A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900

Carlton J. H. Hayes

Chapter III
THE RAPID MECHANIZING OF WORK AND THOUGHT

VI. MECHANISTIC NATURAL SCIENCE

The cosmos, a popularizer of science concluded shortly after 1900, is "simply a machine, so orderly and compact, so simple in construction, that we may reckon its past and gauge something of its future with almost as much certitude as that of a dynamo or a water‑wheel. In its motions there is no uncertainty, no mystery." [6] Such a conclusion seemed to be inescapably drawn from the then known facts of physics and chemistry and quite consonant with the best informed and most prevalent thought about them.

Since the days of Galileo and Newton, scientific knowledge had been piling up and pointing ever more clearly to the material nature and mechanical operation of the whole physical universe. Matter was conceived of, in a common‑sense way, as something substantial and eternal, something that could be accurately weighed and measured, something too which functioned mechanically through an iron interplay of cause and effect. Toward confirming this conception and stimulating the search for still more facts in support of it, the mechanical industrialization of the nineteenth century contributed immensely.

By 1870 the steam engine had already given rise to the physical science of thermodynamics with its epochal twin laws of the conservation and the degradation of energy. By this date, moreover, the kinetic theory of gases was formulated, the wave theory of heat and light established, the atomic theory of the structure of matter capped by Mendeléyev's periodic law, and a new means found in [108/109] spectrum analysis of identifying matter in the heavens with matter on earth.

Along all these lines much confirmatory progress was made during the next thirty years. By help of Mendeléyev's law, for example, new chemical elements were discovered: gallium in 1871, scandium in 1879, germanium in 1886. Helium, also, which by aid of the spectroscope Lockyer had detected in the sun in 1868, was found in 1895 by Ramsay in the earth in the mineral cleveite. Obviously the whole universe was constructed of the same material elements.

Furthermore, it was disclosed in the '80's by the Dutch physicist van't Hoff that the osmotic pressure of chemical solutions conforms with the principles of thermodynamics governing gas pressure, and by Arrhenius, a Swede, that it is likewise connected with the electrical properties of solutions. These disclosures were the cornerstone of a vast superstructure of physical chemistry, in which thermodynamics and electrical science were combined in ever-extending theoretical knowledge and practical industrial applications.

Probably the most novel scientific achievement of the last third of the nineteenth century, theoretical as well as practical, was in the domain of electrical phenomena, and certainly in generalizations about natural science the dynamo supplanted the steam engine as the favorite metaphor. In 1873 appeared Clerk Maxwell's great treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, a classic attempt to make the known facts of electricity fit the then generally accepted pattern of mechanics. It maintained the theory that electricity is matter moving in waves like those of light and radiant heat.

Toward the end of the century two new events of far‑reaching importance occurred in electrical science. One was the promulgation of the electron theory. As far back as 1756 Benjamin Franklin had spoken casually of electrical "particles" and in the 1830's Faraday had based some interesting experiments on an atomic theory of electricity, but the significance of all this was long unperceived. Now, however, Joseph Thomson, working in his celebrated research laboratory at Cambridge on the conduction of electricity through gases, reached the certain conclusion that electricity is [109/110] composed of particles (to which he gave the Newtonian name of "corpuscles") and demonstrated that these were constituent parts of atoms. Simultaneously Hendrik Lorentz, a Dutch physicist, pursuing a different line of research, arrived at much the same conclusion, except that, while Thomson explained electricity in terms of matter, Lorentz expressed matter in terms of electricity and named the particles "electrons"—a name which prevailed over Thomson's "corpuscles." At any rate the converging investigations of these two eminent physicists solved the problem—old as the Greeks—whether different kinds of matter have a common basis. The answer at last was an unqualified "yes."

The other event was the discovery of radio activity. It began with a German physicist, Wilhelm Röntgen, who accidentally stumbled upon X rays in 1895. The next year Henri Becquerel, professor at the Polytechnic in Paris, found radio‑active properties in uranium, and at the turn of the century Pierre Curie and his equally gifted Polish wife managed to extract radium from pitchblende. Knowledge of X rays was immediately serviceable in experiments which confirmed the electron theory and also, most practically, in medicine and surgery.

