publications have reacted on the industrial socialism of our own
time. Meanwhile, philosophic forces to counteract materialism
were weak. Realism was at a low ebb. Idealism was receding
for the moment. Hegelianism had made itself unpopular, and
its confusion of God, nature and man had led to differences
within the school itself (see Hegel).
These causes, scientific, industrial and philosophical, led to the domination of materialism in the middle of the 19th century in Germany, or rather to its revival; for in its main position, that matter and motion are everything and eternal, it was a repetition of the materialism of the 18th century in France. Thus Karl Christoph Vogt (q.v.) repeated the saying of the French physician Cabanis, “The brain is determined to thought as the stomach is to digestion, or the liver to the secretion of bile,” in the form, “Thought stands in the same relation to the brain as the bile to the liver or the urine to the kidneys.” But the new materialism was not mere repetition. J. Moleschott (1822–1893) made a diligent use of the science of his day in his Kreislauf des Lebens (1852). Starting from Lavoisier’s discoveries, he held that life is metabolism, a perpetual circulation Moleschott. of matter from the inorganic to the organic world, and back again, and he urged this metabolism against the hypothesis of vital force. Aristotle had imputed to all living beings a soul, though to plants only in the sense of a vegetative, not a sensitive, activity, and in Moleschott’s time many scientific men still accepted some sort of vital principle, not exactly soul, yet over and above bodily forces in organisms. Moleschott, like Lotze, not only resisted the whole hypothesis of a vital principle, but also, on the basis of Lavoisier’s discovery that respiration is combustion, argued that the heat so produced is the only force developed in the organism, and that matter therefore rules man. He put the whole materialistic view of the world into the following form: Without matter no force, without force no matter. L. Büchner (q.v.) himself said that he owed to Moleschott the first impulse to composing his important Büchner. work Kraft und Stoff (1855), which became a kind of textbook of materialism. Passing from Moleschott to Lyell’s view of the evolution of the earth’s crust and later to Darwin’s theory of natural selection and environment, he reached the general inference that, not God but evolution of matter, is the cause of the order of the world; that life is a combination of matter which in favourable circumstances is spontaneously generated; that there is no vital principle, because all forces, non-vital and vital, are movements; that movement and evolution proceed from life to consciousness; that it is foolish for man to believe that the earth was made for him, in the face of the difficulties he encounters in inhabiting it; that there is no God, no final cause, no immortality, no freedom, no substance of the soul; and that mind, like light or heat, electricity or magnetism, or any other physical fact, is a movement of matter. Sometimes he spoke of mind as an effect of matter; but, though his expressions may be careless, nothing is to be made of the difference, for he called it movement and effect indifferently in the same context. His definitely expressed view was that psychical activity is “nothing but a radiation through the cells of the grey substance of the brain of a motion set up by external stimuli.”
E. Haeckel belongs to a slightly later time than the materialists hitherto mentioned. His book Die Welträthsel (Eng. trans. J. M‘Cabe, The Riddle of the Universe) identifies substance with body. Starting like his predecessors with the indestructibility of matter, Haeckel makes more than Haeckel. they do of the conservation of energy, and merges the persistence of matter and energy in one universal law of substance, which, on the ground that body is subject to eternal transformation, is also the universal law of evolution. His strong point consists in inferring the fact of evolution of some sort from the consideration of the evidence of comparative anatomy, palaeontology and embryology. On the strength of the consilience of arguments for evolution in the organic world, he carries back the process in the whole world, until he comes to a cosmology which recalls the rash hypotheses of the Presocratics.
He supposes that all organisms have developed from the simple cell, and that this has its origin by spontaneous generation, to explain which he propounds the “carbon-theory,” that protoplasm comes from inorganic carbonates. He not only agrees with Laplace and Lyell about the evolution of the solar system, but also supposes that the affinities, pointed out by Lothar Meyer and Mendeleeff, between groups of chemical elements prove an evolution of these elements from a primitive matter (prothyl) consisting of homogeneous atoms. These, however, are not ultimate enough for him; he thinks that everything, ponderable and imponderable or ether, is evolved from a primitive substance, which condenses first into centres of condensation (pyknatoms), and then into masses, which when they exceed the mean consistency become ponderables, and when they fall below it become imponderables. Here he stops; according to him substance is eternal and eternally subject to the law of substance; and God is the eternal force or energy of substance. What, then, is the origin of mind or soul? Haeckel answers that it has no origin, because sensation is an inherent property of all substance. He supposes that aesthesis and tropesis, as rudimentary sensation and will, are the very causes of condensation; that they belong to pyknatoms, to ponderables and imponderables, to chemical atoms and molecules. Hence, when he returns to organisms, it does not surprise us that he assigns to ova and spermatozoa cell-souls, to the impregnated ovum germ-soul, to plants tissue-souls, to animals nerve-souls; or that he regards man’s body and soul as born together in the impregnated ovum, and gradually evolved from the bodies and souls of lower animals. It appears to his imagination that the affinity of two atoms of hydrogen to one of oxygen, the attraction of the spermatozoon to the ovum, and the elective affinity of a pair of lovers are all alike due to sensation and will.
But has Haeckel solved the problems of mind? When he applies sensation and will to nature, and through plants to the lowest animals, he considers their sensation and will to be rudimentary and unconscious. Consciousness, according to his own admission, is not found even in all animals, although it is present not only in the highest vertebrates—men, mammals, birds—but also in ants, spiders, the higher crabs and molluscs. He holds indeed that, in accordance with the law of substance, consciousness must be evolved from unconsciousness with the development of sense organs and a central nervous organ. At the same time he admits, firstly, that to mark the barrier between unconscious and conscious is difficult; secondly, that it is impossible to trace the first beginning of consciousness in the lower animals; and, thirdly, that “however certain we are of the fact of this natural evolution of consciousness, we are, unfortunately, not yet in a position to enter more deeply into the question” (Riddle of the Universe, 191). Thus in presence of the problem which is the crux of materialism, the origin of consciousness, he first propounds a gratuitous hypothesis that everything has mind, and then gives up the origin of conscious mind after all. He is certain, however, that the law of substance somehow proves that conscious soul is a mere function of brain, that soul is a function of all substances, and that God is the force or energy, or soul or spirit, of nature. He, in fact, returns to ancient hylozoism (q.v.), which has tended to revive from time to time in the history of thought. He believes that mind and soul are inherent attributes of all bodies. Curiously enough, he supposes that by making mind a universal attribute of matter he has made his philosophy not materialism, but monism. It is really both: monistic, because it reduces substance to one kind; materialistic, because it identifies that one kind of substance with body or matter, and reduces mind to an attribute of matter. It makes no difference to attribute mind to all matter, so long as it is attributed as an attribute. It is at least as materialistic to say that unconscious mind is an attribute of nature as to say that conscious mind is an attribute of brain; and this is the position of Haeckel. Materialists seem to dread the word “materialism.” Büchner also entreats us “to abandon the word 'materialism,' to which (it is not clear why) a certain scientific odium attaches, and substitute 'monism' for it” (Last Words on Materialism, 273). His reason, however, is different: it is that a philosophy, not of matter as such, but of the unity of force and matter, is not materialism. But if a philosophy makes force an attribute of matter only, as his does, it will recognize nothing but matter possessing force, and will therefore be materialism as well as monism, and in short materialistic monism. The point is that neither Büchner nor Haeckel could on their assumptions recognize any force but force of
