266 HACKEL'S MATERIALISM. 



feelings to overpower our judgment, so as to hinder us 

 from looking at this question steadily in the face ; 

 when we may perceive that the word materialism does 

 not necessarily bear all the meaning that is usually 

 put upon it. There is materialism and materialism. 

 With Hackel it bears the extreme- signification of the 

 denial of the immortal soul of man as well as of a 

 spiritual principle of mere life, and when he is re- 

 proached with materialism he disclaims it in the 

 ethical and aesthetic sense, viz., as a low tone of mind 

 which is set upon money and material possessions, the 

 gratification of personal wants ministering to bodily 

 comfort, to luxury, vanity, and other objects of vulgar 

 ambition, in preference to the more spiritual states 

 desiring intellectual, artistic, and the higher moral ob- 

 jects involving self-sacrifice. And he points to the 

 fact that as a rule philosophers of his stamp are men 

 of higher intellectual and moral aim, and of more 

 virtuous lives, than many professedly religious persons.* 

 This is, no doubt, the fact, and probably it is all that 



* " Hence," says he, speaking of the low ethical materialism, " you 

 will seek it in vain among sucli materialists and philosophers whose 

 highest delight is the mental enjoyment of nature, and whose highest 

 object is the recognition of her laws. For this materialism you must 

 look in the palaces of the princes of the Church, and in the conduct 

 of all those hypocrites who, under the outward mask of pious honour- 

 ing of Grod, strive solely for hierarchical tyranny and the making ma- 

 terial gain out of their fellow-men. Dead to the infinite nobility of 

 the so-called ' brute matter,' and the splendid phenomenal world 

 springing out of it ; insensible to the inexhaustible charms of nature 

 as they are ignorant of her laws, they brand as heresy the whole of 

 natural science, and as sinful materialism the culture springing from it, 

 while they themselves revel in the most repulsive form of the latter. Not 

 only the whole history of the popes, with their endless chain of terrible 

 crimes, but also the repulsive ethical code of the orthodox in all 

 forms of religion furnish sufficient proofs on this point" (" Natiirliche 

 Schopfunggesch.," p. 33). 



