Contemporary Literature [pp. 729-761]

1874.] CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 743
B. Smith in our April number: "He designs to follow it by a further discussion, but as it stands it establishes a claim to a place among the best
things which the theme has called forth." We are sure nothing will be more
welcome on these pages than this "further discussion" which has been so
successfully begun.
The judgment of Humboldt, in general an ardent admirer of Strauss, is
happily quoted against his Darwinian materialism: "What has not pleased
me in Strauss is the levity he displays in the sphere of natural history, in his
readiness to find the origination of the organic out of the inorganic, and the
formation of man himself out of the original slime of Chaldea."
The following extract from Dr. Krauth's Introduction will convey to the
reader a fair idea of its spirit and power:
"MATERIALISM A POWER IN OUR DAY.-The lowest and the most
practical of the characteristics of our day unite with some of its most brilliant
and extravagant to give to materialism a special potency. In no land is the
temptation, in some of its forms, greater than in our own, where material
nature in her unsubdued majesty challenges man to conflict, or in her fresh
charms and munificent life lures him to devotion. Materialism is popularized in
our day. The magazines and papers are full of it. It creeps in everywherein the text books, in school books, in books for children, and in popular
lectures. Materialism has entered into the great institutions of Germany,
England, and America. Our old seats of orthodoxy have been invaded by it.
New England, the storm-gauge of the rising thought of our land, begins to
quiver on the edge of the coming hurricane.
"The Materialism of our day is very versatile. It takes many shapes,
often avoids a sharp conflict, assumes the raiment of light, knows how to
play well the parts of free thought, truth, and beneficence. All the more
securely does it pass in everywhere, so that we have Materialism intellectual,
domestic, civil, philanthropic, and religious. Strangest of all, in a philosophical point of view, we have systems, like the system of Schopenhauer,
for example, which, under the form of the supremest Idealism, have the
practical power of the lowest Materialism. Beginning in the sublimation of
the spirit, they end by wallowing in the filthiest sty of the flesh.
" Much of the Materialism of our day is servile and dogmatic, implicit in
credulity, and insolent in assertion. Professing to be independent of names,
and calling men to rally about the standard of absolute freedom from all
authority, it parades names where it has names to parade, and vilifies the fair
fame of those whom it cannot force into acquiescence or silence. Claiming
to be free from partisanship, it is full of coarse intolerance. It is an inquisition, with such tortures as the spirit of our age still leaves possible. The
rabies t/zeologorum of which it loves to talk pales before the rabies j5hysicorumz of this class, sometimes as directed against each other, yet more as
directed against the men of science or of the church, who resist their theories.'If,' says Erdmann,'We are to suppose that natural philosophy
teaches us to be dogmatic on topics about which we understand nothing, then
has natural philosophy never found such zealous adepts as are found among