45 2. THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



things was certainly improved at a later date, but for some considerable time 

 to come Christian conservatism was an officially approved standpoint. 



A radical thinker who never succeeded in acquiring any permanent 

 right to give instruction was Biichner, one of the most widely read of the 

 authors who wrote on the materialism controversy. Friedrich Karl Chris- 

 tian LuDwiG BiJcHNER (18x4-99) belonged to a very gifted family, especially 

 in regard to literature. He studied medicine and concurrently also philosophy, 

 was a lecturer for a time, but having been dismissed, he earned his living by 

 taking up a medical practice. He was of noble character and a keen upholder 

 of liberty and justice, and from his early youth he enthusiastically adopted 

 materialistic ideas, in which he saw a means of bringing humanity out of 

 darkness and superstition. His famous work Kraft und Staff, one of the most 

 widely read popular scientific works of his age, is really a collection of 

 talks on various theoretical questions in connexion with natural science, 

 written in an attractive form, but without any very great originality. The 

 old theme — the indestructibility of energy, the permanency of matter, the 

 soul as a combination of cerebral functions — is played upon with constant 

 variations and in a spirit of incessant controversy against theologians and 

 philosophers. Biichner certainly has a better idea of the limitations of 

 natural science than Vogt; he admits that existence is full of riddles that 

 cannot be solved; but like Moleschott and Vogt he never attained to that 

 clearly formulated self-limitation that Comte in his great work imposed 

 upon positivism. Nor did any of them realize the importance of evolution as 

 Comte did. All of them hailed the advent of Darwin with enthusiasm; his 

 doctrine gave to their conception of nature an impetus that it never had be- 

 fore. The fact is, the idea of the origin of species gave to the realistic natural 

 philosophy the connexion that the idealistic conception of nature had in its 

 theory of ideas. Energy and matter were far too abstract and difficult ideas 

 to support a popular theory of life, all the more so as the above-mentioned 

 champions of their omnipotence lacked that thought-training which would 

 have made them capable of mastering a subject so hard to elucidate. Their 

 service to natural science and their labours for its propagation among a 

 larger public are at any rate deserving of recognition. 



