|
| The title page of German 1894 edition Ludwig Buchner's Force and Matter (1855), or Kraft and Stoff (German), oft-classified as the Bible of the free thinkers of the 19th century. |
“At the age of 13, I read with enthusiasm Ludwig Buchner’s Force and Matter, a book which I later found to be rather childish in its ingenuous realism.”— Albert Einstein (c.1950), “comment to biographer Carl Seelig” [3]
“Max Talmey recommended that Einstein read Ludwig Buchner’s Force and Matter, wherein he propagates a materialistic-natural scientific worldview and, along with Aaron Bernstein’s literature, prompts the young Einstein to renounce religious enthusiasm and turn toward free thought.”— Author (c.2010), “Sides on Einstein” (Ѻ), Max Planck Institute
“The sensitive period related to reading popular science books was a significant one for the development of Albert's scientific genius. Such intellectual experiences — as, for example, reading Buchner's Force and Matter — transformed Einstein, who as a child was slow, almost pathologically modest, and seemed likely to become an introspective dreamer, into an independent scholar. The impact of this sensitive period can be seen in Albert's developing directness and readiness to question everything that others took for granted.”— Larisa Shavinina (2016) “On the Cognitive-Development Theory of the Child Prodigy Phenomenon” (Ѻ)
See main: Social Newton term analysisThe following, noting Buchner’s pre 1923 Lewis-mediated free energy supplantation of affinity terminology switch position, shows the key term usage count:
(add)
Scientific terms Religious terms Elements Metaphysical Force (Ѻ) | 100+
Matter (Ѻ) | 100+
Work (Ѻ) | 88+
Motion (Ѻ) | 61+
Chemical (Ѻ) | 54+
Heat (Ѻ) | 40+
Mechanical (Ѻ) | 39+
Atom (Ѻ) | 33+
Energy (Ѻ) | 30+
Molecule (Ѻ) | 20+
Electricity (Ѻ) | 19+ Affinity (Ѻ) | 9+
Affinities (Ѻ) | 3+
Bond (Ѻ) | 0+Life (Ѻ) | 100+
Soul (Ѻ) | 75+
God (Ѻ) | 65+
Death (Ѻ) | 50+
Spirit (Ѻ) | 45+Hydrogen (Ѻ) | 16+
Oxygen (Ѻ) | 16+
Carbon (Ѻ) | 15+
Iron (Ѻ) | 12+
Phosphorus (Ѻ) | 3+
Sulphur (Ѻ) | 2+
Nitrogen (Ѻ) | 7+
Calcium (Ѻ) | 3+
etc.Love (Ѻ) | 21+
Ether (Ѻ) | 13+
Hate (Ѻ) | 0+_________________ ______________ _________________ _________________
“We are learning more and more to regard ‘chemistry’, or the science which deals with matter, as a branch or subdivision of ‘physics’, the science which deals with force.”
“Strife is the parent of things.”— Heraclitus (c.560BC), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 172)
“It appears to mortals that the gods are like them in form, apparel and language. The negroes serve black gods with flat noses; the Thracians, gods with blue eyes and red hair. If the oxen and lions had hands to fashion images, they would give the gods a bovine or leonine shape.”— Xenophanes (c.490BC), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 313)
“They are children or persons of narrow views who imagine that anything originates which before was non-existent, or that anything can wholly die or perish.”— Empedocles (c.450BC), Fragment; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1855) in Force and Matter (pg. 20)
“None of the gods have formed the world, nor has any man it has always been.”— Empedocles (c.450BC), Fragment; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1855) in Force and Matter (pg. 128)
“Out of nothing arises nothing: nothing that is can be annihilated. All change is only the union and separation of particles. The varieties of all things depend on the varieties of the atoms in number, size, form, and arrangement.”— Democritus (c.400BC), Fragment; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1855) in Force and Matter (pg. 20)
“The gods dwell in the interspaces of our knowledge of the world.”— Epicurus (c.280BC), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 116)
“Never can no thing become something, nor something nothing.”— Lucretius (55BC), On the Nature of Things; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 8)
“If thou wilt comprehend and hold fast these things, then will it be clear to thee that nature, set free and relieved from her haughty lords, does all things by intuition and without the interference of the gods.”— Lucretius (55BC), On the Nature of Things; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 145)
“For truly the origin of things has neither been led up to the present order by wise pre-ordainment, nor have its motions been regulated by the compulsory force of law; but shaken by countless impulses, constantly changing, endless in numbers it drove through the universe, and at length, after attempting every form of motion and of composition, it finally arrived at the present order of things.”— Lucretius (55BC), On the Nature of Things; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 174)
