The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Battle for the Mind

[ 1 ] There are events in which, as if condensed into a symbol, everything that defines the character of the intellectual life of an era is expressed. One such event for the mid-nineteenth century is the discovery of the planet Neptune in 1846. Nothing was known about such a distant member of the planetary group that revolves around our sun. But the laws governing the movements of the other planets were known. Celestial mechanics calculates these laws of their movements in space from the forces that the celestial bodies exert on each other. Uranus, which until then had been considered the outermost planet in the solar system, did not want to conform to these laws. It moved differently than these laws require. There were now two possible assumptions. Either the laws were wrong, or Uranus had a previously unknown neighbor that exerted forces on it that had not been taken into account. Then the laws are correct, but so far not all the facts to which the laws apply have been taken into account. Confident in the correctness of the laws, the latter assumption was chosen. Le Verrier calculated the orbit that a planet must follow in space to cause the apparent insubordination of Uranus. And Dr. Galle actually found this planet when he pointed his telescope at the place where, according to Le Verrier's calculations, the star should be. Was this not a great triumph of thought over mere observation? There seems to be no more beautiful confirmation of the word with which Goethe characterizes the highest form of knowledge, the “comprehensive”: “Those who are comprehensive, who in a prouder sense could be called creators, behave in the highest sense productively; for by starting from ideas, they already express the unity of the whole; and it is, so to speak, afterwards the task of nature to conform to this idea.” (See Volume 1, p. 70 [95f.]) The significance of the discovery was deeply felt in the circles involved. Alexander von Humboldt writes about it (1850) in his Kosmos: "The merit of successfully working on and publishing a reverse disturbance problem (that of “deriving the elements of the unknown disturbing planet from the given disturbances of a known planet”) and publishing it, and indeed for having prompted Galle's great discovery of Neptune on September 23, 1946, through his bold prediction, belongs to Le Verrier's astute powers of deduction and persevering diligence. It is, as Encke puts it, the most brilliant of all planetary discoveries, because purely theoretical investigations allowed the existence and location of the new planet to be predicted.

[ 2 ] An understanding follower of Hegel could have interpreted this fact in favor of his master. After all, Carl Ludwig Michelet, the editor of Hegel's “Philosophy of Nature,” wrote in his preface to it in 1841: "Will it still be considered a limitation of philosophy that it can only create thoughts, not even a blade of grass? That is, only the general, the lasting, the uniquely valuable, not the individual, the sensual, the transitory? But if the limitation of philosophy consists not only in its inability to create anything individual, but also in its inability to even know how it is done, then the answer is that this “how” is not above knowledge, but rather below it, and therefore cannot be a limitation on it. In the how of this transformation of the idea into reality, knowledge is lost, precisely because nature is the unconscious idea and the blade of grass grows without any knowledge. The true seeing, that of the general, however, remains unlost to philosophy in its own knowledge. ... And now we assert: the most chaste development of thought in speculation will correspond most completely with the results of experience, and the great sense of nature in this, in turn, will reveal nothing more than the embodied ideas in the most undisguised manner. Must reality not come to life in the astronomical world of ideas if a structure determined as necessary from this world of ideas can subsequently be found in experience? In the aforementioned preface, Michelet expressed his views on facts such as the discovery of Neptune five years before it actually took place. However, if no corresponding observation can be found for an idea derived from philosophy, two options remain: either to suppose, as it were, in the empty space, a phenomenon not yet discovered by experience [...]; or to throw the idea back into the crucible of knowledge and bring it up from the fertile shaft of reason to the light of consciousness." Le Verrier posited a phenomenon not yet found in experience. And experience has brilliantly proved him right.

[ 3 ] In the same preface, Michelet also expresses a hope: "Goethe and Hegel are, in my opinion, the two geniuses who are destined to pave the way for speculative physics in the future by preparing the reconciliation of speculation with experience. Namely, it is these Hegelian lectures that will be the first to succeed in gaining recognition in this regard; for since they testify to comprehensive empirical knowledge, Hegel had at his disposal the surest test of his speculations."

[ 4 ] The period that followed did not bring about such a reconciliation. A certain animosity toward Hegel spread to ever wider circles. The mood toward this thinker, which became increasingly widespread in the course of the 1850s, can be accurately characterized by the words used by Friedrich Albert Lange in his “History of Materialism” (1865): “His” — Hegel's — “entire system moves within our thoughts and fantasies about things that are given lofty names, without any reflection on the validity that can be attributed to the phenomena and the concepts derived from them.” "Through Schelling and Fegel, pantheism became the dominant way of thinking in natural philosophy, a worldview which, with a certain mystical depth, also carries within it the danger of fantastical excesses almost as a matter of principle. Instead of strictly separating experience and the sensory world from the ideal and then seeking reconciliation between these areas in human nature, the pantheist accomplishes the reconciliation of spirit and nature through a decree of poetic reason without any critical mediation."

[ 5 ] Although this view of Hegel's thinking corresponds as little as possible to his worldview (cf. my description of it in the first volume), it already dominated numerous minds in the middle of the century and gained ever wider ground. Trendelenburg, a man who held an influential position in German intellectual life as a professor of philosophy in Berlin from 1833 to 1872, was sure to receive great acclaim when he judged Hegel: he wanted to use his method to “teach without learning” because, “believing himself to be in possession of the divine concept, he hinders the laborious research that is certain to lead to its discovery.” Michelet tried in vain to correct this with Hegel's own words, such as these: “Experience is responsible for the development of philosophy. The empirical sciences prepare the content of the particular for inclusion in philosophy. On the other hand, they thereby contain the compulsion for thought itself to proceed to these concrete determinations.”