The edifice of physical science as built up laboriously and continuously throughout three centuries appeared at the end of the nineteenth quite secure and well‑nigh complete. In the future little would remain to be done, it was imagined, beyond measuring physical constants to the increased accuracy represented by another decimal place, investigating a bit more the mechanics of electrons, and resolving some recent doubts about the ether. The electron theory of Lorentz and Thomson assumed that the electrical particles moved within an atom in accordance with Newtonian dynamics and that the atom was like a solar system in miniature, with electrons revolving within it as planets swing around the sun. Further investigation, it was predicted, would prove this assumption—though the next generation of physicists learned with shock that it didn't.

The doubts about ether were already bothersome. Ether had been postulated as an intangible something filling all space, and it was very convenient to nineteenth‑century physicists. It provided [110/111] for a medium through which waves of heat, light, and electricity could undulate, like sea waves through water. It also validated the Newtonian conception of absolute motion, always and everywhere the same, for inasmuch as all stars were moving in the ether their motion could be considered as absolute by reference to it, just as a bird's motion can be referred to the air through which it flies. Unfortunately for the certitudes of physical science, a delicate experiment of two Americans, Michelson and Morley, in 1887 showed that motion through the "ether," and indeed the ether itself, could not be detected empirically. It thus discredited the whole ether hypothesis. Again and again the Michelson‑Morley experiment was repeated in the hope that it might turn out differently. Only the generation of scientists after 1900 could bring themselves to do without "ether," and then Einstein would formulate his new doctrine of relativity.

VII. DETERMINISTIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE

To older and sustained interest in physics and chemistry, the latter part of the nineteenth century added a new and surpassing interest in biology. Just as physical science inspired confidence in its mechanistic and materialistic assumptions by reason of its practical contributions to technology, industry, and material wealth, so biological science, by its promise of promoting human health and happiness and raising up a superior race, obtained a most respectful hearing for its deterministic theories. In a period when, incredible as it may appear, health was even more eagerly sought after than wealth, the novelties of biology naturally attracted more attention than the somewhat staid and prosaic course of physics.

Biological investigation during the period followed two main lines which rarely converged. One was biochemical, physiological and microscopic, leading to a big access of precise knowledge about embryology, cellular structure of living organisms, pathology, and bacteriology. This was the province of such biologists as Pasteur, Virchow, and Koch, whose revolutionary achievements in medical science, particularly in the detection and prevention of germ diseases, have already been sketched.

This line of research carried into problems of heredity. In 1839 [111/112] Theodore Schwann had formulated a "cellular" theory, that all living things originate and grow in very small structural units, or "cells"; and shortly afterwards other physiologists had recognized the existence within these cells of vital material to which was assigned the suggestive name of "protoplasm." Then in the 1870's August Weismann, professor at Freiburg, distinguished between ordinary bodily (or somatic) cells, which die with the individual, and reproductive (or germ) cells, which transmit a continuous stream of protoplasm from generation to generation and are potentially immortal. Weismann reasoned further in the '80's that inasmuch as hereditary characters can be transmitted only through germ cells, all acquired characters, which are variations occurring in somatic cells, cannot be inherited.

At the same time it was well known, at least to practical gardeners and farmers, that new varieties of plants and animals could originate in "sports" and be maintained by cross‑fertilization and selection, and the article on "Horticulture" in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1881) noted the fact: "An inferior variety of pear may suddenly produce a short bearing fruit of superior quality; a beech tree, without obvious cause, a shoot with finely divided foliage; or a camellia an unwontedly fine flower. When removed from the plant and treated as cuttings or grafts, such sports may be perpetuated. Many garden varieties of flowers and fruits have thus originated."

But none then knew outside a corner of Moravia that an Augustinian monk, Gregor Mendel, had discovered the hereditary principle by means of which "sports" could be bred scientifically. Already in the '60's Mendel had conducted in the garden of his cloister a series of ingenious experiments with the crossbreeding of peas and had reached the conclusion that in the germ cells are determinants of particular characters, which, when transmitted, become "dominant" or "recessive" according to fixed mathematical laws. But this pregnant conclusion, which confirmed and refined the deterministic cellular theory of Weismann and likewise explained the phenomena of variation and mutation, was buried away for thirty years in dust-gathering tomes of a local scientific society. Not until its resurrection by De Vries and Bateson at the beginning of the twentieth [112/113] century did Mendelianism come into its own and make of heredity an exact experimental and industrial science.

