Last Words on Materialism | Nature

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 6_s_. net. ARTICLE PDF Authors * A. E. T. View author publications You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Reprints and

permissions ABOUT THIS ARTICLE CITE THIS ARTICLE T., A. _Last Words on Materialism_ . _Nature_ 66, 29 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/066029a0 Download citation * Issue Date: 08 May 1902 *

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