a World attractive or believable (not necessarily the same thing), such that you may find yourself making a different journey with a different destination. But for that to happen, you need to consider carefully the journey I have made.

1

. The term originates with philosopher Friedrich Schiller and sociologist Max Weber; see also Morris Berman, Re-enchantment of the World.

2

. The introduction to Volume

1

clarified that a number surrounded by curly brackets identifies a World (roughly, a way of conceptually weaving a worldview); so {

1

} should be read as "World

1

. I also explained the notation for questions raised by a World, such as ?{

3

}d," which would be question d regarding World

3

.

3

. Those who have taken what looks like a clear pathway to a destination, in one of those countries where paths are intended only to reach remote olive groves and farmsteads, will understand this experience well!

4

. We shall see that Aquinas allowed the possibility of the soul’s separation in order to make room for Christian eternal life; but the separate soul remains a fundamentally deprived, disabled soul.

5

. On interillumination see {

6

}, sections on Pantheism, and Poetry, ?{

8

}f, and the section on Three Kinds of Loopiness in {

10

}.

6

. Booker, Seven Basic Plots.

{6}

Matter with Mind

Panpsychism and Neutral Monism

Spear said there had never been any sacredness in rocks or springs, but in the mind-soul, the spirit only. The rock and the spring and the body, he said, were screens, that kept the spirit from pure sacredness, true power. I said heyla [the holy] was not like that; it was the rock, it was the water running, it was the person living. If you gave Blue Rock nothing, what could it give you? If you never spoke to it, why should it speak to you? Easy enough to turn from it and say, The sacredness has gone out of it. But it was you that had changed, not the rock; you had broken the relation.

⁷

I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives us a lot of factual information, puts all of our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly-silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.

⁸

It can seem that the only way to accept the arguments against reduction is by adding peculiar extra ingredients like qualia, meanings, intentions, values, reasons, beliefs, and desires to the otherwise magnificently unified mathematical order of the physical universe. But this does not answer to the desire for a general understanding of how things fit together. A genuine alternative to the reductionist program would require an account of how mind and everything that goes with it is inherent in the universe.

⁹

If evolution holds true, and consciousness and intentionality have arisen historically in the evolutionary process, and if (as argued in {3}) these features cannot be explained in terms of matter alone, it follows that the evolutionary process contains non-material elements. If we dislike this conclusion, we can deny the first premise, and argue, with substance dualism, that consciousness and intentionality are eternal, belonging first to an eternal mental Substance, and then implanted in matter by an inscrutable process that has nothing to do with evolutionary development. Or we can deny the second premise, and argue that mind can be, or will one day be, explained in material terms after all. So we can backtrack to Worlds {2} or {3} respectively.

But if we embrace the conclusion, there are several ways forward.

1. The evolutionary process, like everything else, is essentially non-material, or ideal, matter being explained in mental terms. This takes us to {7}, idealism.

2. The evolutionary process is precisely a process whereby the mental qualities and relations emerge from matter: {9}, emergence.

3. 1 and 2 are both true—which may seem a logical contradiction or a creative paradox! Explored in {10}.

4. The most basic things we can describe are not atoms, whether mental or material or neutral, but matter with intelligible shape or form: {8}, hylomorphism.

5. Because our concepts have evolved to understand things in two different ways, from sensation and from introspection, we may never have the concepts to unite matter and mind in a seamless understanding. This is the new mysterianism of Colin McGinn, who argues that within a (for him, desirable) materialist framework, consciousness must be left as a mystery that will always defy understanding.

6. The evolutionary process brings together elements (themselves either neutral or dual) that already have both mental and physical properties, so that there is no discontinuity in the arising of consciousness in complex organisms. This brings us to {6}, this present chapter.

