Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of performing an endless process of addition. Only material things being perceptible to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement which has a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical.
"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a proof for Bacon’s fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in the Essay on the Human Understanding, supplied this proof.
"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestly similarly shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed:in Locke's sensationalism. At all events, for practical materialists, Theism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion."[1]
Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. if Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more’s the pity. It is none the less unde-
- ↑ Marx and Engels, "Die Heilige Familie," Frankfurt a. M. 1845, pp. 201-204.