“If we assume the continued existence of the individual, we must first of all prove that the soul can live without requiring the body as subject or object of its activity. We cannot think without sensations; but these depend on corporeality of its organs. Thought is in itself eternal and immaterial, but human thought is bound up with the senses; it can recognize the general only in the special, it is never free from the rule of space and time, for its ideas come and go one after the other. Our soul is therefore really mortal, since neither consciousness nor memory can endure. Virtue is far purer when practiced for its own sake, than for a reward. Yet must those politicians not be blamed who desire that the immortality of the soul should be taught for the sake of the public good, in order that the weak and the bad might at least go the right way under the impulse of hope or fear, while noble free spirits choose that path of their own accord. For it is utterly untrue that only base scholars have denied immortality, and that all noble sages have adopted it. Homer, Pliny, Simonides and Seneca, who did not cherish this hope, were not vile on that account; they only managed to get along without mercenary servility.”— Pietro Pomponazzi (c.1520), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pgs. 335-36)
“Give me matter and motion, and out of them I will build the universe.”— Rene Descartes (c.1620), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1855) in Force and Matter (pg. 64)
“I am of opinion that we should try every other method of explanation first, before we take refuge in the admission of creation (that is, in miracle) for when once miracles are admitted, every scientific explanation is out of the question.”— Johannes Kepler (c.1620), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 85)
“The human freedom, of which all boast, consists in nought but that men are conscious of their own will, while ignorant of the causes which have induced it.”— Benedict Spinoza (c.1675), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pgs. 366-67)
“The value of a man does not depend on the truth he possesses or believes he possesses, but on the sincere labor he has bestowed upon getting at the truth; for it is not the possession of, but the search for truth, that increases his strength and thereby makes him more perfect.”— Gotthold Lessing (c.1770), Source; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Preface to 15th edition of Force and Matter (pg. xiii)
“Narrow is the world, wide is the brain.”— Friedrich Schiller (c.1790), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 255)
“If matter can fall to the ground then it can also think.”— Arthur Schopenhauer (c.1844), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1855) in Force and Matter (pg. 52)
“I believe neither in chance nor miracle, but only in phenomena regulated by laws.”
— Jouvencel (c.1850), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 80)
“Man’s body is dust, but his soul lives in his works [W = Fd].”— R. Voss (c.1850), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 316)
“All the substances in nature, even when they appear to be perfectly at rest, are engaged in the most rapid internal movement, and these movements in the bodies are transmitted to the surrounding ether, so that all space is continually traversed in every possible direction by wavelike vibrations, and the perception of the vibrations is what we term ‘heat’.”— Rudolf Clausius (c.1850), Publications; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1855) in Matter and Motion (pg. 62)
“The doctrine which follows from the materialistic theory of the universe is: let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall be dead. All great and earnest thoughts are idle dreams, phantasms, games of mechanical contrivances running about on two legs and with two arms, which are dissolved into chemical atoms, and get joined together again like the dance of madmen in a lunatic asylum, without a moral basis.”— Rudolf Wagner (1854), Stated, amid his siding with Christianity over physiology, at a meeting of German naturalists and physicians held at Gottingen; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 398)
“The necessary laws of thought and of matter are one and the same. Thought is a condensed motion, and since the human organism is but an involution of physical forces, thought must also be regarded as merely the condensed action of physical forces.”— Paul von Lilienfeld (c.1870), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 102)
“Thought is a motion of matter.”— Jacob Moleschott (c.1880), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 241)
“There is no such thing as a free will or voluntary act, independent of the totality of the influences which in each individual moment guide men and keep even the strongest within bounds.”— Jacob Moleschott (c.1880), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 266)
“Capacity of consciousness mast lie dormant in the existence of the atoms; otherwise our brain, which is a group of atoms, could not possess consciousness.”— Theodor Meynert (c.1880), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 247); note: this was Freud’s teacher in psychiatry
“Whenever knowledge takes a step forward, god recedes a step backwards.”— Gustave Naquet (c.1880), Publication; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 301)
“Everywhere we observe only immutable natural laws and blindly working causes. Hence the ghost of a personal, universal spirit, interfering in natural processes, has long been banished from astronomy, physics, and chemistry; no chemist now thinks of ascribing the union of two elements to the will of god, and no scientist now sees the manifestation of the divine will in any phenomenon of attraction or repulsion.”— George Schneider (1883), The Animal Will; cited by Ludwig Buchner (1884) in Force and Matter (pg. 76); see: Mirza Beg, Frederick Rossini, etc.