In the meantime most biologists pursued another and quite different line of investigation, the one opened up by Darwin and leading to emphasis on environment. As we remarked in the first chapter, the distinctively Darwinian doctrine of natural selection attained a great vogue in the early '70's, partly because of its simplicity and seeming applicability to a wide range of human interests, and partly because of its concurrence with a high tide of industrial and military competition. The vogue remained throughout the era and gave continuing direction to a vast deal of inquiry, not only in biology but in psychology and the so‑called social sciences. And the further the inquiry was carried, the more the results verified, or seemed to verify, the Darwinian thesis. Biologists themselves, with the help of anatomists and geologists, accumulated such a mass of confirmatory evidence as to leave no doubt in the mind of any well‑informed person that all life was essentially one and that it had been differentiated into multitudinous species of plants, insects, reptiles, fishes, birds, and mammals by a perfectly natural evolutionary process.

Darwin himself did not regard natural selection as a complete explanation of the evolutionary process. He had buttressed it with Lamarck's hypothesis of the inheritance of acquired characters, and had still recognized its basic shortcoming. It explained why variations survived or failed to survive, but not how the variations actually occurred. Nevertheless his own early interest in a study of heredity which might meet this difficulty and his sympathetic attitude toward the first endeavors of Weismann were largely abandoned by his disciples. These (and Darwin too in his last years) engaged in most unedifying controversy with Weismann over the inheritance of acquired characters, and in total ignorance of Mendel and his work they went gaily on their way, brushing aside the specialists in heredity as though they were mosquitoes, and blithely assuming that natural selection was the proved and adequate cause of evolution and the origin of species.

Before long, of course, almost all biologists came to agree with Weismann in rejecting the inheritance of acquired characters, but [113/114] not so a large number of evolutionary philosophers and sociologists. Herbert Spencer to the end of his days carried on bitter controversy with Weismann, and many others clung stubbornly to what they regarded as the chief prop of Darwinism and the surest pledge of human progress. And the Darwinian school that accepted the Weismann amendment only concentrated the harder on natural selection. By natural selection alone Haeckel in 1898 evolved the whole human race in twenty‑six stages from chunks of carbon through simple structureless bits of protoplasm and on through the chimpanzee and the pithecanthropus erectus. [7] The physicist Helmholtz, under the spell of Darwinism, suggested that all life on earth might have evolved from a few germs brought hither from distant worlds in the interstices of meteoric stones. And Darwinian social scientists imagined even greater marvels.

An essential feature of Darwinism was its idea that external circumstances rigidly determine the nature of living creatures, including man himself; that environment is more significant than heredity; that neither human reason nor human will can act independently of its fateful past conditioning. Natural selection was a blind and brute process, operating under inexorable laws of its own and assuring existence and development only to such forms of life as were adapted to their physical milieu and enabled to survive the fierce and constant struggle waged against them from outside. Francis Galton, it is true, based his special science of eugenics on the supposition that intelligence or the lack of it is an hereditary quality, but his notion of heredity was more in keeping with the reasoning of his cousin Darwin than with the discoveries of Weismann and Mendel.

The vogue of Darwinism synchronized, we must recall, with the ascendancy of mechanical and material conceptions in physics and chemistry, and the one colored the other. To evolving life were applied the principles of the conservation of matter and energy, and this fed the belief that all the various activities of living organisms would presently be disclosed as mere modes of atomic motion and manifestations of mechanical or chemical energy. Already some progress toward this end was being made in physiology. Physical activities of the body were traced to the chemical and thermal energy of the food taken into it. Phenomena of nervous action were found to be accompanied by electrical changes. The variety of idiocy known as cretinism was proved to be due to the failure of the thyroid gland.

Here and there a scientist or philosopher raised his voice in criticism of the prevalent trend, declaring that even if the problems of life were reduced to those of physics and chemistry the concepts of matter and force were but abstractions without ultimate explanation. Ultimates, it was said, could not be arrived at by methods of experimental science, whether physical or biological. [8] But voices of dissent were pretty effectually drowned in the wave of materialistic and deterministic certitude induced by the coalescence of Darwinian biology with physics, and the high‑water mark was reached in 1899 with Haeckel's dogmatic book of revelations, [9] according to which life is but a form of matter and the highest faculties of the human mind but properties of brain cells evolved automatically from unicellular protozoa and thence spontaneously from inorganic compounds. Though direct evidence for this conclusion was unluckily lacking, it was widely accepted on faith, proving that even with scientists, or at any rate pseudo‑scientists, faith may transcend knowledge. And as a hopeful addendum to Haeckel's faith, a publicist could prophesy that "in forty or fifty years" laboratory technicians might be manufacturing from inorganic materials "endless varieties [of life] as readily as they do new chemical varieties of sugar now." [10]

