The History of Materialism
and Criticism of its Present Importance

 By

Frederick Albert Lange
Late Professor of Philosophy in the Universities of Zurich and Marburg
3^rd Edition (with an introduction by Bertrand Russell)

New York: The Humanities Press, 1950

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The mingling of astronomy with the fantasies of astrology was, for this very reason, not so disadvantageous as might be supposed. Astrology, as well as the essentially related alchemy, possessed in every respect the regular form of sciences,¹⁹ and were, in the purer shape in which they were practised by the Arabian and the Christian savants of the middle ages, far removed from the measureless charlatanry which made its appearance in the sixteenth and especially in the seventeenth century, and after austerer science had rejected these fanciful elements. Apart from the fact that the impulse to inquiry into important and unfathomable secrets through that early connection came to the aid of the scientific discoveries in astronomy and chemistry, in those deep mysterious studies

¹⁹ Comp. Leibig, Chomische Briefe, 3 and 4 Br. The remark, “Alchemy was never anything more than chemistry," goes, of course, a little too far. .As to the caution against confounding it with the gold-making art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it must not escape us that this is only alchemy run wild., just as the nativity delusion of the same period is astrology run wild. The most imporortant contrast between the spirit of modern chemistry and of medieval alchemy may be most clearly shown in the relation between theory and experiment. With the alchemists the theory in all its main features stood unshakably firm; it was ranked above experiment; and if this gave an unexpected result, this was forced into an artificial conformity with the theory, which was of aprioristic origin. It was therefore essentially directed to the production of this previously anticipated result rather than to free investigation. This tendency of experiment is indeed still active enough in our modern chemistry, and the authority of general theories, if not in our own days, at all events in a period not very far behind us, was very great. Yet the real principle of modern chemistry is the empirical; that of alchemy, despite its empirical results, was the Aristotelo-scholastic. The scientific form of alchemy as well as of astrology rests upon the consistent carrying out of certain axioms as to the nature of all bodies and their mutual relations-axioms simple in themselves, but capable of the utmost varieties in their combinations. As to the furtherance of the scientific spirit by means of astrology in its purer forms, compare, further, Lecky, Hist. of Rationalism in Europe, i. 302 foIl. ; where also, in note 2 to p. 303, several instances are given of the bold ideas of astrological freethinkers. Compare also Humboldt's Kosmos, ii. 256 foIl.

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themselves was implied, as a necessary presupposition, the belief in a regular progress of events following eternal laws. And this belief has formed one of the most powerful springs in the whole development of culture from the middle ages to modern times.

We must here also have special regard to medicine, which in our days has become in a certain measure the theology of Materialists. This science was treated by the Arabs with especial zeal.²⁰ Here too, whilst attaching themselves chiefly to Greek traditions, they nevertheless set to work with an independent feeling for exact observation, and developed especially the doctrine of life, which stands in so close a connection with the problems of Materialism. In the case of man, as well as in those of the animal and vegetable worlds, everywhere, in short, in organic nature, the fine sense of the Arabians traced not only the particularities of the given object, but its development, its generation, and decay-just those departments, therefore, in which the mystic theory of life finds its foundation.

Every one has heard of the early rise of schools of medicine on the soil of Lower Italy, where Saracens and the more cultivated Christian races came into such close contact. As early as the tenth century, the monk Constantine taught in the monastery of Monte Cassino, the man whom his contemporaries named the second Hippokrates, and who, after wandering through all the East, dedicated his leisure to the translation from the Arabic of medical works. At Monte Cassino, and later at Salerno and Naples, arose those famous schools of medicine, to which the seekers for knowledge streamed from the whole Western world.²¹

²⁹Draper, Intell. Develp. of Europe, i. 384 foll. Less favourable judgments of Arabian medicine will be found in Haser, Gesch. D. Med. (2 Auff., Jena, 1853), 173 foll., and in Daremberg, Hist. des Sciences Medicales  (Paris, 1870). Yet their great activity in this department is shown clearly enough in these accounts .

²¹Comp. Wachler, Handb. Der Gesch. D. Liter., ii. S. 87. Meiners Vol. I.

