The Star in the West

200 THE STAR IN THE WEST Utilitarianism , offspring of a distorted and epileptic steam -mania , has bemerded us with its panting slime , and wound us tight in the arachnoid meshes of its kakodemoniacal web , until we stand before ourselves , no longer homo sapiens , but alone , naked and un adorned , a cinder - sprinkled , soot - besmeared , spider legged , homo ridiculissimus ! Periodically as the adepts soar above vulgar ap preciation , and when vulgar understanding has , swine like , trodden their pearls of wisdom back into the mud of its own sty , a great wave of materialism sweeps over the face of the globe . This system of thought , built on the illusive phantasmagoria of the mind , found in the West a master - mind to mould it into shape , in the personality of Democritus of Abdera ; and from the day when that sage materialized the creations of his brain to that of Büchner and the present - day mud - larks , it has formed the stumbling - block to nearly every great thinker , and the veritable pus puriens of the common mind . However , out of the slough grew , as must always happen , a subtle plant ; and in the form of Newton , whose scientific demonstration ofauto - kinetic ism , many ages previously adumbrated by Empedo cles and Democritus , gave the death - blow to that Empiricism , which may be typified in Locke's asser tion that “ motion and figure are really in the manna , to which Berkeley attributed a purely mental exist ence ; for he asserts again and again that the only substantial existence is the hypothetical substratum of mind , i.e. , spirit .' And this , as Huxley himself | All these philosophers end in the same quandary as the old gentleman who with only one tooth in his mouth tried to spike a pickled onion .