Idealism and Materialism

Abstract

Nature-philosophy originated in Germany towards the end of the eighteenth century; it emerged as a reaction to the reliance on rational analysis and mechanistic explanations which had come to be associated with the French philosophes of the Enlightenment. As we have seen, Lamarck thought of himself as a mechanist and though we may find the appellation inappropriate it was certainly appropriate when applied to many of his contemporaries, and especially to Holbach, whose System of Nature had been published in 1770. To the nature-philosophers this kind of approach to the search for understanding of the world seemed misguided because it dismissed, or at best ignored, the spiritual aspect of both man and nature, an aspect which they believed to be far more important than the material and corporeal. They did not entirely reject the validity of mechanistic explanations but, as far as they were concerned, such explanations were necessarily incomplete. It followed that they did not think that any investigation based on the presumption that the sole realities were matter and motion could be adequate. For them the existence of a higher spiritual power was a fundamental presupposition which did not need to be established by argument; they therefore saw no need to resort to natural theology.