Henry Sturt

“ Adopting the Kantian standpoint that we can know nothing but phenomena, Lange maintains that neither materialism nor any other metaphysical system has a valid claim to ultimate truth. For empirical phenomenal knowledge, however, which is all that man can look for, materialism with its exact scientific methods has done most valuable service. Ideal metaphysics, though they fail of the inner truth of things, have a value as the embodiment of high aspirations, in the same way as poetry and religion. ”

“ Still, the idea of the exact measurement of sensation has been a fruitful one, and mainly through his influence on Wundt, Fechner was the father of that “new” psychology of laboratories which investigates human faculties with the aid of exact scientific apparatus. Though he has had a vast influence in this special department, the disciples of his general philosophy are few. His world-conception is highly animistic. He feels the thrill of life everywhere, in plants, earth, stars, the total universe. Man stands midway between the souls of plants and the souls of stars, who are angels. ”

“ And yet it does not answer to the accepted definition of induction, “the process of discovering a general principle by observation of particular instances”: what the detective does is to reconstruct a particular crime; he evolves no general principle. Such reasoning is used by every man in every hour of his life: by it we understand what people are doing around us, and what is the meaning of the sense-impressions which we receive. In the logic of the future it will probably be recognized that scientific induction is only one form of this universal constructive or reconstructive faculty. ”

“ Dühring’s philosophy claims to be emphatically the philosophy of reality. He is passionate in his denunciation of everything which, like mysticism, tries to veil reality. He is almost Lucretian in his anger against religion which would withdraw the secret of the universe from our direct gaze. ”

“ It is no calamity that natural procrastination, or the clamour caused by his candid treatment of atheism and by certain heretical tendencies detected by orthodox criticism in his view of the Trinity, made Cudworth leave the work unfinished.
A much more favourable judgment must be given upon the short Treatise on eternal and immutable Morality, which deserves to be read by those who are interested in the historical development of British moral philosophy. It is an answer to Hobbes’s famous doctrine that moral distinctions are created by the state, an answer from the standpoint of Platonism. ”

“ It is to matter that we must look for the explanation both of conscious and of physical states. But matter is not, in his system, to be understood with the common meaning, but with a deeper sense as the substratum of all conscious and physical existence ”

“ He expressed in an eager, disjointed, but condensed and laboured fashion, certain deep-lying convictions—that philosophy must come back from unsubstantial metaphysics to the solid facts of human nature and natural science, that the human body was no less important than the human spirit (“Der Mensch ist was er isst”) and that Christianity was utterly out of harmony with the age. ”

“ The immense fragment dealing with atheism is all that was published by its author. Cudworth criticizes two main forms of materialistic atheism, the atomic, adopted by Democritus, Epicurus and Hobbes; and the hylozoic, attributed to Strato, which explains everything by the supposition of an inward self-organizing life in matter. Atomic atheism is by far the more important, if only because Hobbes, the great antagonist whom Cudworth always has in view, is supposed to have held it. ”

“ In this materialistic or quasi-materialistic system Dühring finds room for teleology; the end of Nature, he holds, is the production of a race of conscious beings. From his belief in teleology he is not deterred by the enigma of pain; he is a determined optimist. Pain exists to throw pleasure into conscious relief. In ethics Dühring follows Comte in making sympathy the foundation of morality. In political philosophy he teaches an ethical communism, and attacks the Darwinian principle of struggle for existence. ”

“ I long to take nature to my heart, that nature before whose depth the faint-hearted theologian shrinks back; and with nature man, man in his entire quality.” These words are a key to Feuerbach’s development. ”

“ A subordinate matter in the book that attracted much attention at the time is the conception of the “Plastic Medium,” which is a mere revival of Plato’s “World-Soul,” and is meant to explain the existence and laws of nature without referring all to the direct operation of God. ”

“ In economics he is best known by his vindication of the American writer H. C. Carey, who attracts him both by his theory of value, which suggests an ultimate harmony of the interests of capitalist and labourer, and also by his doctrine of “national” political economy, which advocates protection on the ground that the morals and culture of a people are promoted by having its whole system of industry complete within its own borders. ”

“ He saw, what so many of his successors failed to see, that the world as we know it is an expression of power; and he could not imagine whence the power could come if not from a world beyond phenomena. ”

“ His main work, the Geschichte des Materialismus, which is brilliantly written, with wide scientific knowledge and more sympathy with English thought than is usual in Germany, is rather a didactic exposition of principles than a history in the proper sense. ”

“ According to Kant the human mind is such that it can never penetrate by its speculative powers to things-in-themselves, but can only know phenomena. Thus we have the odd position that noümena, or the contents of the intelligible world, are just the things to which thought can never penetrate. ”

“ Treating of God in his various aspects “as a being of the understanding,” “as a moral being or law,” “as love” and so on, Feuerbach shows that in every aspect God corresponds to some feature or need of human nature. “If man is to find contentment in God, he must find himself in God.” In part 2 he discusses the “false or theological essence of religion,” i.e. the view which regards God as having a separate existence over against man. ”

“ It occasioned a long-drawn controversy between Pierre Bayle and Le Clerc, the former maintaining, the latter denying, that the Plastic Medium is really favourable to atheism.
No modern reader can endure to toil through the Intellectual System ”

“ Subsequently recovering, he turned to the study of mind and the relations between body and mind, giving public lectures on the subjects of which his books treat. He died at Leipzig on the 18th of November 1887. Among his works may be mentioned: Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode (1836, 5th ed., 1903) , which has been translated into English ”