Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 1, 2025
These were the popular materialists "the blatant atheists," who, without scientific knowledge and gifted with mere oratory or a popular style of writing, used every advance of science as a weapon of attack upon the Creator and popular religion. Engels sneers at these as not being scientists at all, but mere tradesmen dealing in pseudo-scientific wares.
Not Energy or Force as the materialists use the terms, for their energy and force are blind, mechanical things, devoid of Life or Mind. Life and Mind can never evolve from blind Energy or Force, for the reason given a moment ago: "Nothing can rise higher than its source nothing is evolved unless it is involved nothing manifests in the effect, unless it is in the cause.
"Just what I expected you to say," he replied, flushing up. "I know you, you scientific men, you materialists. When you can't explain a phenomenon, you call it nonsense, instead of throwing yourselves with childlike faith into the arms of the supernatural. That is the sum and finality of your so-called science. But, come, be rational now.
After thus finally belittling the two poets, he shot a parting shaft at German idealism in his farewell to the academicians. He bade them beware of idealogues as dangerous dreamers and disguised materialists.
And his manner was a bit indefinite, doubtful, yet weighted with care, as he slowly repeated the question: "An American? Once more I don't understand. I have never heard the word, my dear sir. You are neither D'Hartian nor Kospian; although there are some materialists for the most part who contend that you are just as any one else. That is a man."
But it is peculiar that, although entirely dependent in his reasoning on that monistic view of the world, and that Darwinian view of nature, he defines his ethical developments and his reflections on the organizations of human life in a relative independence, which again separates him as moralist from these before-mentioned monists and materialists, and rather ranks him, as we have seen in Chap.
Nor is this argument peculiar to the theologians; we find it expressed in equivalent language in the philosophical writings of the materialists, believers in infinite perfectibility. Destutt de Tracy teaches formally that poverty, crime, and war are the inevitable conditions of our social state; necessary evils, against which it would be folly to revolt.
Even the Materialists have conceded this conclusion, and they speak and think of a something called "Matter," as the One holding that, inherent in Matter, is the potentiality of all Life.
It has, indeed, been rendered highly probable that every act of consciousness is accompanied by a molecular motion in the cells and fibres of the brain; and materialists have found great comfort in this fact, while theologians and persons of little faith have been very much frightened by it.
But, at the risk of being tedious, let us extend this argument of the materialists a little further: The only difference, they will still insist, between the preA"xisting germs of crystals and plants or the only difference essentially worth noticing is that crystalline particles of matter are endowed with much less potentiality of undergoing diversified forms and structural changes than the more highly favored vital particles, such as the proligerous pellicle, the bioplast, the plastide, etc.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking