The Philosophy of the Present in Germany

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill MATERIALISM In the first half of the nineteenth century there began that brilliant advance of the natural sciences which has given to that period the name of the scientific or technical century. The progress in method and in matter which took place in all the branches of scientific knowledge was especially marked in biology, the science of vital phenomena. As early as the seventeenth century, the French philosopher, Descartes, taught that life can be explained on purely mechanical principles. After Descartes' time, with the help of the improved and refined methods brought into use by the gradually unfolding natural sciences, modern physiology set to work to confirm by careful research this mechanical conception of vital phenomena, and to explain the activity of muscles and nerves, of glands and sense-organs, according to physical and chemical laws. Mental life thus took itsplace among other vital functions; it was connected with a special organ, namely, the brain, and was therefore classed among material phenomena. Some, to be sure, recognised a fundamental difference between mind or consciousness, on the one hand, and phenomena of life in general, on the other, and claimed a mechanical explanation only for the latter. At a Congress of Natural Scientists held in ' Gottingen in 1854, the so-called controversy over Materialism sprung up, in which the opposing views of the physiologists clashed. Materialistic views were openly advocated, and a lively war of words followed. At that time Rudolph Wagner delivered an address upon The Creation of Man and the Substance of the Soul, and professed the belief in an individual, immortal soul-substance, because, without this, the moral basis of the social order would be wholly destroyed. If we assume that the soul is merely a funct...

This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.