[ 6 ] Characteristic of the course of worldview development in the middle decades of our century is the statement of an important but unfortunately little-known thinker: K. Ch. Planck. In 1850, he published an outstanding work: “Die Weltalter” (The Ages of the World), in the preface to which he says: "To bring to consciousness both the purely natural lawfulness and conditionality of all being and, in turn, the full self-conscious freedom of the spirit to establish the independent inner law of its being—this dual tendency, which is the distinguishing feature of recent history, also forms the task of the present work in its most pronounced and purest form. The former tendency has been evident since the revival of the sciences in the awakened, independent, and comprehensive study of nature and its liberation from the domination of the purely religious, in the transformation of the entire physical worldview brought about by it, and in the increasingly sober and understanding view of things in general, as finally manifested in its highest form in the philosophical endeavor to understand the laws of nature according to their inner necessity, in all respects; but it also manifests itself practically in the ever more complete development of this immediately present life according to its natural conditions." The growing influence of the natural sciences is expressed in such statements. Confidence in these sciences grew steadily. The belief became prevalent that the means and results of the natural sciences could be used to gain a worldview that did not have the unsatisfactory aspects of Hegel's. Where such an opinion had taken hold, one would have had little luck interpreting the discovery of Neptune in favor of Hegel. However, it would have been all the more welcome if one had undertaken to demonstrate the high level of development that the natural sciences had reached using this example.

[ 7 ] An idea of the change that took place in this direction is given in a book that can be regarded as representative of this period in the fullest sense of the word: Alexander von Humboldt's “Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung” (Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the World). A man at the height of scientific education of his time, he speaks of his confidence in a scientific view of the world: "My confidence is based on the brilliant state of the natural sciences themselves, whose wealth is no longer the abundance, but the interconnection of observations. The general results, which inspire interest in every educated mind, have multiplied wonderfully since the end of the eighteenth century. The facts are less isolated; the gaps between beings are being filled. What remained inexplicable to the inquiring mind for a long time in a narrower field of vision, in our immediate vicinity, is now illuminated by observations made on a journey to the most remote regions. Plant and animal structures that long appeared isolated are now linked together by newly discovered intermediate links or transitional forms. A general chain, not in a simple linear direction, but in a network-like intertwined fabric, according to the higher development or atrophy of certain organs, according to versatile fluctuations in the relative supremacy of the parts, gradually presents itself to the inquiring mind of nature." “The study of general natural history awakens organs in us that have long been dormant. We enter into a more intimate relationship with the outside world.” In “Cosmos,” Humboldt himself leads the description of nature only to the gateway that opens access to a worldview. He does not seek to link the abundance of phenomena through general ideas about nature; he strings things and facts together in a natural way, in accordance with “the entirely objective direction of his disposition.”

[ 8 ] Soon, however, other thinkers intervened in the development of thought, boldly making connections and seeking to penetrate the essence of things from the ground of natural science. What they wanted to bring about was nothing less than a radical transformation of all previous philosophical and theological views of the world and life based on modern science and knowledge of nature. The knowledge of nature in the nineteenth century had paved the way for them in the most powerful way. Feuerbach points out in a radical way what they wanted: “To place God before nature is the same as wanting to place the church before the stones from which it is built, or the architecture, the art that has assembled the stones into a building, before the combination of chemical substances into a stone, in short, before the natural origin and formation of the stone.” Hegel, too, had begun his worldview with the logic he calls God before the creation of the world. But it is not surprising that development took this path. If one wants to erect a building out of stones, these stones must first be available. And the first half of the century created numerous scientific stones for the architecture of a new worldview. Only when these building blocks had taken on firm contours within natural science itself was it possible to begin assembling them into a building.

[ 9 ] When one considers the personalities who participated in the construction of this building in the 1850s, the physiognomies of three men stand out with particular clarity: Ludwig Büchner (born 1824, died 1899), Carl Vogt (1817-1895), and Jacob Moleschott (1822-1893). If one wants to characterize the fundamental sentiment that inspired these three men, one can do so in the words of the latter: “Once man has explored all the properties of matter that are capable of making an impression on his developed senses, he has also grasped the essence of things. In doing so, he attains absolute knowledge, that is, the absolute knowledge of mankind. No other knowledge has any permanence for man.” According to these men, religion and philosophy to date have handed down such impermanent knowledge to mankind. In this regard, Büchner makes no distinction between the religious dogmas of theology and the ideas of idealistic philosophy. He sees these ideas as nothing more than abstract derivatives of revealed truths. According to Büchner and his like-minded colleagues, idealistic philosophers believe they are drawing on reason; in reality, they are merely producing a watered-down, abstract caricature of theological ideas. Thinkers who base their ideas on natural science agree with Feuerbach, who says: “Our philosophers to date are nothing more than mediatized theologians, mediated by abstract concepts.” This does not sound much different from a statement by Hegel on the relationship between religion and philosophy. However, Hegel is wholeheartedly in favor of a friendship between the two; but these minds of the 1950s want to emancipate worldview from religion. Hegel believes: "Religion is the way of consciousness, as truth is for all people, for people of all education; but scientific knowledge of truth is a special kind of consciousness, which not everyone, but only a few, undergo. The content is the same, but just as Homer says of some things that they have two names, one in the language of the gods and the other in the language of ordinary people, so there are two languages for that content." He believes that religion speaks the language of feelings, while philosophy speaks the language of ideas. Feuerbach, and with him Büchner and his like-minded comrades, have the answer: "Religion is the dream of the human spirit. But even in dreams we are not in nothingness or in heaven, but on earth—in the realm of reality, only that we see real things not in the light of reality and necessity, but in the delightful glow of imagination and arbitrariness. I therefore do nothing more to religion—including speculative philosophy and theology—than open its eyes, or rather turn its inward-looking eyes outward, i.e., I merely transform the object in the imagination or imagination into the object in reality." These personalities made so little distinction between religion and the idealistic worldview in this regard that Moleschott believed he was condemning not only the former but also the latter, which he did not even mention: “Research excludes revelation. Revelation and knowledge behave like poetry and truth; the former guesses where the latter probes.” “But truth can only be gleaned from nature and its workings.” In their time and the following period, those who fought for such a worldview gleaned from nature were collectively referred to as materialists. And it has been emphasized that their materialism is an ancient worldview, which outstanding minds have long recognized as unsatisfactory for higher thinking. Büchner has already opposed such a view. He emphasizes: "Firstly, materialism or the whole direction has never been refuted, and it is not only the oldest philosophical view of the world that exists, but it has also reappeared with renewed vigor with every revival of philosophy in history; and secondly, today's materialism is no longer that of Epicurus or the encyclopedists, but a completely different direction or method, supported by the achievements of the positive sciences, which differs very significantly from that of its predecessors in that it is no longer, like former materialism, system, but a simple realistic-philosophical view of existence, which above all seeks the uniform principles in the world of nature and spirit and strives everywhere to demonstrate a natural and lawful connection between all the phenomena of that world."

