is pessimist first and expounder of the Unconscious afterward. In talcing him as the representative of materialism, I have purposely passed by names far more widely known, — those of Moleschott, Büchner, and Carl Vogt, for instance, — not only because these are all men of popular rather than of severe methods, having far less weight in the scientific world than he, but because he is a man of far more scope, of really thorough attainments, of positive originality, and of a certain delicacy of intellectual perception characteristic of the true thinker.[1] Haeckel, who by his extravagant ardour in advocating atheistic evolution, his vast knowledge of biological details, and his high repute among his associates in science, fills so large a place in the minds of most readers as a representative of materialism, must be counted out, according to his own public and repeated protests, as not intending or teaching materialism at all, but a monism
- ↑ A writer more correctly to be compared with Dühring is Czolbe, of Königsberg, author of a naturalistic theory expounded in his Limits of Human Knowledge on the Basis of the Mechanical Principle, who died in 1873. But he did not, like Dühring, develop his views into a comprehensive philosophy, applied to all the provinces of life. He belonged, too, rather to the previous generation of thinkers than to this, and was known there as an opponent of Lotze. Lotze, gifted and influential as he was, I have also passed by, later in the essay, in the agnostic-idealist connexion, in spite of his acknowledged bearing on the position of Lange, mainly for reasons similar to those that led me to disregard Czolbe: he belongs to a movement earlier than the one here considered.
