MOLESCHOTT, JAKOB. - Dutch physiologist and physician, born in ’s-Hertogenbosch on 9 April 1822, died in Rome on 20 May 1893. He first taught at Heidelberg (1847–54), where he was opposed for his materialistic orientation, then at Zurich. There, after being introduced by F. De Sanctis, the Minister of Education, he was appointed professor at the University of Turin (1861); he later taught in Rome (from 1879). He was a senator of the Kingdom of Italy.
He conducted scientific research on the phenomena of nutrition and metabolism in plants and animals (Physiologie des Stoffwechsels in Pflanzen und Tieren, Erlangen 1851; Untersuchungen zur Naturlehre des Menschen und der Tiere, 13 vols., Frankfurt, then Giessen 1857–85),
Moldavia - Ascent to Calvary. Episode of the Cyrenean. Under St. Theodore the Recruit and St. Theodore the Stratelate. Fresco from the 16th century. Dobrovat, Monastery.
and on human physiology (theory of cardiac innervation). His fundamental work Der Kreislauf des Lebens (Magnozza 1852) marks the transition from the philosophy of nature, inspired by Romanticism, to the materialistic conception of the world as a system of force and matter, in which M. influenced Büchner (v.). Unlike dogmatic materialists, M. still admits with Kant that space and time in which the world appears are subjective; but their content, the substance hidden between physical phenomena and psychic phenomena, is for him matter, not spirit. Consciousness itself has the brain as its organ and no other reality than this. The material world is governed by a continuous circulation of forces of various types and orders of existence, which assist one another and transform into one another. Thus the reciprocal relations of nature and society, of lineage and environment sustain human life. These rather naive views were compared by contemporaries to the scholastic metaphysics of substances and to medieval Enlightenment (v.): yet they do not surpass the materialist method.