5. The Soul's knowledge relates only to earthly things.
6. It becomes a person by being opposed to earthly individualities.
7. (Adopted from C. Vogt) "The soul ... is a product of the development of the brain; just as muscular activity is a product of muscular development, and secretion a product of glandular development. So soon as the substances composing the brain are aggregated in a similar form, will they exhibit the same functions.... Mental activity changes with the periods of life, and ceases altogether at death."
Büchner's writings are sufficiently known in this country. In America they are food for the million.
Proposition No. 6 is particularly noticeable because it re-echoes the fallacy of Locke (see page 182-3 ante) on personal identity. By opposition to earthly individualities we do not "become" persons, but the sense of antagonism between ourselves and other externalities (both men and things), sharpens every day our belief in our own personality, and furnishes its daily verification.
The grossness of this writer's Materialism does not hinder him from using the word "soul" on almost every page; and in one of his more recent publications he is candid enough to acknowledge that this old-fashioned entity is not yet quite improved off the face of the Earth. He says:—"Just the properties of the human mind and the impossibility of explaining them, were from the most ancient times one of the main supports of spiritualism and theological systems. True, their explanation is still wanting." Büchner, of course, looks for the speedy elimination of "Soul" proper, on exactly the same grounds which underlie his own whole system. Mental activity and Brain go together (he argues), as Force and Matter go together. It may be answered, that every practical reasoner knows the danger of arguing from concomitancies, however well-established, to Causality; and the risk is evidently much increased when a like argument is used to Identity. Besides, if Mental activity is resolvable into Brain, why should not Matter be likewise resolved into Force? Thus the whole Universe, inanimate and animated, material and psychical, becomes Force. The chain would run in this manner: Mind = Brain = Matter = Force. But how are we to know that Force must be all of one kind and description? Or, again, why may not the concomitancies be rather resolved some other way;—e.g., Matter (including Brain) = Force = Mind? Thus Materialism might slide into Idealism, Pantheism, or even Theism; since in some shape or other Mind would form and sustain the Universe. Our last citation of Büchner is taken from a New York Edition of his Materialism, p. 19.
[148] In other words, that kind of law which pervades the lowest sphere of Nature is conceived as dominant over the highest also. The whole Universe is submitted to its iron rule. There is of Man's Mind as well as of the flagstone with which he paves his streets, one account, one law, one science, one philosophy; nay, strangely enough, as we shall see further on, one religion! The law of stocks and stones is supreme, it rules alike Man's present and his future, and ought to be the sole object of his veneration.
Positivism, as is well known, makes many sciences and classifies them by an ascending scale of Laws. "La Philosophie Positive," writes Littré (Paroles, p. 10) ... "apercevant que, suivant la vraie conception, où la matière n'est pas séparable de ses propriétés, le mot de matérialisme n'avait plus d'emploi philosophique qu'en histoire, elle l'a renouvelé, et s'en est servie pour caractériser l'intrusion de la méthode de toute science inférieure dans la science supérieure."
If Littré had said, "the intrusion of the lowest into the highest," he would have rightly characterized the systems we are describing.
Von Feuchtersleben puts the practical state of the question thus:—"All we can say is, that an intellectual world reveals itself to us, by the law of the true, the good, and the beautiful, and that a physical world manifests itself by those laws which act in space and time. What lies beyond these laws, as it were the substance of both worlds, we know not; we only call that of the physical world, matter or body in the abstract, that of the super-physical, we call spirit (Geist), and must never forget that hereby we have only pronounced an abstraction.