United States or Central African Republic ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Among philosophic minds she saw an inclination to ignore the principles of such systems as Sir William Hamilton's, and to embrace the modified and subtle materialism of Buckle and Mill, or the gross atheism of Buchner and Moleschott.
One of the greatest of physiologists, Moleschott, says: "Courage, readiness, and activity depend in a great measure upon a healthy and abundant nourishment. Hunger makes heart and head empty. No force of will can make up for an impoverished blood, a badly nourished muscle, or an exhausted nerve."
But he said: "No thought without phosphorus," and thought he had wiped the human soul out of existence. Philosophers do not laugh at Moleschott. But they would laugh at a savage who would say: "I have discovered that there is a catgut in a fiddle. No fiddle without catgut no music without cats. Don't talk to me about soul or musical genius it's all catgut."
Physiology distinctly and categorically pronounces against any individual immortality, and against all ideas which are connected with a figment of a separate existence of the soul." "Man," says Moleschott, "is produced from wind and ashes.
It will be understood that the influences of which M. Moleschott speaks are not of an hereditary nature, that is, they are not transmitted through the blood; but they are influences which are present from the first moment of consciousness. They are quite sufficient to account for the criminal type being found in the physiognomy of a person born and reared among such surroundings.
M. Moleschott, at the International Congress of Criminal Anthropology held in Paris in 1889, "mentioned an influence towards crime that had not been noticed, to wit, the hereditary social influence, or that is, the tradition which is instilled into the mind of every child before he knows the difference between right and wrong, that by which he obtains the rudiments of his knowledge of right and wrong.
He says "Materialism is for me the foundation of the building of the being and knowledge of man, but it is not for me what it is for the physiologists in the narrow sense, as Moleschott, for example, since necessarily from their standpoint it is the building itself. Backwards, I am in accord with the materialists but not forwards."
All those works on Natural Science, by Alexander von Humboldt, Oersted, Du Bois-Raymond, Cotta, Vogt, Moleschott, Büchner, Rossmässler, Ule, Müller, and others, which have appeared since the Revolution of 1848, uniting a more popular and intelligible style with a purely scientific treatment of the matter-of-fact, irrespective of the religious and political dogmas that conflict with the results of natural science, have met with decided success in Germany and France.
As held by philosophical materialists, like Buchner and Moleschott, these two opinions are strictly consistent with each other; nay, the latter seems to be the inevitable inference from the former, though Priestley did not so regard it.
Is hope, radiant warm sunny hope, only one of those "beings woven of air by light," whereof Moleschott wrote? To Regina the sad vigil seemed interminable, and soon after the clock struck four she hailed with inexpressible delight the peculiarly shrill crowing of her favourite white Leghorn cock, which she knew heralded the advent of day.
Word Of The Day