48 DEATH AND RESURRECTION. 



is a bodily function or a substance dif- 

 fering from matter. In other words, 

 natural science must sooner or later ar- 

 rive at a stage when it either verifies 

 materialism or gives us tangible and 

 obvious evidence for the truth of ideal- 

 ism. It was to such a point that science 

 arrived in the last century when 

 Btichner presented his well known 

 "Force and Matter," in which he en- 

 deavors to prove that the soul is an 

 attribute of the body, religion, immor- 

 tality and so on being only illusions. 



Had natural science then finally 

 found materialism to be the highest ex- 

 pression of truth? In reality this was 

 so far from being the case, that natural 

 science, just at that time, had given en- 

 tirely new impulses to a higher evolu- 

 tion of religious conceptions. How then 

 could Buchner, with natural science as 

 a basis, deny all religion, and how can 

 materialism, in our days, live with un- 

 diminished force and vitality? No 

 other explanation is possible than the 

 one we have already proposed. When 



