LANGE'S HISTORY OF MATERIALISM.*

PROFESSOR LARGE, of Zurich, and latterly of Marburg, died in 1875, at the comparatively early age of forty-seven, after play- ing, as many of our readers know, no small part in the politics, journalism, and speculative thought of Germany. His chief philosophical work, The History of Materialism, very successfully translated by Mr. E. C. Thomas, forms the beginning of "The English and Foreign Philosophical Library," projected by Messrs. Triibner, an undertaking which promises well, and to which we heartily wish success. Only one of the three volumes is yet published in an English dress, but the work is so important in its bearings upon that which is really, for all thinking men, the question of questions, and, even in the case of thousands of the present generation who little dream of philosophical distinctions, has an unconscious influence on the tone of thought and religious sentiment, that we offer no apology for devoting to each volume a separate notice as it appears. The book is one the value of which, from its comprehensiveness and accurate learning, as well as the great fairness of its tone, and, for so difficult a subject, its lucidity of style, which is remarkable even in the translation, no thinker, even of the schools most opposed to Lange's views, will venture to deny. Von Hartmann has described it as controver- sial; but, although starting, as it does, from a specific stand- point, it cannot altogether avoid that character, it is above the position of an ordinary polemic. Its influence may be clearly traced on much of the half-scientific, half-philosophical discus- sions of the day. Seven years ago Professor Huxley said that its translation would prove a great service to philosophy in England. Since that time it has been greatly remodelled, and Professor Tyndall admitted, in his well-known Belfast address, his deep obligation to the work. It may be our duty hereafter to inquire how far Lange's views really coincide with those of that prevailing scientific school which at present claims to be the leader of rational progress.

The word "Materialism" has been so much in the mouths of men during the last few years, that it is not surprising that it should have been used without much accuracy and in many different senses. Lange has nowhere in this work attempted to define it, but leaves the reader to gather from his general statements and argument what that Materialism is of which he is recording the history and the part it has played in the development of human knowledge and thought.

Materialism, in the sense in which it is used by Lange, assumes the objectivity of the universe and the truth of the data of percep- tion and memory ; and it assumes also the truth of our expecta- tion of the uniformity of the sequence of phenomena for the future as in the past, stipulating, as it does, the non- severance of force and substance, and recognising the former as the absolutely necessary property of the latter. It involves also the unity of substance dualism seeming to it to imply unnecessary assumption, and indeed contradiction, and the personification, in any sense or degree, of causation or force is to it mere anthro- pomorphic fancy. Atomism it holds to be an hypothesis

* Haim of Materialism, and Criticism of its "resent Importance. By Frederick Albert Lange, late Professor of Philosophy in the Universities of Zlirieh and Marburg. Translated by Ernest Chester Thomas, late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. London: TrUbncr and Co.

without which materialism cannot well hold together, though we have a hint in this volume of a possible materialism of the future without atomism, which is to be considered at a later stage of the work. It follows that teleology must be strictly eliminated from a true materialism, being superseded by the grand principle of "the development of the purposeful from the unpurposeful."

These seem to be the essentials of that Materialism of which, with its frequent eclipse by opposing schools of thought, and its frequent aberrations from the pure standard and vitiation with alien elements, we have here the history. It has admittedly its basis in metaphysical thought, though denying the reality of much which bears that name, and must be distinguished, on the one hand, from that school which sees in materialism an absolute contradiction of all philosophical thought, and, on the other, from the more common-place materialism which despises all metaphysic, and imagines that its own views are in no way the product of philosophy, but a pure result of experience, of sound sense, and of the physical sciences. In his own higher and more legitimate mate rialism, Lange saw the only path of progress for genuine scientific knowledge. Although it necessarily implies certain philosophical dogmata, it is a materialism which is con- cerned less with dogma than with method ; and the work teems with admissions that, outside of this rigid path of inquiry, there are regions of lofty and ennobling thought, in which the human mind, by its very constitution, must revel ; and things beyond the pale of materialism, more or less dimly conceived, but whose ex- istence, in some sense, is undoubted. Although there must be "a rigorous elimination of final causes before any science can de- velope itself," although the " absolutely anthropomorphic design" "needed by religions" is "as great an antithesis to natural science as poetry is to historical truth, and can, therefore, like poetry, only maintain its position in an ideal view of things," we are not excluded from admiration of the "exquisitely articulated bodies of animals and plants, with all their organs for the maintenance of the individual and the species," but are bound to demonstrate, if we seriously undertake to carry out our principle of causality, that of the mechanical impact of atoms, how this is possible.

Speaking of what he considers the one-sidedness of the philosophy of Socrates, and its exaggeration when passing through the mind of Plato, its contempt for efficient causes, and other results of its purely ethical and religious starting-point, Lange says :—

4, These Platonic errors, however, because of their deep opposition to the philosophy which springs from experience, are of special import- ance. They are also errors of universal signifieance' like those of materialism, yet they rest only more surely on the broad basis of our whole psychical organisation. Both theories are necessary stages of human thought, and although Materialism may, as compared with Platonism, upon special points always maintain its position, yet it may be that the whole picture of the world which the latter affords stands neater to the unknown truth. In any case, it has the deeper relations to the life of the emotions, to art, and to the moral functions of mankind."