[ 10 ] One can now show, based on the behavior of a mind that strove in the most eminent sense for natural thinking, Goethe's, one of the most outstanding materialists of the French - the encyclopedists of the previous century - Holbach, how this older materialism differs from the newer one. Paul Heinrich Dietrich von Holbach (born 1723) published his “Systeme de la nature” in 1770. Goethe, who came across the book in Strasbourg, describes in “Poetry and Truth” the repulsive impression it made on him: "Matter was supposed to be eternal, and moved from eternity, and was now supposed to produce, with this movement, right and left and in all directions, without further ado, the infinite phenomena of existence. We would even have been satisfied with all this if the author had really constructed the world before our eyes from his moving matter. But he knew as little about nature as we did; for, having nailed down a few general concepts, he immediately abandons them in order to transform that which is higher than nature, or that which appears as higher nature in nature, into material, heavy, moving, but directionless and formless nature, and believes that he has thereby gained a great deal." Goethe was already convinced at that time: “Theory in and of itself is of no use unless it makes us believe in the connection between phenomena.” (“Proverbs in Prose.” German National Literature, Goethe's Works, Vol. 36, 2. $. 357). And at the end of the previous century, natural science had not yet progressed to the point where a mind like Holbach's could have used his theories to establish a connection between empirical facts. Instead of such facts, men like Goethe were therefore referred to empty assertions when they wanted to ask what ideas are called upon to hold together.

[ 11 ] The scientific findings of the first half of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, were suitable as facts to provide the materialists of the 1850s with a basis for their worldview. It was only possible to seek in matter the essence that explains the phenomena of the world at a time when the properties of matter were known to a certain degree.

[ 12 ] An example of the advance toward the essence of matter, the substance spread throughout nature, is the artificial production of urea by Wöhler in 1828. This discovery provided proof that simple substances can combine under certain conditions through their own inherent forces to form higher structures, the formation of which had previously only been observed under the living influence of the organic body. It was now necessary to say: Not only does organic life have the power to combine nitrogen, hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen in such a way that they become urea, but these substances themselves have the powers that unite them into a higher structure. There was no longer any need for a special mystical life force residing in the organism and transforming the inorganic into the organic; the inorganic substances themselves could be credited with the ability to combine into an organic entity. This paved the way for a change in thinking. It was no longer necessary to say that the more perfect, the organic, only uses inorganic elements to process them into higher entities; it was possible to say that the imperfect, the inorganic, has the ability to develop into something higher. What could one hope for from matter, which was considered dead and had no other ability than to move back and forth in space? How different the situation was when one saw the fact that supposedly dead matter combines to form things that one had previously only seen arise under the influence of already existing life?

[ 13 ] That was the difference between the matter Holbach spoke of and that which the materialists of the 1750s had in mind. Holbach's matter was a barren, empty, dead concept from which no mind could extract the rich phenomena of nature. Through the discoveries made after him, matter began to take on a life of its own. Büchner no longer needed to speak of dead, merely moving matter; he could speak of matter whose power chemists and physiologists could observe in the laboratory. When Holbach spoke of matter, he was referring to a concept; Büchner was referring to something that actually existed and had shown, in certain cases, what it was capable of producing from itself. One first had to reveal the possibilities of creation that lie dormant in material existence if one wanted to trace higher things back to this material existence. Dead lumps of matter that move back and forth can only clump together again to form dead aggregates; but people learned to understand that they were not dealing with such dead lumps at all, but that what appeared to be dead could produce something higher from itself and through itself.

[ 14 ] The materialists were influenced by such insights. Before their eyes, higher things arose from lower ones. They developed the belief that it was not appropriate for human thinking to assume, as theologians did, that higher powers brought the entities of the world into being through their power, when one could see that the lower, the simple, had the power to produce the higher from itself. How obvious it was to say: if the inorganic produces organic substances from itself, why should it not also have the ability to produce organisms from itself? And since the spirit, the human soul, appears only as an expression of life in organic beings, why should substances with their powers not also be able to give birth to the spirit from themselves? Why should the spirit come from heavenly powers?

[ 15 ] Around the middle of the century, it took only a bold thinker to draw such conclusions. People thought only in terms of how certain facts had to be interpreted, and they came to attribute to matter in this world the powers that had previously been attributed to otherworldly forces. For materialists, matter with its properties became the source from which all things and processes were generated. It was not far from the fact that carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen combine to form an organic compound to Büchner's assertion: “The words soul, spirit, thought, sensation, will, life do not denote entities, real things, but only properties, abilities, actions of living substance or results of entities that are grounded in material forms of existence.” No longer a divine being, no longer the human soul, but matter with its power was what Büchner called immortal. And Moleschott expresses the same conviction in these words: “Power is not a repulsive god, not an essence of things separate from their material basis; it is an inseparable property of matter, inherent in it from eternity.” "Carbon dioxide, water, and oxygen are the forces that break down even the hardest rock and carry it into the river, whose flow generates life. “ ”The change of substance and form in the individual parts, while the basic structure remains the same, is the secret of animal life."

[ 16 ] The scientific research of the first half of the century gave Ludwig Büchner the opportunity to express views such as these: “In the same way that the steam engine produces motion, the intricate organic complexity of powerful substances in the animal body generates a total sum of certain effects which, when combined into a unity, we call spirit, soul, and thought.” Karl Gustav Reuschle rightly explains in his substantial book "Philosophy and Natural Science. In Memory of David Friedrich Strauss" (1874) that the findings of natural science themselves contained a philosophical element. The relationships discovered between the forces of nature led to the secrets of material existence.

