MATERIALISM. — A philosophical (scientific, historical) system that deduces the form of things and events from their matter, considering the latter fundamental and primitive, and the former phenomenal and consequent. idealism (v.), inasmuch as the latter deduces matter from form; spiritualism (v.), inasmuch as the latter affirms the absolute superiority of the world of spirit over matter.
It may, however, also be developed in a particular or methodical form with regard to a single problem or aspect of philosophy: for example, ethical m. (hedonism, utilitarianism [v.]) establishes pleasure or utility as the principle of morality (as the matter of consciousness), but does not prescribe a materialistic interpretation of the world; biological m. maintains that vital phenomena in corporeal beings are generated by the mechanisms and chemisms of inorganic matter, but does not exclude the presence of spiritual life. A comprehensive materialistic system is unable to achieve full coherence, both because it cannot avoid attributing to itself, as an intellectual system, some difference from material processes, and because the definition of the concept of matter is itself formal and therefore cannot be deduced from matter. Materialistic systems are in reality formulas corresponding to periods of spiritual weariness or decline, or resulting from the predominance of empirical knowledge and progress. Their constant error is that, while they propose the principle of matter as contrary to the metaphysics of form, it is nevertheless a metaphysical principle that goes beyond sense experience and is never entirely justified by II. Indeed, there is a metaphysical m. in the description, through material images, of the spiritual world and the genesis of life, as is characteristic of the primitive Greek and Oriental cosmogonies and of the later theosophies that imitate or reproduce them.
Ancient m. is still quite close to these forms of naive metaphysics, although inspired by scientific and juridical interests. It is divided into atomistic and pneumatalogical forms. Atomistic m. is represented by the school of Abdera (Leucippus, Democritus [v.], fifth–fourth centuries B.C.) and by the school of Epicurus ([v.], third century B.C.–second century A.D.). They agree in identifying matter with bodies, and these with atoms or indivisible corpuscles, driven by perpetual motion through empty space. The weight of the atoms determines their deferent motion, and this is the same necessity (ἀνάγαν) that governs all events (v. ATOMISM). Ancient atomism is credited with formulating the principle of the conservation of matter and the canons of scientific research by empirical method, although these were also developed or accepted by other schools. Its attitude in religious and social matters is characteristic: the divinities exist only as corporeal entities; the universal mechanism of necessity excludes providence; religion as a relationship between man and God is useless, harmful, and superstitious; according to Epicurus, the soul dies with the body, and consequently there is neither a hereafter nor an underworld (according to Democritus, the soul possessed a weak survival subject to the laws of bodies); civilization is formed through the aggregation of material and utilitarian interests, and social order and the progress of the arts are due to these. Here many evolutionary views of the ancients are confusedly adopted and recast (adaptation of species; the origins of language and the social contract); but above all, from the inconsistencies of the doctrine and the aridity of reason, there emerges a poetic melancholy, a veiled pessimism regarding the fortunes of human imagination and life, which inspires the work of Lucretius and his imitators.
Pneumatological m. is represented by the Stoic school (third century B.C.–second century A.D.; V. STOICISM). hylozoism (v.), it appeals to the idea of a primitive and unique matter (the πνεῦμα igno), identical with the divine principle, which generates and permeates all things and sustains their life and animation, particularizing its own universal law and energy in the laws and principles productive of individual existences, recognizing itself in human reason, and reabsorbing everything in the periodic consummation and renewal of the world (ἀποκατάστασις). The Stoics thus came to propose the identity of matter and form, and therefore of necessity and freedom, fate and providence, experience and reason; but, for polemical reasons (the idealization of wisdom, the formalism of moral law, the religious sense of cosmic order), they did not succeed in eliminating dualism from their doctrine; indeed, they logically justified it in the contrast between activity and passivity, λόγος and πάθος. Their m. therefore did not take the path of science, pantheism (v.) and a return to metaphysics.
Related to the Hellenic schools and largely derived from them are the Oriental materialistic schools. In Indian philosophy, the systems of Nyāya and Vaiçeshika (third century B.C., with scholastic expositions from the third century A.D.) reorder atomistic theories within categorical schemes; the heterodox tendencies, no less ancient, of the Lokāyatas and Cārvākas propose, respectively, sensationalism and hedonism. In the Persian world, Manichaeism (third century A.D.) gives rise to the abstract and rigorous dualism between spirit and matter, which permitted the systematic survival of physical and ethical m., as a doctrine parallel to that of spiritual life, in the heresies of the Middle Ages (v. CATHARS).