VIII. PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

The rise of "scientific" psychology with its laboratory methods was a conspicuous feature of the era of materialism, a whirling eddy [115/116] in the merging streams of biology and physics. Its spirit, if one may so denote a very material thing, had been neatly prefigured by a German physician before 1871: "Just as a steam engine produces motion, so the intricate organic complex of force‑bearing substances in an animal organism produces a total sum of certain effects which, when bound together in a unity, are called by us mind, soul, thought." [11] But its true foster father was another German physician, Wilhelm Wundt.

While professor at Heidelberg in 1863 Wundt had published some famous preliminary studies on the "human and animal soul." Then in 1874 appeared his Foundations of Physiological Psychology, the first monumental exposition of the physical bases of thought and behavior and of the affinity of human minds to those of the lower animals. Called the next year to the University of Leipzig, Wundt opened there his celebrated psychological laboratory, in which knowledge of human behavior was deduced from experiments on cats and dogs, rabbits and mice, and in which, too, a generation of younger men from all over Europe (and America) were inspired and equipped, when they returned home, to start similar laboratories and to conduct similar experiments.

Laboratory investigation of man's "animal mind" and of consciousness as a phase of physical activity yielded a considerable offspring, and the leading accoucheurs, appropriately enough, were medical men. Thus, an Italian physician, Cesare Lombroso, professor at Turin, won fame by his delivery of the "psychology of criminology." Criminals, it seemed, were born, not made. They were a special type of human animal whom evolutionary processes of degeneration and atavism had endowed with peculiar physical features [12] and necessarily therefore with peculiar behavior; they were not morally responsible for their acts. Subsequently, from quite a different slant, Sigmund Freud was to tackle the whole problem of psychological abnormality, and his fame would outstrip Lombroso's.

Meanwhile, in the early '90's, another physician, the Russian [116/117] Ivan Pavlov, following more closely in Wundt's footsteps, began a notable career by making detailed observation of animals and humans in terms of external physical stimuli and reactions and embodying the results in a system of "conditional reflexes." This, later described as behaviorism, fortified the notion that man's mind, no less than his body, consisted of matter and was governed machine‑like by physical laws.

Also in the early '90's a French student of natural science and medicine, Alfred Binet, undertook in his psychological laboratory at the Sorbonne to construct simple tests for the gauging of intelligence and to correlate the mental differences thus disclosed with physical differences of head measurement and skin sensitivity. Although the search for such a correlation proved remarkably elusive and was eventually abandoned, Binet's work on intelligence tests prepared the ground, after the turn of the century, for a luxuriant crop of educational psychologists, including, as tares among the wheat, no small number of charlatans.

Still another and more "philosophical" product of the age was pragmatism. Its chief spokesman was an American trained in medicine in Germany, William James, who passed in 1875 from the chair of physiology at Harvard to that of psychology. James rebelled against the mechanical and fatalistic presuppositions of his contemporaries and yet distrusted reason and felt scant sympathy for earlier "idealism" or any system of absolutes. He viewed the world we live in as a world of change and chance, variety and variation, chaos and novelty. Every human trait, he held, operates as an instrument in the individual's struggle to live, and each is validated or invalidated by its effects upon the struggle. Such a pragmatic attitude fitted nicely into the mood of the age. It enabled one to scoff politely at logic and orthodox philosophy, and at the same time to entertain the hope that through trial and error and adaptation an irrational and purely material world could continue to progress. There was, of course, no absolute morality; but what "worked" was good and what didn't was bad. The proof of the pudding was in the eating. To a generation which began with Prussia's defeat of France and ended with Britain's triumph over the Boers and witnessed [117/118] in the interval a steady advance of science and technology, the gospel of pragmatism was peculiarly attractive.

