BÜCHNER, LUDWIG. - German philosopher, b. at Darmstadt on 29 March 1824, d. there on 1 May 1899. A physician, he came under the influence of Moleschott and thus became one of the most eminent popularizers of materialism. His work Kraft und Stoff (1855) achieved extraordinary success and was the breviary of the new philosophical current throughout the second half of the nineteenth century; between 1855 and 1889 it had 16 editions in German and numerous translations. The scandal it provoked, however, cost him his university chair, whereupon he returned to the practice of medicine in his native city. B.’s system is of an elementary simplism: everything is reduced to matter and force, eternal elements which, united, form the sum of the phenomena we call the world. All energies, including those called spiritual, reside in matter; it must therefore be regarded as the original foundation of all existence.
Besides Kraft und Stoff, B. wrote Natur und Geist (Leipzig 1876); Der Mensch und seine Stellung in der Natur (there 1889); Das goldene Zeitalter oder das Leben in der Geschichte (Berlin 1891); Darwinismus und Sozialismus (there 1894), etc.