Again, he says :— " All these Platonic conceptions, therefore, have been, down to our own days, only hindrances and ignes fatui for thought and inquiry, for the mastery of phenomena by the understanding and by sure methodi- cal science. But just as the human spirit will never be content with the world of understanding which an exact empiricism might afford us, so the Platonic will ever remain the first and most elevated type of a poetical exaltation of the spirit above the unsatisfying patchwork of knowledge, and wo are as much justified in this exaltation on the wings of imaginative speculation as in the exercise of any function of our mental and physical faculties. Nay, we shall attach to it a high importance, when we see how the free play of spirit which is involved in the search after the One and the Eternal in the change of earthly things reacts with a vitalising and freshening influence upon whole generations, and often indirectly affords a new impulse, even to scientific research. Only the world must, once for all, clearly comprehend that we have here not lcnowledge, but poesy (Dichtung), even though this poesy may, perhaps, symbolically represent to us a real and true aspect of the true nature of all things of which the immediate apprehension is dented to our reason."

Again, he says of Materialism, "The weak point of all Materialism just lies in this, that with this explanation" (the universal laws of motion), "it stops still at the very point where the highest problems of philosophy begin." The following quotation also shows Lange's conviction of the incompetency of Atomism to explain the phenomena of consciousness :—

*' On the Atomic theory, we explain to-day the causes of sound, of light, of heat, of chemical and physical changes in things in the widest sense, and yet Atomism is as little able to-day as in the time of Demo- kritos to explain even the simplest sensation cf light, heat, taste, and so on. In all the advances of science, in all the presentations of the motions Of atoms, the chasm has remained unnarrowed, and it will be none the less when we aro able to lay down a complete theory of the function of the brain, and to show cletirly the mechanical motions, with the origin and their results, which correspond to sensations, or in other words, which effect sensation. Science does not despair, by means of this powerful won on of. success in deriving oven the most complicated processes and most significant motives, of a living man, according to the laws of the persistence of force, from the impulses that are set free in his brain under the influence of the nervous stimuli; but she is for ever pre- cluded from finding a bridge between what the simplest sound is as the sensation of a subject—mine, fofinstance, and the processes of disintegra- tion in the brain which science Must assume in order to explain the par- ticular sensation as a fact in the objective world."

These quotations (in which the italics are our's) are sufficient to distinguish that which our author means by Materialism from the more vulgar class of opinions which are vaguely denoted by that word. To him, although ho is, strictly speak- ing, a monist, it means less some special conclusion, or set of conclusions, about what arc called in common language mind and matter, than a certain self-denying line of thought, along which alone he conceives that rigid scientific inquiry can be safely pursued so as to terminate in actual knowledge. His con- sciousness of the weak side of the Atomic hypothesis, and his admission not only of the important part played in the general development of our conception of the universe by the occasional predominance of an idealistic philosophy, but of the light which may be indirectly shed by it even on pure scientific research, remove him tote ado from some of the more narrow and dogmatic schools of modern so-called philosophy. His choice of the word " poesy " as descriptive of the region to which he relegates the whole, or nearly the whole, of that which lies outside of rigidly empirical and inductive science (with, of course, such deductive reasoning as may be necessary either in the sphere of the necessary relations of number and space, or after we have accumulated a sufficient amount of major premisses by observation) is, especially to English readers, an unfortunate one, though we do not see that his translator, with due attention to literal rendering, could have done better than to use it. It is used, no doubt, in immediate connection with the Platonic idealism, but it is evident that in the mind of the author its use is as extensive as we have just indica- ted. We have seen that the Materialism of which Lange treats has its foundation in some of the primary data of consciousness. The objective substratum of phenomena is conceded, and powers and forces are conceded. Whether substance and force are

looked upon as in any sense separable is of little moment to what

we now hint at. The substance and the force, whether separable or not, are postulates' intuitively applied to phenomena. The conception repeats itself mentally, as the necessary prefix to every succession of them, and the notion of causality, whatever form it may have had in the mind of Lange, has its subjective origin.

We defer the full examination of the questions raised in this, which is at the root of the whole matter, until we have occasion to notice the completed translation, for at the pre- sent stage there is some risk of doing injustice to an author no less remarkable for subtlety of thought than for fairness and

candour. We vesture, however, to suggest to those who may be disposed at once to assent to Lange's views, the tolerably obvious doubt whether there is not a certain self-deception in the stipu- lated non-severance of substance and force, and in the complete rejection of what he calls the anthropomorphic elembit in the concept of force and causation. if it is possible, which we doubt,

for that element to be completely eliminated, does the terra " force " amount to anything more than a generalised expression of invariable sequence ? Should, on the other hand, force and causation prove obstinate, and it be found that, on due analysis, these concepts necessarily contain something which may be called anthropomorphic—something which we feel to be more or less analogous to human volition—without which they are little more than empty words, and that they must still be allowed to remain as a legitimate element in the method of scientific inquiry, what becomes of that rigid banishment of teleology and other con- siderations which are referred to the region of "Poesy," though they may admittedly ennoble human thought and sentiment, and may even have some beneficial retroactive influence on science, but are inadmissible in their faintest degree into the path of research ?