[ 17 ] Oersted discovered such an important relationship in Copenhagen in 1819. He discovered that the magnetic needle is deflected by electric current. In 1831, Faraday discovered the counterpart to this, namely that electricity can be generated by bringing a magnet close to a spiral-wound copper wire. Electricity and magnetism were thus recognized as related natural phenomena. The two forces were no longer seen as isolated entities; it was pointed out that they had something in common in their material existence. Julius Robert Mayer gained a deep insight into the nature of matter and force in the 1840s when he realized that there was a very specific relationship between mechanical work and heat that could be expressed as a number. Heat is generated by pressure, impact, friction, etc., i.e., from work. In the steam engine, heat is converted back into work. The amount of heat generated from work can be calculated from the amount of work done. If the amount of heat required to heat one kilogram of water by one degree is converted into work, this work can be used to lift 424 kilograms one meter. It is not surprising that such facts were seen as tremendous progress against explanations of matter such as those given by Hegel: “The transition from ideality to reality, from abstraction to concrete existence, here from space and time to reality, which appears as matter, is incomprehensible to the mind and therefore always appears to it as something external and given.”

[ 18 ] Such discoveries about the uniform character of inorganic natural forces were joined by others that shed light on the composition of the organic world. In 1838, the botanist Schleiden recognized the importance of the simple cell for the plant body. He showed how all plant tissues, and therefore the plant itself, are built up from these “elementary organisms.” Schleiden recognized this “elementary organism” as a globule of liquid plant mucus surrounded by a shell (cell membrane) and containing a firmer cell nucleus. These cells multiply and attach themselves to each other in such a way that they build up plant organisms. Soon after, Schwann discovered the same thing for the animal world. In 1827, the brilliant Carl Ernst Baer discovered the human egg. He also traced the processes of development of higher animals and humans from the egg.

[ 19 ] Thus, everywhere people had moved away from seeking the ideas underlying natural phenomena. Instead, they observed the facts that show how higher, more complex natural processes and natural beings are built up from simple and lower ones. Men who sought an idealistic interpretation of world phenomena became increasingly rare. It was still the spirit of idealistic worldview that led the anthropologist Burdach in 1837 to the view that life did not have its basis in matter, but rather that it transformed matter through a higher power as it needed it. Moleschott was already able to say: “The life force, like life itself, is nothing more than the result of the complex interaction and interlocking of physical and chemical forces.”

[ 20 ] After the great impact of the radical views of Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott gave way to other trends of the time, many circles involved in discussions about worldview issues became accustomed to shrugging off these men and moving on to the agenda. Moleschott and Vogt had to be accepted as specialists in the field of natural science in the period that followed; on the other hand, one could not do enough to reject Ludwig Büchner's “popular talk.” His book Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter), which from 1855 onwards was long regarded as the “gospel of materialism,” was later seen as the typical expression of a philosophically crude, dilettantish worldview. Such an assessment does not do justice to the historical position of the three men. It should be borne in mind that they were fighting for nothing other than an ideal that Schiller had once observed in Goethe and described in a letter to him with the words: “From the simplest organization, you ascend, step by step, to the more complex, in order to finally construct the most complex of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire natural structure” (Schiller's letter to Goethe dated August 23, 1794). These materialists wanted nothing more than to construct the most complex phenomenon of nature, the human being, with his physical and mental expressions, from the simplest forces of nature, the materials of the entire natural structure. And to explain this, they wanted to rely on nothing other than the facts that unfold before the human senses.

[ 21 ] The awareness of time urged them to explain the universe through no other phenomena than those that unfold before human eyes. Charles Lyell's work “Principles of Geology,” published in 1830, had overturned the entire old geology with this principle of explanation. Until Lyell's epoch-making act, it was believed that the development of the earth had taken place in leaps and bounds. Repeatedly, everything that had come into being on Earth was said to have been destroyed by total catastrophes, and a new creation was said to have arisen from the graves of past beings. This was used to explain the presence of plant and animal remains in the Earth's strata. Cuvier was the main proponent of such repeated epochs of creation, such supernatural interventions in the life of the Earth. Lyell showed that there is no need for such an interruption in the steady course of Earth's development. If one assumes sufficiently long periods of time, then the forces that are still active on Earth today could have brought about this entire development. In Germany, Goethe and Karl von Hoff had already professed such a view earlier. The latter represented it in his “History of the Natural Changes of the Earth's Surface Proven by Tradition,” published in 1822.

[ 22 ] With all the boldness of enthusiasts of the idea, Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott set out to explain all phenomena from material processes as they unfold before the human senses. It is admirable how they overcame all the preconceived notions that centuries of tradition had planted in the human soul about “raw matter.” They did not only have to appeal to the intellect and reason; they had to revolutionize the world of feelings. Under the influence of Christianity, a concept of matter arose that has been rightly described as a “horror story.” Matter was considered the raw, even evil principle that was only an obstacle to the nobler, spiritual nature of man. The spirit had to triumph over this principle if it wanted to achieve its goal. And the materialists took the courage to derive this spirit from matter itself. They did so as true, genuine idealists, as bold fighters.

