Monism

Monism enters Martin Eden as both a philosophical doctrine and a live contest over the limits of knowledge. In Kreis and Hamilton’s materialistic version, it is bound to Haeckel and a method that claims to begin from facts; Norton, whom Brissenden also calls a monist, affirms spirit instead. Their clash makes monism less a settled answer than the occasion for a searching dispute over what counts as evidence, what science can establish, and whether ultimate reality is knowable.

Competing Forms of Monism

Brissenden introduces Kreis as a former university professor who has been fired and now makes his living by whatever means are available. His account emphasizes the severity of Kreis’s attachment to monism: among the things he cares about, Brissenden says, it is paramount, and Haeckel is its emblematic authority. Kreis can speak about Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, or Kant, but Brissenden presents his deepest commitment as materialistic monism. The portrait makes the doctrine more than an abstract position; it is the intellectual allegiance by which Kreis is most readily defined.

Brissenden’s descriptions also distinguish Kreis from Norton. He identifies Norton as a monist, but says that Norton affirms nothing except spirit. The gathering therefore does not set monism against every alternative in a simple two-sided scheme. Instead, it places incompatible accounts of reality under the same broad name: Kreis and Hamilton’s Haeckelian materialism on one side, Norton’s idealism on the other. Martin, a devoted reader of Herbert Spencer, arrives as a potential convert to Kreis’s side, but the discussion quickly complicates that expectation.

The Gathering and Its Intellectual World

The debate takes place in Kreis’s rooms, upstairs in a two-story corner building with a saloon and grocery below. The upstairs quarters are crowded: the front room serves as bedroom and living room, a small back room as kitchen and dining room, and washing hangs overhead. Brissenden has brought drink and hopes to get the visitors arguing about monism. As other lodgers gather, Martin encounters a company whose talk ranges across literature, drama, labor conditions, international politics, and local union affairs. Their knowledge includes political dealings and concealed maneuvering that never appears in the newspapers.

The breadth of conversation matters to Martin’s experience of philosophy. In the Morses’ home, he had not heard such a range of subjects discussed with this intensity. Here, the books seem to become active in the people who have read them: philosophical claims draw excitement as keen as drink or anger. Mary joins the discussion, speaks intelligently about literature, and leads Martin into French writing; when she defends Maeterlinck, Martin answers with the thesis he has developed in The Shame of the Sun. The evening thus locates philosophical argument within a wider culture of independent reading and disputation, rather than separating it from the group’s other intellectual interests.

The Argument About Knowledge

Brissenden presents Martin to Kreis as an ardent Spencerian and invites Kreis to make him a Haeckelite. Kreis takes up the challenge, but Norton intervenes, and the discussion becomes a personal contest between Norton and the materialists. The initial exchange turns on idealism, which Martin has not found persuasive before. Norton’s explanation nevertheless strikes him as logically plausible, while Kreis and Hamilton dismiss Norton as a metaphysician and Norton returns the charge.

Their dispute repeatedly concerns the relation between phenomena, or appearances, and noumena, or ultimate reality. Kreis and Hamilton insist on reasoning from facts and assigning names to them; Norton accuses them of moving from words to theory rather than from facts to theory. That accusation targets the very method they take to be their strength. In the exchange, the label of metaphysics becomes a weapon used by both sides, while each claims that the other has mistaken verbal or conceptual operations for sound reasoning.

Norton’s fullest attack proceeds through the materialists’ own premises. Drawing on John Locke’s argument against innate ideas, he contends that a mind begins without innate contents and receives appearances through the senses. On this account, people know only the effects of force and matter as they register in consciousness. Norton then turns that restriction against materialist certainty: if positive science deals only with phenomena, it cannot, by its own definition, establish claims about noumena. He argues that materialists cannot use science to settle the existence of matter or the non-existence of God while also limiting knowledge to appearances.

The debate draws on Berkeley, Kant, Hume, Spencer, and Saleeby as the disputants test one another’s claims. Norton invokes Berkeley’s challenge to the assumption that matter can be known as it exists beyond perception; he also argues that Spencer came close to answering Berkeley without succeeding. Kreis and Hamilton resist Norton’s reasoning, while Norton presses them to accept the implications of their empiricism. The argument remains unfinished when the last ferry to Oakland is due: Brissenden and Martin leave while Norton is still speaking, with Kreis and Hamilton waiting to answer.

Martin’s Response and the Concept’s Role

Martin has listened rather than joined the argument, but the encounter changes the shape of his reading. On the ferry, he tells Brissenden that meeting such people has made life feel worthwhile and that his mind is stirred. He acknowledges that idealism has impressed him, yet does not accept it: he expects to remain a realist and believes Spencer has not been refuted. He also regrets not answering Kreis and Hamilton, or Norton, and resolves to read more, including Saleeby, before taking part in another debate.

Monism therefore functions in this episode as a pressure test for Martin’s confidence in Spencer, not as a doctrine he adopts. The contrast between Kreis’s materialism and Norton’s idealism exposes the distance between naming observable facts and claiming knowledge of what lies beyond them. By staging that dispute among working-class readers whose philosophical commitments are argued with precision and passion, the novel gives Martin an intellectual experience unavailable in the social circle he has previously known. He leaves unsettled, but not converted: the argument deepens his inquiry while preserving his realist allegiance.