With the triumph of Christianity, the danger that m. might ever become a definitive system ceased—a danger still immanent in the post-Aristotelian schools. There were, however, also Christian heresies of a materialistic character, for example, that of Montanus (v. d. 175), Tertullian (v.) in his final phase; this heresy attributed a material substance even to the soul. In the Christian Middle Ages (twelfth century), there was the pantheistic m. of Amalric of Bena (the identity of creator and creatures, the unity of the essence of all beings) and David of Dinant (e qui stultissime posuit Deum esse materiam primam: Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 3, a. 8, c); and logical m., or the theory of the indifference of the most general and substantial concepts toward the differences among the concepts of individual, species, and genus (Adelard of Bath, Walter of Mortagne), not without some scientific reference to Democritean atomism, known through the Arabs and Constantine the African (eleventh century). With the first revival of culture in the West, Epicureanism returned to fashion for juridical and literary reasons (Frederick II of Swabia, Guido Cavalcanti), and this vogue continued in humanism (Lorenzo Valla); but the new Epicureanism tended to come to terms with finalism or theism, so much so that Albert the Great already regarded Anaxagoras as an Epicurean as well. In the materialistic tendencies of the Renaissance, however, hylozoism and pantheism prevailed (Pomponazzi, Telesio, Libertinism).
Modern materialism begins in the seventeenth century, with the molecular theory of matter in which the ancient corpuscular theory and atomic hypothesis were renewed. It is developed in connection with the mechanical doctrine of nature in dualistic systems (Galilei, Descartes, Newton), but it was also upheld, independently of religious problems, as a systematic principle of natural philosophy by notable thinkers such as Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and Robert Boyle (1627–91), whose tendency might be designated as physical materialism. In the name of Epicurus, Gassendi restored, against Descartes and the synthesis he had attempted of atomic theories with the new rational mechanics, the classical corpuscular theory, seeking to explain the free will of atoms as deriving from their individual properties. Hobbes maintained that the corpuscular theory alone, through its mechanism, was sufficient to explain even the origin of living beings and of sensory consciousness. Boyle combined the atomic hypothesis with the magnetic and chemical properties of atoms that he had discovered. He was the first to give (De ipsa natura, 1682) a non-metaphysical definition of “matter” on purely scientific grounds. The philosophical current thus formed finally received the name “materialism” from Pierre Boyle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1695–97; 2nd ed. 1702); and Berkeley set out to destroy it by denying the existence of matter. But it continued to develop in that form throughout the eighteenth century in association with deism, beginning with John Toland (Letters to Serena, 1704: Motion essential to matter). It consequently produced singular expressions in that century: the Carteggio sull'essenza dell'anima (1713) of J. G. Westphal and J. D. Hochseisel; the Histoire naturelle de l'âme (1745) and L'homme machine of Julien Offray De La Mettrie; the Essai de cosmologie (1750) of Pierre Moreau de Maupertuis (1698–1759), who asked whether the atoms themselves might possess sensibility, and whether sensibility might not be an “epiphenomenon” of the brain; Diderot’s Pensées sur l'interprétation de la nature (1754); and the treatise De la nature by J. B. Robinet (1735–1820).
In the second half of the eighteenth century, by contrast, the tendency to unify materialism and atheism predominated, represented by D’Holbach’s Système de la nature (1774) and Pierre Maréchal’s Encyclopédie des Sans-Dieu (1800). It was opposed by physiological and ideological materialism, inspired by Condillac’s sensationalism (Traité des systèmes, 1749), with its doctrine of psychic phenomena as organic reactions to physical phenomena (Charles Bonnet, 1720–93; Claude Adrien Helvétius, 1715–73; Pierre Cabanis [v.], 1757–1808). This made it possible to conceive the genesis of life as something superior to matter, and the formation of consciousness as proceeding from elementary phenomena such as the irritability of tissues and sensation as an internal reaction to impressions. A parallel tendency was represented by English associationist materialism, which considered (David Hartley, 1705–57) sensations and ideas as “motions” of the soul, wholly similar and parallel to the vibrations of the nervous system and subject to the same kind of mechanical necessity; and proposed (Joseph Priestley [1733–1804], Free discussion of the doctrines of materialism, 1778) that psychic phenomena be studied in the physical phenomena corresponding to them and according to the same physical law of attraction and repulsion. It was then brought to logical perfection, and to materialistic conclusions, by James Mill (1773–1856: Analysis of the phenomena of human mind, 1829). Spinozism, too, was interpreted in that period in a materialistic-pantheistic sense (H. de Boulainvilliers, H. Heydenreich).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the ascendancy of idealism, the ideologues (v. IDEOLOGIA) came to accept, albeit covertly and with varying degrees of opposition, Kantian criticism, which regards physical “matter” and the scientific principles pertaining to it as postulates deriving from intellectual categories, whereas sensible matter is merely the inseparable content of intuitive form, and its existence in itself is unknowable. It cannot be denied, however, Kant (v.) assigns to the matter of knowledge, both intuitive and intellectual, a limiting function with respect to knowledge, which the subsequent transcendental and absolute idealism had to attempt to overcome. It therefore failed to replace entirely, with its doctrine, the traditional spiritualism of Cartesian inspiration and dualistic background.