[ 23 ] The struggle that materialism had to wage found significant expression when the Göttingen physiologists Rudolf Wagner and Carl Vogt faced each other. In 1852, Wagner argued in the Allgemeine Zeitung for an independent soul, contrary to the view of materialism. He spoke of “the soul being able to divide itself, since the child inherits much from the father and much from the mother.” Vogt initially responded in his Bilder aus dem Tierleben (Pictures from Animal Life). Vogt's position in the dispute can be seen in the following sentence from his response: "The soul, which is supposed to be the epitome, the essence of individuality, of the individual, indivisible being, the soul should be able to divide itself! Theologians, take this heretic as your prey – he was one of yours until now! Divided souls! If the soul can divide itself in the act of procreation, as Mr. R. Wagner believes, then it could perhaps also divide itself in death, with the sin-laden portion going to purgatory while the other goes directly to paradise. At the end of his physiological letters, Mr. Wagner also promises digressions into the field of the physiology of divided souls." The battle became fierce when Wagner gave a lecture on “Human Creation and Soul Substance” against materialism at the Natural Scientists' Assembly in Göttingen in 1854. He wanted to prove two things. First, that the findings of modern science do not contradict the biblical belief in the descent of the human race from one couple; Second, that these findings do not determine anything about the soul, thus leaving theological teachings about it untouched. In 1855, Vogt wrote a polemic against Wagner entitled “Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft” (Köhler's Faith and Science), which on the one hand shows him at the height of scientific insight of his time, but on the other hand also as a sharp thinker who unreservedly exposes his opponent's conclusions as illusions. His objection to Wagner's first assertion culminates in the sentences: “All historical and natural history research provides positive proof of the diverse origins of the human races. The teachings of Scripture about Adam and Noah and the twofold descent of humans from one couple are scientifically untenable fairy tales.” And Vogt objected to Wagner's doctrine of the soul: We see the soul activities of humans gradually developing with the development of the physical organs. We see mental activities becoming more perfect from childhood to maturity; we see that with every shrinkage of the senses and the brain, the “spirit” also shrinks accordingly. “Such a development is incompatible with the assumption of an immortal soul substance implanted in the brain as an organ.” The dispute between Vogt and Wagner shows with perfect clarity that the materialists had to combat not only intellectual arguments but also emotions in their opponents. In his Göttingen lecture, Wagner appealed to the moral need that cannot tolerate “mechanical devices running around on two arms and legs” ultimately dissolving into indifferent matter without the hope that the good they do will be rewarded and their evil punished. Vogt replies: "The existence of an immortal soul is not the result of research or reflection for Mr. Wagner; it is the necessary prop for the entire edifice of vengeance that this zealot has erected. He needs an immortal soul in order to be able to torment and punish it after the death of man; - he needs such an object on which the hatred that his religion carries within itself can feed; - he must have such a soul so that he can promise those who, with him in history, find nonsense and, in the present moral world order, find the nonsensical against him, a compensation or solution in a supposed afterlife; - that is the crux of the matter!"

[ 24 ] Anyone who wants to do justice to the materialists must not ignore the transformation they brought about in public consciousness in the second half of the nineteenth century. Fifty years ago, this public consciousness naturally held a fairy-tale conception of the historical development of the human race. The first human couple was a concept that was taken for granted. History was said to have begun with this first human couple. But this history itself was only a minor episode in the life of humanity. The main thing was seen beyond this history. This was at most a preparatory stage for a life in a completely different setting. For this setting, the laws of nature on earth had no validity. A moral world order applied to it. People lived their earthly lives with this moral world order in mind. The soul is taken out of this moral order and temporarily bound to material existence.

[ 25 ] In the second half of the century, interest in the natural order of the universe prevailed over interest in a supernatural one in wide circles. Natural history facts replaced mythological events. Instead of the biblical story of creation, people followed the geological development of the earth and its creatures. They became increasingly aware of the dependence of spiritual life on the organism. People began to take an interest in the natural, earthly conditions of their existence.

[ 26 ] For the most part, we have the materialists to thank for all this, who pointed out in a radical way the material conditions of all existence. The cautious natural scientist, who always thinks only about what his science does not yet allow him to remove from outdated dogmas, cannot bring about such a change in public consciousness. This required strong language, such as that found by Moleschott, for example, when he said: "Man is the sum of his parents and nurse, of place and time, of air and weather, of sound and light, of food and clothing. His will is the necessary consequence of all these causes, bound to a law of nature that we know from its appearance, like the planet to its orbit, like the plant to the soil. We are a plaything of every pressure of the air."

[ 27 ] And Heinrich Czolbe (1819-1873) showed that there is a point of view from which even the moral world order can agree with the materialistic view. In his 1865 work “The Limits and Origin of Human Knowledge in Contrast to Kant and Hegel,” he argues that all theology arises from dissatisfaction with this world. “The exclusion of the supernatural or everything incomprehensible that leads to the assumption of a second world, in a word, to naturalism, is by no means necessitated by the power of scientific facts, nor initially by philosophy, which seeks to comprehend everything: but rather, at its deepest level, by morality, namely the moral behavior of humans toward the world order, which can be called contentment with the natural world.” Czolbe sees the desire for a supernatural world as nothing less than an expression of ingratitude toward the natural world. For him, the foundations of religion and the philosophy of the afterlife are moral errors, sins against the spirit of the natural world order. For they lead away from “the pursuit of the greatest possible happiness for each individual” and the fulfillment of duty that follows from such a pursuit “towards ourselves and others without regard for supernatural reward and punishment.” In his view, man should be filled with “grateful acceptance of the earthly happiness that falls to him, however small, together with the humility that lies in contentment with the natural world, with its limitations and its necessary suffering.” Here we encounter a rejection of the supernatural moral world order—for moral reasons.

