19th Century History
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History
Materialism
Around 1850 Germany saw a revival of materialism, hitherto repressed by the dominance of German Idealism. Atheist materialism found expression in the work, for example, of German medics and physiologists, precursors of the modern neuroscientists.
These thinkers regarded the natural sciences as providing the ideal form of knowledge. Karl Vogt (1817-1895), for example, in his Physiological Letters (1847) stated his belief that thoughts stood in the same relationship to the brain as gall to liver or urine to the kidneys. In a similar spirit, the chemist Jakob Moleschott (1822-1893) claimed that without phosphorus thinking was impossible. Furthermore, Ludwig Buechner (1824-1899) in 1852 claimed that the psychological is determined by the physiological, and Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) in the spirit of d'Holbach dismissed freedom as an illusion.[1]
The revived materialism, however, was met with scepticism about its ability to produce an adequate worldview which did not undercut morality, and which could adequately account for the existence of raw feels and consciousness - in many respects the very issues which continue to afflict contemporary materialism.
References
Histoire de L'atheisme. La Fleche: Fayard, 1998.
Footnotes
[1]↑ Georges Minois, Histoire de L'atheisme (La Fleche: Fayard, 1998), 512.