Book Description:
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: IV. DR. BUCHNER ON DARWINISM.1 The words ' materialist' and ' atheist' have been so long employed as death dealing epithets in the hands of hard hitting theological controversialists, that it seems hardly kind in us to begin the notice of a somewhat meritorious book by saying that it is the work of a materialist and an atheist. We are reassured, however, by the reflection that these are just the titles which the author himself delights in claiming. Dr. Biichner would regard it as a slur upon his mental fitness for philosophising if we were to refuse him the title of atheist; and 'materialism ' is the name of that which is as dear to him as ' liberty ' was dear to the followers of Danton and Mirabeau. 1 Man in the Past, Present, and Future. A Popular Account of the Results of Recent Scientific Research as regards the Origin, Position, and Prospects of the Human Race. From the German of Dr. L. Biichner, by W. S. Dallas, F.L.S. London, 1872. Accordingly, in applying these terms to Dr. Biichner, they become divested of their old opprobriousness, and are enabled to discharge the proper function of descriptive epithets by serving as abstract symbols for certain closely allied modes of thinking. Considered in this purely philosophical way, an ' atheist' is one to whom the time honoured notion of Deity has become a meaningless and empty notion ; and a ' materialist' is one who regards the story of the universe as completely and satisfactorily told when it is wholly told in terms of matter and motion, without reference to any ultimate underlying Existence, of which matter and motion are only the phenomenal manifestations. To Dr. Biichner's mind the criticism of the various historic conceptions of godhood has not only stripped these conceptions of their anthropomorphic vestments...
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