[ 28 ] Czolbe's worldview also clearly shows what qualities make materialism so acceptable to human thinking. For it is undoubtedly true that Büchner, Vogt, and Moleschott were not philosophers enough to logically clarify the foundations of their views. They were influenced by the power of scientific facts. Without venturing into the heights of an idealistic way of thinking, as Goethe used to express it, they drew conclusions from what the senses perceive, more as natural thinkers than anything else. It was not their business to give an account of their methods based on the nature of human cognition. Czolbe did that. In his “New Presentation of Sensualism” (1855), we find reasons given as to why he considers only knowledge based on sensory perceptions to be valuable. Only such knowledge provides clearly imaginable and vivid concepts, judgments, and conclusions. Any conclusion about something unimaginable, as well as any vague concept, must be rejected. According to Czolbe, it is not the spiritual as such that is vividly clear, but the material, in which the spiritual appears as a property. That is why, in his 1856 work “Die Entstehung des Selbstbewusstseins, eine Antwort an Herrn Professor Lotze” (The Origin of Self-Consciousness, a Response to Professor Lotze), he attempts to trace self-consciousness back to material, vivid processes. He assumes a circular movement of the parts of the brain. Through such a movement returning to itself, an impression that a thing makes on the senses becomes a conscious sensation. It is curious that this physical explanation of consciousness caused Czolbe to abandon his materialism. This reveals one of the weaknesses that easily attach themselves to materialism. If he remained true to his principles, he would never go beyond the facts explored by the senses in his explanations. It would not speak of any processes in the brain other than those that can actually be determined by scientific means. What it sets out to do is therefore an infinitely distant goal. Minds like Czolbe's are not satisfied with what has been researched; they hypothetically assume facts that have not yet been researched. One such fact is the aforementioned circular movement of the parts of the brain. A complete investigation of the brain will certainly reveal processes within it that occur nowhere else in the world. It will follow from this that the mental processes based on brain processes also occur only in the brain. Czolbe could not claim that his hypothetical circular movement was limited to the brain. It could also occur outside the animal organism. But then it would also have to entail mental phenomena in inanimate things. Czolbe, who insists on vivid clarity, does not in fact rule out the possibility of the whole of nature being animated. “Should,” he says, "my view not be a realization of the world soul already defended by Plato in his Timaeus? Shouldn't this be the point of union between Leibniz's idealism, which held that the entire world consisted of animated beings (monads), and modern naturalism?"

[ 29 ] The error that Czolbe made with his brain circuit movement occurs to an even greater extent in the work of the brilliant Carl Christian Planck (1819-1880). This man's writings have been completely forgotten, even though they are among the most interesting that philosophy has produced. Just as vigorously as materialism, Planck strove for an explanation of the world based on reality. He, too, rejects religious ideas because they link their interest to a moral world order. He criticizes the German idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel for seeking the essence of things one-sidedly in ideas. For Planck, as for Vogt and Büchner, the spirit with its ideas belongs to nature. He sees it as the greatest shortcoming of the idealistic worldview that it wanted to give something with its ideas that is absolute and unconditional, like the God of the religious worldview. The world of things should not be explained by some such revealed or imagined absolute being, but only finite, mutually conditioning forces and entities of nature itself should be used to explain phenomena. “To explain things truly independently of themselves means to recognize them in their original conditionality and finiteness.” (See Planck: “Die Weltalter” [The Ages of the World], p. 103) “There is only one true pure nature, so that mere nature in the narrower sense and spirit are only opposites within the one nature in the higher and comprehensive sense” (ibid. p. 101). Now, however, something strange happens with Planck: he declares the real, the extended, to be that which the explanation of the world must seek, and yet he does not approach sensory experience, the observation of facts, in order to arrive at the real, the extended. For he believes that human reason can penetrate to the real by itself. Hegel made the mistake of letting reason contemplate itself, so that it saw itself in all things; he did not want reason to remain within itself, but to lead it beyond itself to the extended, as the truly real. Planck criticizes Hegel for allowing reason to spin its own web, but he himself is bold enough to allow reason to spin objective existence. Hegel said that the mind can comprehend the essence of things because reason is the essence of things and reason comes into existence in the human mind. Planck explains: the essence of things is not reason; nevertheless, he uses only reason to represent this essence. A bold construction of the world, ingeniously conceived, but conceived far from real observation, far from real things, and yet designed in the belief that it is completely imbued with the most genuine reality—that is Planck's edifice of ideas. He sees world events as a living interplay of expansion and contraction. For him, gravity is the striving of bodies spread out in space to contract. Heat and light are the striving of a body to bring its contracted matter into effect at a distance, i.e., the striving for expansion.

[ 30 ] Planck's relationship with his contemporaries is a highly interesting one. Feuerbach says of himself: “Hegel stands on a standpoint that constructs the world, I on a standpoint that wants to recognize the world as being; he descends, I ascend. Hegel turns man upside down, I set him on his feet, which rest on geology.” The materialists could also have characterized their creed in this way. Planck, however, proceeds in exactly the same way as Hegel. Nevertheless, he believes he is proceeding in the same way as Feuerbach and the materialists. But if they had interpreted his approach in their own terms, they would have had to say to him: You stand on a standpoint that constructs the world; yet you believe you recognize it as existing; you descend, and consider the descent to be an ascent; you turn the world upside down and believe that the head is the foot." The urge for natural, actual reality in the third quarter of the nineteenth century could hardly have been expressed more sharply than through the worldview of a man who wanted to conjure up not only ideas but reality from reason. Planck's personality is no less interesting when compared to that of his contemporary Max Stirner. In this regard, it is worth considering how Planck thought about the motives of human action and community life. Just as the materialists took the substances and forces actually given to the senses as the basis for explaining nature, so Stirner took the real individual personality as the guiding principle of human behavior. Reason is only found in the individual. What it determines as the guiding principle of action can therefore only apply to the individual. Coexistence will arise naturally from the natural interaction of individual personalities. If everyone acts according to their reason, the most desirable state will arise through the free interaction of all. Natural coexistence arises of its own accord when everyone exercises reason in their individuality, in Stirner's view, just as, according to the materialists, the natural view of world phenomena arises when one allows things to express their essence themselves and limits the activity of reason to merely connecting and interpreting the statements of the senses accordingly. Just as Planck does not explain the world by letting things speak for themselves, but by using his reason to decide what they supposedly say, so too, with regard to community life, he does not rely on a real interaction of personalities, but dreams of a union of peoples governed by reason and serving the common good, with a supreme legal authority. Here, too, he considers it possible that reason can master what lies beyond personality. “The original general law necessarily demands its external existence in a general legal authority; for it would not really exist as a general law in an external way if it were left to the individual alone to implement it, since the individual, according to his legal position, is only the representative of his own right, not of the general right as such.” Planck constructs a general legal authority because this is the only way in which the idea of law can truly be realized. Five years earlier, Max Stirner wrote: “Owner and creator of my own right—I recognize no other source of law than myself, neither God, nor the state, nor nature, nor even man himself with his ‘eternal human rights,’ neither divine nor human law.” He believes that the real right of the individual cannot exist within a general right. It is a thirst for reality that drives Stirner to reject an unreal general right; but it is also a thirst for reality that drives Planck to strive to construct a real legal state out of an idea.

