HKB
and practical refutation of these doctrines, scientifically, a step backwards, and practically, merely the acceptance of materialism in a shame-faced way, clandestinely, and the denial of it before the world.
But the philosophers were during this long period from Descartes to Hegel and from Hobbes to Feuerbach by no means, as they thought, impelled solely by the force of pure reason. On the contrary, what really impelled them was, in particular, the strong and ever quicker conquering step of natural science and industry. Among the materialists this very quickly showed itself on the surface, but the idealistic systems filled themselves more and more with materialistic content and sought to reconcile the antagonism between spirit and matter by means of pantheism, so that finally the Hegelian system represented merely a materialism turned upside down, according to idealistic method and content.
Of course Starcke in his "Characteristics of Feuerbach" enquired into the fundamental question of the relations of thinking and being. After a short introduction in which the ideas of preceding philosophers, particularly since Kant, are portrayed in unnecessarily heavy philosophical language and in which Hegel, owing to a too formal insistence on certain parts of his work does not receive due credit, there follows a copious description of the development of the metaphysics of Feuerbach, as shown in the course of the recognized writings of this philosopher. This description is industriously and carefully elaborated, and, like the whole book, is overballasted with, not always unavoidable, philosophical expressions, which is all the more annoying in that the writer does not hold to the vocabulary of one and the same school nor even of Feuerbach himself, but mixes up expressions of very different schools, and especially of the present epidemic of schools calling themselves philosophical.
The evolution of Feuerbach is that of a Hegelian to materialism--not of an orthodox Hegelian, indeed--an evolution which from a definite point makes a complete breach with the idealistic system of his predecessor. With irresistible force he brings himself to the view that the Hegelian idea of the existence of the absolute idea before the world, the pre-existence of the logical categories before the universe came into being, is nothing else than the fantastical survival of the belief in the existence of an extra-mundane creator; that the material, sensible, actual world, to which we ourselves belong, is the only reality, and that our consciousness and thought, however supernatural they may seem, are only evidences of a material bodily organ, the brain. Matter is not a product of mind, but mind itself is only the highest product of matter. This is, of course, pure materialism. When he reached this point Feuerbach came to a standstill. He cannot overcome ordinary philosophical prejudice, prejudice not against the thing, but against the name materialism. 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."
Feuerbach here confuses materialism, which is a philosophy of the universe dependent upon a certain comprehension of the relations between matter and spirit, with the special forms in which this philosophy appeared at a certain historical stage--namely in the eighteenth century. More than that he confuses it with the shallow and vulgarized form in which the materialism of the eighteenth century exists today, in the minds of naturalists and physicians, and was popularized during a period of fifty years in the writings of Buechner, Vogt and Moleschott. But as idealism has passed through a series of evolutionary developments, so also has materialism--with each epoch-making discovery in the department of natural science it has been obliged to change its form; since then, history also, being subjected to the materialistic method of treatment, shows itself as a new road of progress.