Abstract
IT can scarcely have been the intrinsic worth of these occasional essays which induced the “Rationalist Press Association” to circulate them in an English dress. The volume is marked by all the confident dogmatism and loose reasoning for which the author of “Force and Matter” is unfavourably known to serious students. Its value as a contribution to genuine thought on the ulti mate constitution of the world around is of the slightest. The author's position is that thought and will are secondary derivatives of a reality which is, in its own nature, “material” in the sense of being not mental, but for this position no proof whatever is offered. The “idealist,” who comes in for a good deal of abuse which, from an English point of view, must be pronounced de cidedly undignified, is never fairly met. His real argu ment, that the physical world itself is only given us in terms of the experiences of a sentient perceiver, isquietly ignored, and he is only allowed to make thefutile objection that he does not know by what special process physical energy is “transformed” into conscious ness. The writer's competence in philosophic discussion is shown by the fact that he thinks the inability of savages to count beyond four a proof that mathematical science is purely empirical. Similarly, he thinks Kant's view of the presence of an a priori element in knowledge refuted by the irrelevant appeal to the fact that know ledge has been acquired by a process of gradual develop ment. The real point has, of course, nothing to do with the process by which we come to know; it is purely a question of how knowledge is constituted when you have got it. The excursions into philosophic history made in such essays as those on “Hobbes” and on “Buddhism and Christianity” are even sorrier stuff than the rest of the book. Büchner seems to have known little or nothing about the subject; he repeats complacently the absurd farrago by which Pythagoras has been brought into connection with Buddha, and expressly praises Hobbes for being—precisely what he was not—an empiricist. The “Rationalist Press Association” is doing scientific thought no good service in issuing such a mixture of anti- ecclesiastical rhetoric and crass metaphysical dogmatism as representing the views of serious science about the world.
Last Words on Materialism.
By L. Büchner. Translated by J. McCabe. Pp. xxxiv + 299. (London: Watts and Co., 1901.) Price 6s. net.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
T., A. Last Words on Materialism . Nature 66, 29 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/066029a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/066029a0