[ 31 ] Like Planck, whose writings are deeply unsettling, one senses from his writings that the belief in two interacting world orders, one natural and one purely spiritual, unnatural, is unbearable. Rudolf Wagner is the typical representative of such a belief. He cannot imagine that human actions are subject to the same laws as the processes of nature. On the one hand, he sees the laws of nature operating according to eternal, ironclad necessity; on the other hand, a power that follows its own laws intervenes in the natural course of the world order. To wrest this power from its domain was the common goal of idealists such as Planck and materialists such as Vogt, Büchner, and Moleschott. But at that time, this power still played a major role in the development of worldviews. Quite apart from the moral world order, the followers of the two world powers could claim the realm of organic life on earth for themselves. For objective thinking, the discoveries in the field of organic life seemed to speak for themselves. If organic substances can develop from inorganic processes, why should the elementary organism described by Schleiden and Schwann not also develop from such inorganic processes under certain conditions? But it was still a long way from this primitive organism to the diversity of animal and plant forms. This diversity seemed to clearly express something that does not prevail in inorganic nature. Something seems to be at work in living beings that is just as purposeful as human reason in its actions. In the unborn living being, lungs, sensory and motor organs are formed that can only fulfill their full function upon entering the world; in the child, the reproductive organs are formed that only become effective at a later stage of life. Does it not seem as if a rational guidance in the present is preparing for the future? Does not a rational world government seem to realize a purpose in every living being, according to which it forms its organs, just as man designs his machines for future purposes? And does not the purposefulness seem to be unique to each form of life, only transplanted into it? It is not easy for the mind to overcome Linnaeus's idea that there are as many species of plants and animals as the Creator originally formed.

[ 32 ] Now, there have been thinkers in earlier times who were not satisfied with this way of thinking. Apart from more or less clear attempts by others, Lamarck, in 1809, developed a picture of the origin and development of living beings which, according to the state of knowledge at the time, should have been very attractive to a contemporary worldview. He imagined that the simplest living beings arose through inorganic processes under certain conditions. Once a living being has been formed in this way, it develops new structures that serve its life by adapting to the given conditions of the outside world. It grows new organs because it needs them. The beings can thus transform themselves and also perfect themselves in this transformation. Lamarck imagines this transformation as follows. There is an animal that depends on obtaining its food from tall trees. To do this, it must stretch its neck. Over time, the neck lengthens under the influence of this need. A short-necked animal evolves into a giraffe with a long neck. Living beings did not arise in diversity, but rather this diversity developed naturally over time as a result of circumstances. Lamarck believed that humans were included in this development. Over time, they evolved from ape-like animals similar to themselves into forms that allowed them to satisfy higher physical and mental needs. Up to the level of humans, Lamarck had thus linked the entire world of organisms to the realm of the inorganic.

[ 33 ] Lamarck's attempt to explain the diversity of life was ahead of its time. This was most clearly demonstrated by the dispute that broke out two decades later in the French Academy between Geoffroy St. Hilaire and Cuvier. Geoffroy St. Hilaire believed that, despite their diversity, the abundance of animal organisms revealed a common blueprint. Such a blueprint was a prerequisite for explaining their divergent development. If they had diverged in their development, then despite their diversity, they must have had something in common. In the lowest animals, there must still be something recognizable that only needs to be perfected in order to become, over time, the form of the higher animal. Cuvier vigorously opposed the consequences of this view. He was a cautious man who pointed out that the facts did not give rise to such far-reaching conclusions. As soon as he heard about this dispute, Goethe considered it the most important event of the time. For him, interest in a contemporary political event such as the French July Revolution completely faded in comparison to this struggle. He expressed this clearly enough in a conversation with Soret (in August 1830). It was clear to him that the natural conception of the organic world depended on this controversial issue. In an essay he wrote, he spoke out strongly in favor of Geoffroy St. Hilaire (cf. Goethe's natural science writings in volume 36 of the Goethe edition of German national literature). He told Johannes von Müller that Geoffroy St. Hilaire was following a path that he himself had embarked on fifty years earlier. This clearly shows what Goethe wanted when, shortly after arriving in Weimar, he began to study the animal and plant world. Even then, he had in mind a natural explanation for the diversity of life, but he too was cautious. He never claimed more than the facts allowed him to. And he says in his introduction to “Metamorphosis of Plants” that the situation at that time was unclear enough with regard to these facts. People believed, he says, that monkeys only needed to stand up and walk on their hind legs to become human beings.

[ 34 ] The natural scientists had very different duties than the Hegelians. The latter could remain within their ideal world. They could develop their idea of man from their idea of the ape without worrying about how nature manages to create man alongside the ape in the real world. Michelet had said (cf. above p. 2f. [220ff.]) that it was not the task of ideas to comment on the “how” of processes in the real world. In this respect, the creator of an idealistic worldview is in the same position as a mathematician, who only needs to say through which mental operations a circle is transformed into an ellipse and this into a parabola or hyperbola. But anyone who seeks an explanation based on facts would have to point out the real processes through which such a transformation could take place. In this case, he is the creator of a realistic worldview. He cannot take the position suggested by Pegel with the words: "It has been a clumsy idea of older and even newer natural philosophy to regard the development and transition of a natural form and sphere into a higher one as an external, real production, which, however, in order to make it clearer, has been relegated to the darkness of the past. Nature is characterized precisely by its external nature, which causes differences to fall apart and allows them to appear as indifferent existences; the idea that carries the stages forward is their inner nature. Such nebulous, essentially sensual ideas, such as the so-called emergence of plants and animals from water, for example, and then the emergence of more developed animal organisms from lower ones, etc., must be rejected by thoughtful consideration." (Hegel's Works, 1847, Volume 7, p. 33) Such a statement by an idealistic thinker is contrasted with that of the realist, Lamarck: "In the very beginning, only the simplest and lowest animals and plants came into being, and only lastly those of the most complex organization. The course of development of the earth and its organic population was entirely continuous, uninterrupted by violent revolutions. [...] The simplest animals and the simplest plants, which stand at the lowest level of the organizational ladder, arose and still arise today through spontaneous generation (Generatio spontanea)."