IX. POSITIVISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Positivism was likewise attractive. Auguste Comte had died more than a decade before 1870, but his works lived after him. There were so many things in his positivist philosophy to appeal to the ensuing generation. It was like James's pragmatism in that it enshrined evolutionary conceptions, eschewed all ultimate explanations, whether "theological" or "metaphysical," and concentrated upon scientific fact‑finding. Furthermore it exalted social science, that is, sociology, as queen of the sciences, just when industrialism was begetting mass movements and new social problems, and it ascribed to social science the same exact methods and the same fruitful principles as those characterizing physical science; in fact sociology was "social physics." Besides, Comte had imbued his scientific precepts with a rosy coloring of optimism and a faint aroma of benevolence which titillated a generation still distant from the World War. Humanity was to him and to his immediate disciples a mystical as well as a positivist phenomenon, not alone the subject of meticulous research but the object of religious worship, a substitute, as it were, for the Christian God. The highest service which could be rendered to humanity was the "good works" of collecting all possible facts about it and letting them speak for themselves, and this service its high priests, the research professors, would perform to the ever greater glory and progress of mankind.

Probably the number of persons who conned Comte's Positive Philosophy between 1870 and 1900 and fully absorbed it was but a fraction of the host of social scientists who emerged in those years. But consciously or unconsciously almost all of these—sociologists, economists, statisticians, political scientists, historians, anthropologists, archaeologists—were conditioned by the climate of positivism and adapted, as by a process of natural selection, to the pursuit of its method and its goal.

Sociological studies, multiplying after 1871, were of two main kinds. One was the synthesizing of data of history, economics, and politics with data of natural science and physiological psychology [118/119] into generalized statements of the "laws" and "trends" presumably governing the behavior and evolution of human society. This was represented most elaborately by the three volumes of Spencer's Principles of Sociology (1877‑1896), in which the opinionated author treated of society as an evolving organism, of religion as stemming from the worship of ancestral ghosts, and of the struggle for existence as evidenced by a constant natural antagonism between nutrition and reproduction and between the productiveness of industry and the waste of militarism. The other kind was the analysis, through detailed "field" investigation, of the existing status of particular social classes or groups. This was the aim of Le Play's notable studies, over a score of years, of family life in France and elsewhere throughout Europe, and likewise of numerous social surveys of urban centers, especially of their poorer population. The most monumental of these was the inquest into the "life and labor of the people in London," directed and financed by Charles Booth, a British capitalist and philanthropist, and reported in extenso, with maps and charts, by his staff of "experts," first in three volumes (1889‑1891) and later in eighteen (1903).

Sociological viewpoints and methods were increasingly adopted by specialists in allied fields. Historians, for example, concerned themselves less with individual biography and political narrative, and more with social movements, with the evolution of social forces and social institutions. Political scientists, too, were moved to stress the practical rather than the theoretical aspects of government and to deal not so much with its structure as with its historic functioning in and on society at large. Economists also turned from a priori reasoning and the abstractions of the earlier classical school, either, as in Germany, to concrete study of the setting of economic problems in history and national society, or, as in Austria and England, to an appraisement of economic phenomena in terms of mathematical and physical science. Thus, while Gustav Schmoller and Adolf Wagner preached a kind of national socialism from their academic chairs at Berlin, Jevons, the leading English economist, demonstrated at least to his own satisfaction a correlation between commercial crises and sun spots.

A special importance attached after 1870, to statisticians, in part [119/120] because of their indispensability to expanding business corporations and improving governmental censuses, in part because of their helpfulness to sociologists, mathematical economists, and social historians, and in part, also, because of the scientific airs they assumed. They claimed that the statistical method was the "exact" method of social science; nay more, that their method was science itself. As the foremost of them, Georg von Mayr, said: "Statistical science is the systematical statement and explanation of actual events, and of the laws of man's social life that may be deduced from these, on the basis of the quantitative observation of mathematical aggregates."

In emulation of physical and biological science and under the influence of positivism, vast masses of factual data were collected and published about man's present and past occupations and activities, about his social life, about his economic life, about his political life, about his cultural life. Never before had there been such an outpouring of doctoral dissertations, such a profusion of "scientific" monographs, such a proliferation of co‑operative research and publication. Nor had there ever been such implicit faith in the social scientist's ability, by a mere marshaling of reported facts and figures, to discover the true inwardness as well as the whole outwardness of man and of human society.