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combined with the fanatical conception of religious idea, is proved by the case of the Jesuits, with those whole being that of the Assassins has a striking similarity.

To return to the natural science of the Arabinans, we cannot, in conclusion, avoid quoting the bold expression of Humboldt, that the Arabians are to be considered the proper founders of the physical sciences, “in the signification of  the term which we are now accustomed to give it." Experiment and measurement are the great instruments with the aid of which they made a path for progress, and raised themselves to a position which is to be placed between the achievements of the brief inductive period of Greece, and those of the more modern natural sciences.

That Mohammedanism exhibits most of that furtherance of natural study which we assign to the Monotheistic principle, falls in with the talents of the Arabians with their historical and local relation to Greek traditions, without doubt, however, also with the circumstance that the Monotheism of Mohammed was the most absolute, and comparatively the freest from mythical adulterations. Finally, let us place among the new elements of culture which might react upon a Materialistic theory of nature

the sources; and yet we must not forget that this is the usual way in which victorious orthodoxy deals with defeated sects. It is really here, apart from the frequent instances of malicious misrepresentation, just as it is with our judgment of so-called ‘hypocrites’ in private life. Unusual piety is in the popular eyes either genuine saintship or a wicket cloak of all that is vile. For the psychological subtlety of the mixture of genuine religious emotions with coarse selfishness and vicious habits the ordinary mind has no appreciation. Hammer sets forth his own view of the psychological explanation of the Assassin movement in the following words (S. 20, E. T. p. 13): - “Of all the passions which have ever called in to action the tongue, the pen, or the sword,  which have overturned the throne, and shaken the altar to its base, ambition is the first and mightiest. It uses crime as a means, virtue as a mask. It respects nothing sacred, and yet it has recourse to that which is most beloved, because the most secure, that of all held most sacred by man-religion. Hence the history of religion is never more tempestuous and sanguinary than when the tiara, united to the diadem, imparrts and received an increase power.” But when was there ever a priesthood which was not ambitious; how can religion be the most sacred element of humanity if its first servants find in it only a means to satisfy their ambition? Any why is ambition so common and so dangerous a passion,

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this further one, which is handled at length by Humboldt in the second volume of his Kosmos-the development of the aesthetical contemplation of nature under the influence of Monotheism and of Semitic culture.

The ancients had carried personification to the utmost pitch, and seldom got so far as to regard or to represent nature simply as nature. A man crowned with reeds represented the ocean, a nymph the fountain, a faun or Pan the plain and the grove. When the landscape was robbed of its gods, then began the true observation of nature, and joy at the mere greatness and beauty of natural phenomena.

“It is a characteristic," says Humboldt,* "of the poetry of the Hebrews, that, as a reflex of Monotheism, it always embraces the universe in its unity, comprising both terrestrial life and the luminous realms of space. It dwells but rarely on the individual phenomenon, preferring the contemplation of great masses. . . . It might be said that one single psalm (Ps. civ.) represents the image of the whole kosmos: The Lord,' who coverest thyself with light as with a garment; who stretchest out the heavens like a

since for the most part it only leads, by a very thorny and extremely uncertain way, to that life of pleasure which is regarded as the object of every selfish man? There is obviously acting, often at least, and almost always in the great events of world- history, in connection with ambition, an ideal which is partly in itself overprized, but partly passes into a one-sided relation to the particular person regarded as its special bearer. And this is the reason why it is religious, ambition especially that is so frequent, for the cases in which religion is employed by an ambitious but not religious person as a valuable means must be very rare in history. These considerations apply also to the Jesuits, who at certain periods of their history have certainly come very near to the Assassins, as Hammer represents them; while, at the same time, they would scarcely have been able to establish their power in the souls of believers without the help of genuine fanaticism. Hammer often adduces them, and certainly with justice, as a parallel to the case of the Assassins (S, 337, et passim, E.T. 216); but when he thinks the regicides of the French Revolution worthy to have been satellites of the ‘old man of the mountain,' this shows how easily such generalisations may lend to a misapprehension of peculiar historical phenomena. It is certain that the political fanaticism of the French 'men of terror' was, on the whole, very sincere, and by no means hypocritical.

* Kosmos, E. T., Bohn’s ed., ii. 412, 413.

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