If, in a legitimate materialism, the authority of primary intui- tion is necessarily assumed in the admission of the objective reality of the non ego, and as the source of our concept of force, and these play an essential part in the building-up of scientific knowledge, not in a retroactive manner, but at the most ele- mentary stage of the process, it is sot easy to see why the line is so sharply drawn at this point. Are there not other testimonies of consciousness equally or nearly equally capable of playing a part in the process of construction? May it not be reasonably contended that Materialism, in Lange's sense of the term, occupies an illogical position half-way between the extremest phase of Positivism, or perhaps of absolute Scepticism, on the one hand, and on the other, a philosophy which finds it necessary to draw more largely from subjective sources ? These remarks, be it observed, apply to the metaphysical foundation of the Materialism in question, more than to its practical utility, as embodying a safe and cautious rule of procedure ; but safety and caution may happily be purchased too dear, at the cost of a large and consistent philosophy, and practically at the risk of excluding thoughts which, if only by suggesting happy hypotheses, may lead to mighty and speedy results.

The value and importance of this work, however, in its purely historical aspect, are but little affected by the con- siderations at which we have now hinted ; but it is essential that the reader, in order to profit by the history, should have a clear idea of what the author means by Materialism. To follow the author through his laborious and learned tracing of the Material- istic or empirical method from its struggles with local superstition in the days of the early Greek Atomists, would be impossible in these pages. Lange naturally begins with Demokritos, to whom con- siderable space is devoted, and Empedocles, who, though not strictly a Materialist in our author's restricted sense, anticipated Darwin by offering to the ancient world "the simple and penetrating thought that adaptations preponderate in nature, just because it is their nature to perpetuate themselves, while what fails of adaptation has long since perished." Sensationalism, which Lange, in per- fect consistency with his philosophy, regards as at bottom only an untenable position half-way between materialism and idealism, as first developed by the Sophists, is discussed in connection with Protagoras and his successors, the genuineness of whose think- ing he holds to have been grossly underrated, and only its darker side shown to us, through the ridicule of Aristophanes and the moral earnestness of Plato. Then follows necessarily that re- action against the earlier materialism and sensationalism which was called into play first by Socrates, acquiring its thoroughly idealistic character through the intensely religious mind of Plato ; while Aristotle, by combining it with empirical elements, created that ultimate system which dominated the thought of civilised man for many hundreds of years, and has scarcely yet lost its hold in some of the most venerable quarters. The Stoics, though at first sight making a near approach to Materialism, were not true materialists, for their system wanted the distinctive feature of "the purely material nature of matter, the origination of all phenomena, including those of adaptation and spirit, through movements of matter according to universal laws of motion."

The great development of materialistie thought by Epicurus, and above all, in the great poem of Lucretius, is, as might be expected, the subject of the two most important chapters in this volume. Lange's analysis of that which is, perhaps, the greatest didactic poem of any ago, and so important in respect of the pro- found interest of its theme and its relation to the thought of its own time, and still more to much of the thought of the present half of our own century, will repay the most attentive perusal, though it by no means aims at being exhaustive.

After the beginning of the Christian era, the spread of Mono- theism from Judaic, Christian, and afterwards from Mahommedan sources had an influence favourable to Materialism. In a universe full of gods, in which every event is looked upon as the special sphere of some demonic being endowed with arbitrary will, the difficulties offered to a Materialistic explanation of the whole are innumerable. But if the great thought is conceived of necessity and of eternal matter regulated according to fixed laws, the initiatory conception of Materialism, through an anthropo- morphic attribution of those laws to the will of one Supreme Being, is easy. Lange, looking at this from his own stand-point, compares the working of Monotheism to a mighty lake, "which gathers the floods of science together, until they suddenly begin to break through the dam:" In Christianised Europe, the reli- gious movement being chiefly popular, science received loss benefit from the Monotheistic element than it did afterwards among the moro. cultivated of the Moslem races, more especially because the dark Manichsean dualism of the Zend-Avesta had penetrated the more wide-spread phases of Christianity, and the Neoplatonism of the Alexandrian schools contained a mysticism adverse to patient induction, and in some of its aberrations looked upon the material universe as essentially unholy.

This book is by no means a mere dry history of successive phases of speculative thought and scientific inquiry. One of its most interesting and important features is the constant reference to the mutual action of philosophy and the general condition of society, moral and political, of each period.

The glimpses of what Lange terms the ethical side of Material- ism are few and slight, but point towards issues of the deepest importance. With these we must deal in a future notice, when the succeeding portion of the translation shall have appeared.