The most original and reassuring contributions came from anthropologists and archaeologists about man's extraordinarily long history and his gradual ascent from savagery to civilization. A few specimens of what Boucher de Perthes called "ante‑diluvian men" had been unearthed just prior to 1870. Afterwards many more were dug up, together with sufficient geological and archaeological evidence to indicate that they must have lived at a time long antedating Noah and his flood‑riding ark. As excavating went feverishly on, the duration of man's "prehistoric" past rapidly lengthened. In the '80's it certainly reached to a "neolithic age," perhaps to a "palaeolithic age," anywhere from 20,000 to 100,000 years back. In the '90's the discovery of a few strange bones in faraway Java and the reconstruction from them of the singular pithecanthropus erectus pointed to the existence of evolving man half a million years ago and spurred on the search for still earlier creatures, half‑human and [120/121 half‑apish, that must have climbed out of ancestral trees and laboriously learned to make fist hatchets. Simultaneously archaeologists were re-examining the ancient classical foundations of European civilization. Schliemann, that German‑American adventurer in high finance and deep digging, settled in Greece in 1868, and during the next score of years uncovered and identified the site of legendary Troy and unearthed at Mycenae and Tiryns ample proof of a civilization far antedating that of the historic Greeks. By the end of the century, thanks to the efforts of Schliemann and of many other and abler (if less self-advertised) archaeologists, it was possible to trace the history of the Aegean lands, Egypt, and Mesopotamia back several thousand years B.C.

Anthropologists, too, were exceedingly busy. Some, the "physical" group, were indefatigable in measuring skull shapes and other anatomical features of the quick and the dead and utilizing the results to classify the "races" of mankind. True, there were almost as many classifications as there were classifiers. But any such confusion failed to arrest the growing faith that there must be different races in different stages of evolution. By many physical anthropologists, notably by Francis Galton, the conclusion was drawn that an existing race could pull itself up to a higher plane, could transform its men into supermen, through obedience to "laws" of eugenics requiring the physically fit to breed and the physically unfit to practice birth control or be sterilized. In this respect, unfortunately, Galton's “fit” got mixed up about the dictates of "science"; it was they who proceeded to practice birth control.

Other anthropologists, the "cultural" sort, zealously gathered an immense miscellany of data about the speech, customs, crafts, and myths of primitive tribesmen all over the world, collated it with similar data concerning European peoples, and facilely hypothesized the evolutionary stages of man's cultural rise. Tylor published his standard textbook in 1871, and Frazer brought out the Golden Bough in 1890.

Comte had counseled social scientists to stick to "facts" and to refrain from metaphysical explanations. Though the generation after 1870, detested the word "metaphysical" with a horror and [121/122] vehemence worthy of the master, they were too much under the spell of contemporary physics and biology, too much impressed by obvious progress in machine industry, and withal too human, not to perceive in the myriad facts they amassed a co‑ordinating principle of mechanical evolution which was really metaphysical. Actually it was social scientists, more than natural scientists, who implanted this principle in the popular consciousness; and it was the postulates of social scientists, more than their facts, which inspired the most distinctive (and most varied) intellectual movements of the era: agnosticism in religion and realism in art, Marxism and integral nationalism, racialism and pacifism, enlightenment for the masses and quest of the superman.

[Notes]

6 Carl Snyder, The World Machine.

7 This amusing family tree was presented quite seriously by Haeckel to the International Zoological Congress at Cambridge on August 26, 1898.

8 Such caveats were expressed, for example, by the brothers du Bois‑Reymond, Emil in Über die Grenzen des Naturerkennens (1872), and Paul in Über die Grundlagen der Erkenntniss in den exacten Wissenschaften (1890). Cf. Ernst Mach, Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwickelung (1883); R. H. Lotze, Mikrokosmus, 3rd. ed., 3 vols. (1876-1880); A. J. (Earl) Balfour, A Defense of Philosophic Doubt (1879); J S. Haldane, Essays in Philosophical Criticism (1883); J. B. Stallo, The Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics (1888); F. A. Lange, The History of Materialism, 3 vols. (1873‑1875).

9 Die Welträssel, Eng. trans. as The Riddle of the Universe (1900).

10 Carl Snyder, op. cit., p. 440.

11 Ludwig Buchner, Kraft und Stoff, 10th ed. (1869), 147.

12 You could recognize a criminal when you saw him by his "ape‑like agility, rejecting ears, thick head-hair and thin beard, square and protruding chin, large cheek bones, and frequent gesticulation."

SOURCE: Hayes, Carlton J. H. A Generation of Materialism, 1871-1900. New York: Harper & Row, 1963, orig.1941. Chapter 3, sections 6-9, pp. 108-122.

Note: Footnotes have here been converted into endnotes. See also bibliographical essay.

Positivism vs Life Philosophy (Lebensphilosophie) Study Guide

CONTACT Ralph Dumain