“Buchner's Force and Matter also became the Bible of a new movement, ‘free thinking’, otherwise known as atheism.”— Howard Bloom (2012), The God Problem (pg. #)
“The ocean of mankind moves according to the same laws as the sea that covers the great part of the earth’s surface. It is in the innermost nature of both to ebb and to flow.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Preface to 15th Edition of Force and Matter (pg. ix); compare Henry Adams’ 1863 “waves and tides” quote
“The universe, as we see it, is the result of regularly working forces, having a causal connection with each other and therefore capable of being understood by human reason.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (preface, pg. x)
“One of the objections most frequently urged against my views, is that I was destroying the old faith and putting no new one in its place.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (preface, pg. xii)
 |
| Buchner's opinion of "creative force" or models of self-caused things, e.g. god, as akin to the tale of Baron Munchhausen (Ѻ) pulling himself out of a bog by his hair, i.e. a fiction; this is akin to "higher power" seen used in the 21st century. |
“A creative force that either creates itself or arises from nothing, and which is a causa sui (its own cause), exactly resembles Baron Munchhausen, who drew himself out of the bog by taking hold of his own hair.”
— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 10)
“The useless search of philosophers for a cause of the universe is a regressus in infinitum (a stepping backwards into the infinite) and resembles climbing up an endless ladder, the recurring question as to the cause of the cause rendering the attainment of a final goal impossible.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 10) (compare: Lawrence Henderson on causality)
“We are sorry to confess that biological hypotheses have not yet completely got out of the second phase, and that ghost of ‘vital force’ still haunts many wise heads.”— Ludwig Bucher (1884), Force and Matter (15th ed) (pg. 13)
“The force which urges forward the locomotive, is a ray of sunshine converted into work by a machine, just the same as the work which creates thoughts in the brain of the thinker, or forges nails by the arm of the smith.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 27)
“They can, however, console themselves with the example of the great Greek philosopher Anaxagoras, who was compelled to leave Athens because, with a knowledge of nature or a foresight marvellous for his time, he declared that the sun was not a god, but a fiery ball, a glowing mass of stone. His great contemporary, the spiritualistic philosopher Socrates, spoke of him on account of this theory as an " impious man '' — an epithet which, if well-merited, must now be applied to the whole educated human race.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 56)
“For the rest, the whole struggle yet proceeding between Materialism and Spiritualism, still more that between Materialism and Idealism, must appear futile and groundless to him who has once attained to the knowledge of the untenability of the dualisitc theory which always underlies it. All philosophical systems up to the present time have almost without exception been more or less dualistic, that is they have made a definite severance between matter and force, substance and form, being and becoming, movement and mover, nature and spirit, world and god, body and soul, earth and heaven, death and life, time and eternity, finite and infinite,—and all these things or conceptions have been placed in opposition to each other and been treated as antitheses, whereas modern science has shown that these oppositions do not exist in reality, and that the separation can only take place in thought.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 56)
“Motion is everywhere in the universe, in the small as in the great. The conception of dead or motionless matter is utterly untenable; it exists only theoretically or as an abstraction, and not in reality, like that of forceless matter.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 59)
“Rest is not the absence of motion, but the resistance between two motions.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 64)
“The conception of dead matter is a mere abstraction, answering to nothing real, for matter, as we know experimentally, is everywhere full of life and motion and bears within itself its formative energies. Just the same view relating to matter was maintained by the materialistic philosophers of the eighteenth century. According to Holbach (The System of Nature) the world is nothing more than matter and motion and an endless concatenation of causes and effect. Everything in the universe is in constant flow and change, and all rest is but apparent. Matter and motion are eternal. Diderot and his successors held the same opinions.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 66)
“We are constrained to agree with Nageli when, basing his opinion on such facts, he declares that the difference between organic and inorganic is no other than that which exists between the simple and the complex.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 71)
“How easily has the torch of investigation shown what previously seemed incomprehensible, miraculous, caused by a supernatural power, to be the outcome of hitherto unknown or imperfectly estimated natural forces; how swiftly did the might of the spirits and the gods melt away beneath the hands of science.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 75)
