RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Mateer Materialism
Hackel, Die Weltratsel (Bonn, 1899). All these recent materialistic theories are monistic, and usually more or less connected with the doctrine of evolution. Monistic also is the atomistic materialism, however much its supporters have attempted to give it a dualistic coloring, as may be seen in the teaching of Democritus and of his successors the Epicureans.
In the seventeenth century the Epicurean atomism was revived by Pierre Gassendi (q:v.), who led the way to a mechanical-physical conception of the world and thus to modern materialism. 3. Dualistic But whereas Gassendi was unable to Materialism, include the Deity in his materialistic conception of the universe, placing God rather above this world of phenomena in which Only secondary causes are operative, long before his day the Stoics had made their noteworthy attempt to include God as a factor in the material world, thus leading up to a dualistic materialism. Because they emphasized so strongly an ethical idealism which amounts to rigorism, they have been a good deal neglected by historians of materialism; and yet they were thorough-going and logical materialists. All reality to them is corporeal; the Godhead exists, therefore it must be corporeal, i.e., material, and so must the soul, and even the virtues and affections of the soul. It is true they often speak of two principles, thus apparently following Plato or Aristotle; but a closer scrutiny of their views shows that the active formative principle is considered as definitely material. The four elements are not eternal, nor do they spring from different sources, but all come from the one primal matter, which the Stoics, here following Heraclitus, regard as fire. This fire, the artificer of the world, pervades the whole universe and is called God. They also call the Deity anima mundi, the worldsoul, or Logos; but their Logos is material, not spiritual. In the evolution of the world, the Logos, as spermatikos, seminal, is contrasted with the other two coarser elements. It comprehends the single logoi spermatikoi, which are also thought of as material substances. But the kind of materialism which commended itself to the Stoics by its logical character found no adherents after the last real Stoic had occupied the imperial throne (see Stoicism). Christian philosophy gave a certain place to rationes seminales, but regarded them as rather spiritual than material; there are traces of Stoic materialism in some of the Fathers, but Platonic metaphysics gained the upper hand, as being more in harmony with Christian spiritual ideas. In the Renaissance and later times Stoic philosophy has had more influence than is generally supposed; but its natural system has had but few and unimportant followers, and monism has generally triumphed in the region of materialism.
But besides the distinction already treated between monistic and dualistic materialism, there is another of still deeper significance between organic and mechanical materialism. The latter rejects all teleological considerations, while the former is at least patient of them. The oldest Greek philosophers, materialists as they were, regarded matter as possessing life, if not a soul. Heraclitus may be taken as a type of the older organic materialism,
regarding matter as eternally in motion, and moved
by certain laws, not from without but according
to reason. But his Logos is not a con-
4. Mechan- scious-, still less a self-conscious agent, ical and and is thus distinguished from the all-
( Organic knowing, intelligent nous of Anax- Materialism. agoras, which had no slight influence
on the Platonic and Aristotelian doctrine of God. The principal representatives of organic as of dualistic materialism were the Stoics, with their decided teleological tendency. In their view the end of all things, of course, is the return into the primary fire; but in the existing world the formative principle is rational. Everything is logically ordained by a provident intelligence. The mechanical materialism of the present day is still based upon the atomistic theory, as laid down by Leucippus and Democritus. The eternal movement of the atoms is not conditioned by any definite cause, and proceeds in no definite order; casually, yet still by necessity, atoms came together from various sides, from one part and another of infinite space, and this brought about a rotary motion out of which the universe ultimately came into being. Since the soul is composed of atoms, its processes also must be purely mechanical. Democritus even considered the perception of the senses to be mechanical, emanations of atoms detaching themselves from objects and affecting the senses. His atomistic system is a strictly logical and scientific one, not depending upon any invisible powers such as the nous of Anaxagoras or the love and hate of Empedocles. Sense-perception, indeed, with him is deceptive — a dim knowledge, contrasted with the true, which is to be gained by reason; although according to his whole teaching thought must be based upon sense-perception and can not be independent of it. Epicurus, while as a rule following Democritus, introduced a peculiar variation in teaching, not a primary motion or rotation of atoms, but a mode of motion by which they fell through their own weight and declined a little from a straight line through a sort of self-determination. This declension explains their meeting and permanent combinations, as well as the upward and sidelong motions through which worlds came into being. This element of arbitrary determination helps Epicurus to explain the freedom of the will, which he accepts in a certain sense, but it damages the strict logical consequence of a materialism that denies any freedom or arbitrary determination.
In modern times, without knowing anything of Epicurus, Galileo revived the Democritean mechanical conception of the universe, denying, in
opposition to the scholastic-Aristo-
5. Mechan- telian philosophy, any real coming ical View in into existence or perishing, and re- Modern ferring all changes to shifting of parts,
Philosophy, to quantitative not qualitative relations. The mechanical view of nature, if not of the universe, was dominant at the beginning of modern philosophy with the most apparently opposite thinkers, with Rene" Descartes (q.v.) as well as with Thomas Hobbes (q.v.), who, regarding philosophy as the science of bodies, considered an incorporeal substance as an absurdity
Materialism Mather