[ 35 ] Lamarck also had a kindred spirit in Germany. Lorenz Oken (1779-1851) also advocated a natural development of living beings based on “sensual ideas.” “Everything organic has emerged from slime and is nothing more than slime in different forms. This primordial slime arose in the sea from inorganic matter in the course of planetary development.”

[ 36 ] Despite such radical ideas, thinkers who were cautious and never wanted to stray from the guiding thread of factual knowledge had to remain skeptical of a naturalistic view as long as the purposefulness of living beings remained unexplained. Even to a thinker and researcher as groundbreaking and pioneering as Johannes Müller, the consideration of this purposefulness suggested the idea: “Organic bodies differ from inorganic ones not only in the nature of their composition of elements, but also in the constant activity that operates in living organic matter, which creates purposefulness in the laws of a rational plan by arranging the parts for the purpose of a whole, and this is precisely what distinguishes the organism” (J. Müller's “Handbook of Human Physiology,” 3rd ed. 1838, 1, S. 19). In the case of a man like Johannes Müller, who strictly confined himself to the limits of natural science and for whom the view of purposefulness remained a private thought in the background of his factual research, this view could not, of course, have any unfavorable effects. He examined the laws of organisms strictly objectively, despite their purposeful connections, and became a reformer of modern natural science through his comprehensive understanding, which made unrestricted use of physical, chemical, anatomical, zoological, microscopic, and embryological knowledge. His view did not prevent him from basing his understanding of the spiritual characteristics of beings on their physical peculiarities. One of his fundamental beliefs was that one cannot be a psychologist without being a physiologist. However, those who ventured beyond the boundaries of natural science into the realm of general worldview were not in the fortunate position of being able to simply relegate the idea of purposefulness to the background. And so it seems only understandable that a thinker as significant as Gustav Theodor Fechner (born 1801) expressed the idea in his book “Zend-Avesta oder über die Natur des Himmels und des Jenseits” (Zend-Avesta or On the Nature of Heaven and the Hereafter), published in 1852, that it was strange in any case to believe that no consciousness is involved in creating conscious beings such as humans, since unconscious machines can only be created by conscious humans. Karl Ernst von Baer, who traced the development of animal beings back to their initial states, could not shake the idea that the processes in living bodies strive toward certain goals, and indeed that the concept of purpose in its entirety applies to nature as a whole. (K. E. v. Baer, “Studies in the Field of Natural Science,” 1876, p. 73 and 82)

[ 37 ] If the materialists have overcome this obstacle, it speaks for their great sense of nature, which opened up a perspective for them even where the facts still stood in their way. They were inspired by their confidence in the spirit of their thinking. This confidence told them that the results of natural science to date spoke for them everywhere, and that this knowledge, which had removed so many obstacles, would one day also remove that of purposefulness.

[ 38 ] Nothing allows us to see into the hearts of materialists better than this confidence. They have been accused of taking the soul out of things and thus depriving them of what speaks to the heart and mind of man. And does it not seem that they rob nature of all its mind-uplifting qualities and degrade it to a dead thing, on which their intellect satisfies its urge to seek causes for everything that leaves the human heart unmoved? Does it not seem as if they want to undermine morality, which rises above mere natural instincts and seeks higher, purely spiritual motives, and unfurl the banner of animal instincts, which say: let us eat and drink, let us satisfy our physical instincts, for tomorrow we will be dead? Lotze (1817-1881) says quite bluntly of the period in question that its members judge the truth of sober empirical knowledge by the degree of hostility with which it offends everything that the mind considers inviolable.

[ 39 ] These words cannot be applied to materialists when one looks into their souls. In Karl Vogt, we encounter a man who had a deep understanding of the beauties of nature and sought to capture them as an amateur painter. A man who was not insensitive to the creatures of human imagination, but felt at home in the company of painters and poets. It seems to be not least the aesthetic enjoyment of the wonderful structure of organic beings that carried the materialists away with enthusiasm at the thought that the magnificent phenomena of the physical world could also give rise to souls. Should they not have said to themselves: How much more claim to be considered the cause of the spirit does the magnificent structure of the human brain have than the abstract concepts with which theology and often also philosophy concern themselves?

[ 40 ] And least of all can the materialists be accused of denigrating morality. Their knowledge of nature was combined with deep ethical motives. What Czolbe particularly emphasizes, that naturalism has a moral basis, was also felt by the materialists. They wanted to instill in people a joy in natural existence; they wanted to awaken in them the feeling that they had duties and tasks to seek on earth. They [regarded] it as an elevation of human dignity when people were conscious of having developed from subordinate beings to their present perfection. And they believed that only those who knew the natural necessities from which personality acts could correctly judge human actions. They said that only those who knew that life circulates through the universe with matter, that life is naturally connected with thought, and thought with good or evil will, could recognize a person according to his value. To those who believe that moral freedom is endangered by materialism, Moleschott replies, "Everyone is free who is joyfully aware of the natural necessity of their actions, their circumstances, their needs, demands, and requirements, and the limits and scope of their sphere of influence. Those who have understood this natural necessity also know their right to fight for demands that arise from the needs of the species. Yes, even more than that, because only freedom that is in harmony with what is truly human is defended by the species as a matter of natural necessity, and therefore in every struggle for freedom for human goods, ultimate victory over the oppressors is guaranteed." With such feelings, with such devotion to the wonders of natural processes, with such moral sensibilities, the materialists could expect the man who, in their view, had to come sooner or later, the man who overcame the great obstacle to a natural worldview. This man appeared in Charles Darwin; and his work, which placed the idea of expediency on the basis of natural knowledge, was published in 1859 under the title: “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.”