“There exists in nature a tendency to form, which is the outcome of a definite formula.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 84)
“It is no part of the object of this work to take much notice of those who seek and find in the province of religious faith an explanation of the problem of existence and a satisfaction of their moral wants. We are only busying ourselves with that world which is accessible to our means of intelligence, and can find no scientific reasons compelling us to believe that behind this world there is another, a higher one, independent of the influence of the laws of nature and perhaps arranged in an entirely different fashion.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pgs. 85-86)
“Nor is truth arid or disconsolate; for it is in the very nature of true knowledge to restore more with one hand than what it seems to take away or destroy with the other.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 86)
“What we still designate as ‘chance’, merely depends on a concatenation of circumstances, the internal connection and final causes of which we have as yet been unable to unravel. '' To chance,'' says the famous System of Nature,'' we ascribe those effects of which we cannot trace the connection with their causes.— Order and disorder are not in nature." Therefore, the alternative "God or Chance" which is so often presented to us by teleologists, has no real existence.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 179)
“The largest known brains (excepting those enlarged by disease) have belonged to men who distinguished themselves in their lifetime by remarkable mental ability. While the average normal weight of the human brain is three pounds, the brain of Cuvier, the famous and ingenious naturalist, weighed nearly four. One of the largest known brains, according to the statement of Prof. Broca, who made an exact measurement of the skull, belonged to our great poet Schiller, Next to his, if the statements relating to them are accurate, come the crania or brains of Byron, Cromwell, Napoleon I, etc. Tiedemann weighed the brains of three full-grown idiots, and found the weight in all three varying between one and two pounds”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 220)
“What we still designate as ‘chance’, merely depends on a concatenation of circumstances, the internal connection and final causes of which we have as yet been unable to unravel.”
— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (15th ed) (pg. 226) (Ѻ) (see: anti-chance)
“The researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings. Man is a product of nature, in body and mind. Hence not merely what he is, but also what he does, wills, feels, and thinks, depends upon the same natural necessity of the whole structure of the world.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pgs. lxxviii + 239) [8]
“Philosophers are wonderful people. The less they understand of a thing, the more words they make over it. They have as many opinions as they have heads, and as Bacon very forcibly says, they become through their speculations "like owls that only see their dreams in the darkness, but become blind in the light of experience, and are least able to perceive that which is clearest."”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 257)
“The Stoics considered that the child only received a soul when it first began to breathe.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 278)
“This is true in such a measure that it always seems an impossibility, and will continue to be impossible, to obtain anywhere an absolute and specific definition of what is meant by ‘good’.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 292)
“The whole deep-seated difference between the ideas of "juridical" and "moral" springs but from outward conditions, which is the best proof of the fact that the idea of good has no absolute standard.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 294)
“While force and matter as such manifest their indestructibility in an incontrovertible manner, which rests upon experiments, the same cannot be said of the soul, which is only the effect or product of a definite combination of materials and forces subject to disassociation.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 319)
“None but a superficial and ignorant contemplation of man and of human existence, superadded to spiritualistic and metaphysical prejudices, could ever induce the idea that the actions either of an individual or of nations are the outcome and expression of a perfectly free and self-conscious will.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 366)
“The same conclusion has been arrived at by Dr. Bordier of Paris. Having examined the brains of thirty-six executed criminals, he found that in almost all of them the parietal lobes were excessively developed at the cost of the frontal, a fact which points to a low grade of intelligence together with a stronger tendency to violence.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 377)
“What we call "moral feeling" has it origin in the social instincts or habits which each human (or animal) society develops, and must develop within itself, if it is not to perish by its own incapacity. Morality, therefore, is evolved from sociability, or the faculty for living in a community, and it changes according as the particular ideas or necessities of any given society change. Thus, the nomadic savage thinks it is a very praiseworthy action to kill his father when effete with age, whereas in the eyes of the cultured European, parricide is the most horrible of all crimes.”— Ludwig Buchner (1884), Force and Matter (pg. 382)