Option 5 can only be overcome by presenting a convincing understanding, so this book will not tarry with it, but proceed by exploring different attempts to understand. Option 6, discussed in what follows, proves to be a mixed philosophical bag, including neutral monism (the ultimate constituents are neither physical nor mental), dual-aspect theory and property or aspect dualism (the ultimate(s) is/are both mental and physical), and panpsychism (something like mind is omnipresent in the universe: a view that overlaps with the preceding views but is not exhausted by them, since panpsychism can mean that everything has only mental properties). These views have in common that they combine some kind of reductionism with some kind of idealism, thus taking mind down to the basic levels of existence.

Despised Antecedents

The complex of views just outlined represents perhaps the World least known outside philosophical discussions. The term panpsychism—let alone its modified forms, such as panprotopsychism and cosmopsychism—is probably unfamiliar outside of such circles; likewise, neutral monism and the aspect and property forms of dualism. When people use the term dualism without qualification, they generally mean the substance dualism of Descartes. But all these views share the familiar idea that all things, down to their basic constituents, contain an element of mind as well as (probably) matter; all things are in some sense psychical as well as physical. These views are therefore reductionist in the sense of understanding the world in terms of its many elements. They contrast with the absolute idealism for which the world consists only of one indivisible Mind. But they are not reductionist in the sense of eliminating the mental, or identifying it with matter. They are in the main dualist in affirming both mind and matter, but as different qualities of one substance, rather than distinct substances. The core argument for them is that they enable us to be naturalistic while doing justice to mind. Mind is given a naturalistic explanation in terms of the mental properties of the stuff it is made of.

Neutral monism looks like the opposite of panpsychism in that it regards ultimate reality as neither mental nor physical, rather than both. But in practice, as we shall see, neutral monism and panpsychism have often been closely allied. Both the terms physical and mental are adjectives, denoting qualities and perhaps relations, and what both philosophies affirm is that ultimate reality, whatever it is, can bear physical and mental qualities and relations. The idea of reality being in itself, qua bearer of qualities, either physical or mental or both or neither, is a strange one, as we shall see.

Panpsychism is not necessarily pantheism, for many modern panpsychists are atheistic. Nevertheless, it has much in common with the early worldview called animism, and like animism is a standpoint that atheists and religious believers alike have often despised as superstitious, spooky, and unworthy of rational consideration, though also worthy of the condemnation and persecution those latter-day animists called witches received. Witchcraft and magic center on the idea that psychic powers inhere in physical things, and the converse idea that the mind can directly affect physical things. Christians (and other monotheists) condemn both animism and witchcraft because animists impute to people and things supernatural powers that monotheists ascribe to God alone. Atheists and naturalists generally condemn them because they believe only science and technology can genuinely understand and unlock the powers of nature. Both early Christians and contemporary atheists condemn witchcraft as irrational and delusory because it attempts the impossible. For reasons that are hard to fathom, the early moderns, including believers and scientists, often condemned it as wicked on the grounds that witches really do harm, implying that magic is actually possible. Perhaps this was because the early scientists themselves, in their experiments with and manipulations of the powers of matter, were sometimes accused of magic, or of stealing powers that belong to God alone, and this made them extra-anxious to distinguish their work from magic. Nonetheless, despite frequent condemnations and attempts to convert animists to a respectable religion, and to use only scientifically verified remedies, animism remains widespread, often surviving under the aegis of one of the advanced religions: under Christianity and Islam in Africa, under Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, and Shintoism in Asia, and in the eclectic mix of scientific, religious, and magical beliefs dubbed New Age in Europe, America, and elsewhere.