Dialectical materialism (v.) arose instead around the middle of the nineteenth century through the negation of Hegel’s absolute idealism and gave rise to historical materialism. The economic materialism that followed from it, and was developed by the same authors, consequently identified “value” with productive labor and defined artistic and intellectual values as “surplus value” (v. VALORE). Dialectical, historical, and economic materialism, after enjoying varying fortunes in the nineteenth century, are still found united in the socialism and communism of the twentieth century, as at their beginnings. Attempts have repeatedly been made to trace them back to Kantian criticism, by unifying matter and the sensible form of praxis in a single act; but Marxists have been unable to overcome the initial sophism of the “reversal” of the idea into its content or matter, since the latter is comprehensible only insofar as it is contained in the idea itself.
Psychophysical materialism (A. Weber, L. Fechner, H. Helmholtz, H. Hertz) arose in the first half of the nineteenth century through the extension of the experimental method and the advances of the physical sciences to associationist psychology and materialist Spinozism; Fechner linked it with a pantheistic vision of the universe. It tends chiefly to demonstrate that constant and quantitative relations exist between physical phenomena and psychic phenomena, in accordance with the law of the conservation of energy (L. Meyer, 1840). With the development of the new atomic theories (C. Avogadro, P. Gay-Lussac), evolutionary cosmogony (P. R. Laplace, H. L. Helmholtz), and zoogony (K. Vogt, R. Virchow), mechanical-biological materialism also re-emerged around the middle of the century (K. Vogt, Köhlerglaube u. Wissenschaft, 1854; K. Moleschott [v.], Kreislauf des Lebens, 1852; L. Büchner [v.], Kraft u. Stoff, 1855). In this view, atomic matter constitutes the substratum of organized and organic material forms; the forces required to produce them are reduced to phenomena of matter or to an initial duplication of it; and every autonomy of psychic life in relation to the functions of the brain is denied. This new materialist dogmatism could not avoid concluding with a certain skepticism concerning the limits of scientific knowledge (P. Du Bois Reymond) and the possibility of excluding teleology from it (F. Überweg). In the social sciences, it corresponds to the ethical atomism of Max Stirner (Der Einzige, 1845) and to determinism.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, in connection with the predominance of the evolutionary method in the natural sciences (C. Darwin, H. Spencer) and of the electromagnetic theories of matter (W. I. Rankine, J. Maxwell, W. Ostwald), monistic (energistic, evolutionary) m. gained the upper hand. It replaced the classical concept of atomic matter with that of an indeterminate matter as primitive or fundamental and diffuse energy, from which the formation of atomic and molecular nuclei would derive, and which would continue to produce the successive phenomena of evolution. This hypothesis, which also reverses the traditional relationship between force and matter, was adopted in psychology as well with the theory of Mind-Stuff (psychic matter; V. TAIN). It would be theoretically reconcilable with spiritualist systems, since energy is rather form than matter; but thus far it has inspired monistic systems akin to pantheism and decidedly materialistic. Such was the system of the evolutionary cosmogony of Ernesto Haeckel and Enrico Morselli at the end of the last century, and such is the contemporary system of the quantum physics of Max Planck, which once again unites energy with a primitive quantity of nuclear value.
The initial error of m. was precisely to attribute to the atom a primitive and uncreated existence, and this error is repeated even in modern activist and energetic forms. Neither the atom nor the instant, neither the elements of extended matter nor those of physical forces or energies, constitute the act of life. Still more evident is their radical insufficiency to account for the forms of spiritual life (truth, freedom, duty), which are essentially irreducible, owing to their ideal value of universality and necessity, to the pure empirical becoming in space and time in which every m. is resolved and brought to completion (v. ATEISMO; ATOMISMO; DUALISMO; MONISMO; and the individual thinkers cited).