History of Materialism (Volume 3); History of Materialism Since Kant (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. DARWINISM AND TELEOLOGY. When the first edition of the ' History of Materialism' appeared, Darwinism was still new; the parties were just taking up their positions, or, more strictly, the rapidly growing party of ' German Darwinians' was still in process of forming, and the reaction, which at present sees here the most threatened point in the old theory of things, was not yet properly in harness, because it had not yet properly appreciated the range of the great problem and the inward power of the new doctrine. Since then, the interest of friends and foes has been so much concentrated on this point, that not only an extensive literature has sprung up on Darwin and Darwinism, but that we may say that the Darwinian controversy is to-day what the general Materialistic controversy was formerly. Biichner is still ever finding new readers for ' Kraft und Stoff, ' but we no longer hear a literary outcry of indignation when a new edition appears. Moleschott, the true author of the Materialistic movement, is almost forgotten by the great public, and even Karl Vogt is now seldom mentioned except in reference to some special question in anthropology or some isolated and immortal utterance of his drastic humour. Instead of this, every periodical takes sides for or against Darwin; there appear almost daily larger or smaller treatises on the theory of descent, natural selection, and especially, as we may expect, on the descent of man, since there are many members of this particular species who lose their wits, ifany doubt is raised of the genuineness of their ancestral tree. Despite this great movement, we may still maintain unchanged nearly everything that we wrote on Darwinism eightjrears ago, though we can no longer leave the matter where it was then. The material has ..