It is a considerable achievement of the panpsychist philosophers to have rehabilitated, in philosophical circles, the core idea of animism, albeit under a new name that repudiates its magical and spooky associations. This is the idea that all that we experience consists of, or is the work of, beings who also have experience; that there is (to use a phrase that will become familiar) something it is like to be a squirrel, a nut, or a lawn; and just as we can do things that make a difference to them, they can do things that make a difference to us. A thing is not just third person it to be studied and dissected, but also a second person thou who engages with us, and therefore also a first person I with consciousness and agency.¹⁰

In grammatical terms, animism is the view that things are best described by proper nouns. When I see a tiger, I am not just seeing an example of the tiger kind, but encountering Tiger, the manifestation of a being I need to engage with, and perhaps placate if I want my livestock and my kinsfolk to survive. When William Blake addressed his poem, Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, he captured the spirit of animism, in a way that, as later discussed, many poets do. Likewise, I do not just see an oak, or a phase of the moon, or a bay, but Oak, or Moon, or Sea, in whom a god or spirit, or at least something protopsychic is manifesting.

To us, familiar and perhaps imbued with either a monotheistic or a secular understanding, or both, animism seems irrational. We easily forget that our first encounter with reality outside ourselves is probably with personal thous, such as mother and father, and how often in childhood we have been convinced of the reality of fairies and demons around us, delightful or terrible, enchanting or menacing, until parents and schools have taught us to think otherwise. Arguably animism is not irrational but a primordial rationality, which we learn to modify in various ways; and what we call naïve realism is animism watered down by some materialist presuppositions.

The pre-Socratic philosophers were early naturalists, looking to natural things like earth, air, and fire to explain the world. However, to ascribe ultimate explanatory power not to the official pantheon but to natural things, like water and fire, was inevitably to ascribe a kind of divine power to those material things, resulting in panpsychism. When Thales of Miletus, for example, declared water to be the origin of all things, he was being naturalistic, but not in the modern materialist way. The belief Aristotle attributed to him, that all things are full of gods, was not in tension with his belief in creation out of water, but rather followed from it.

Later philosophers were, on the whole, more ready to abandon this early naturalism than early panpsychism. It is remarkable how many philosophers retained an element of panpsychism, often tending in the direction of absolute idealism rather than dualism or materialism. Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume are the exceptions in this respect. The Stoics with their one logos pervading all things; Plato with his mythology of creation; Aristotle with his entelechy and his ascription of soul (psyché) to all living things; Spinoza with his identification of God and Nature; Leibniz with his infinity of monads, each conscious of the whole, held together in pre-established harmony; the Romantic idealism of Coleridge, Fichte, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, though to James, Pierce, Eddington, and Russell: all of these philosophers could be said to hold a form of panpsychism, or in a few cases, neutral monism. Of course, there is much more to be said: there are huge differences in what each of these would understand by mind or the psychic, and equally huge differences in how pan the psychic is for each of them: how far mind is held to extend beyond the human realm, to the animals, the plants, (seemingly) inanimate things, even perhaps atoms.

There is not space to explore this fascinating history, but I shall touch on Leibniz and Spinoza before discussing the neutral monism of Mach, James, and Russell, and then Nagel and Chalmers, pioneers of a more recent revival of panpsychism.

Naturalistic Theism?—Spinoza versus Leibniz

Spinoza was discussed in {4} for his advocacy of a necessary universe identifiable with God. This advocacy makes Spinoza a special kind of panpsychist. In contrast with his predecessor, Descartes, he believes that the mind and the body are one and the same individual, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension.¹¹ Roger Scruton unpacks this typically austere statement:

Everything that exists—every mode of the divine substance—can be conceived in two incommensurate ways, as physical or mental. In my own case I have an inkling of what this means—for I know that I have both a mind and a body, the first being composed of ideas (where idea is a general term for all mental entities), the second being composed of particles in space. Spinoza’s suggestion is that the relation between mind and body that I perceive in myself is reduplicated through the whole of nature: that everything physical has its mental correlate.¹²

Scruton acknowledges that the idea of physical things having mental correlates is hard to accept, but offers the example of music, which can be described in terms of physical frequencies or in terms of structures, ideas, and feelings.

But what makes Spinoza a pantheist is that he believes, again in contrast with Descartes, that there is only one substance, only one being of which you and I and everything else are modes or attributes. As noted in {4}, this one being is properly called Nature when conceived of physical terms, or God when conceived of in terms of Mind. Arguably this is the only way of reconciling theism (of an unorthodox sort in Jewish or Christian terms) with naturalism, and indeed perhaps with all the tenets of materialism apart from nominalism (since for Spinoza God and the mental realm are certainly as real as we are, real that is, as modes of the divine) and reductionism (for Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura is about as holistic as it is possible to be).

Some argue that Spinoza’s God is nothing more than the necessary, deterministic universe of science given a divine name: Pantheists don’t believe in a supernatural God at all, says Dawkins, but use the word God as a non-supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings. . . . Pantheism is sexed-up atheism.¹³ This is witty but untrue, however, because Spinoza’s God, while indeed not supernatural, has mental as well as material qualities. Spinoza’s God contains many (though not all) of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God, as the omniscient and omnipresent ground of all that is and can be. Pantheism generally enables a great deal of religious language to be recovered and translated into language about the natural world. This is not the case with atheism, at least of Dawkins’s kind.¹⁴ Scruton is closer to the truth in regarding Spinoza’s pantheism as a reconciliation of theism and atheism, saving the core truths of both. Scruton even urges that if religion is to be reconciled with science, it can be only in Spinoza’s way¹⁵; but I hope this book shows there are other ways.

Of course, many traditional theists would complain that in the translation into pantheist terms, too much is lost. There is little room in Spinoza’s system for freedom and individuality, even in God. For such things we must turn to a very different kind of panpsychist, Gottfried Leibniz, who along with Descartes and Spinoza represents the third great rationalist philosopher of the early Enlightenment. Leibniz argued that the world consists not of one substance but of infinitely many monads, which are eternal, indivisible entities, each of them reflecting the entire universe. Human minds are the dominant, but not the only monads constituting the human being. Monads have no spatial or physical properties, but are the foundation of space and time.¹⁶ They are points of view, pure representations. To enable diverse representations to build up into a coherent universe, they are harmonized in the best possible way by the all-benevolent Monad of monads, God. Monads are mental, without any physical aspect: mind is literally everywhere for Leibniz, constituting space, time, and the physical universe.

Leibniz’ theology, like Spinoza’s, is reconcilable with a great deal of naturalism. His God pre-establishes the harmony of the monads, but is not interventionist or miracle-working, so Leibniz tends towards deism rather than supernaturalism. Like Spinoza’s God, his could be described as an ontotheological Deus ex machina, the kind of God of the philosophers against which Blaise Pascal protested (see ?{8}i).

Neutral Monism: Mach, James, and Russell

The stuff of which our world is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them like a common ancestor.¹⁷

Here Bertrand Russell summarizes what has come to be called neutral monism, which for a long while has been viewed as a passing eccentricity of his. More recently philosopher Erik Banks has argued that once Russell moved to the neutral monist position (which Banks prefers to call realistic empiricism), he never abandoned it; that the philosopher-scientist Enrst Mach deserves to be considered, not as the precursor of positivism, as he is often regarded, but as the founder of neutral monism; while linking these two lies arguably the greatest of American philosophers, and the most radical neutral monist, William James. In the wake of Banks’s work, and also that of Nagel, Chalmers, and others (see below), Russellian monism and its close relatives have become major current philosophical options.

Ernst Mach developed his position in vehement opposition to the mechanistic realism of nineteenth-century materialism, which took a realistic, indeed often literalistic view of matter as consisting of atoms connected like cogs in a machine. He argued that the fundamentals for science were observed events, and that the mathematics described not real mechanisms but simply correlations between sensations. It is for this reason that he is often regarded as a positivist, for whom fundamental reality consists in phenomena rather than matter; see {7}. But Mach’s elements were not merely phenomenal and hence mental; rather, they were neutral in themselves, and could be understood in some contexts as mental sensations, in others as physical qualities that had real causal power. The difference between mental and physical resided not in things themselves, but in the contexts in which we think