Moleschott, Jakob

MOLESCHOTT, JAKOB. - Dutch physiologist and physician, b. at s-Hertogenbosch on 9 April 1822, d. at Rome on 20 May 1893. He first taught at Heidelberg (1847-54), opposed for his materialistic orientation, then at Zurich. There, having become acquainted with F. De Sanctis, minister of Education, he was appointed professor at the University of Turin (1861); he then taught at Rome (from 1879). He was a senator of the Kingdom of Italy.

He carried out 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), etc., and on human physiology (theory of cardiac innervation). His fundamental work Der Kreislauf des Lebens (Mainz 1852) marks the transition from the philosophy of nature, of Romantic inspiration, to the materialistic conception of the world as a system of force and matter, in which M. influenced Büchner (v.). Unlike the dogmatic materialists, M. still admits with Kant that the space and time in which the world presents itself are subjective: but their content, the substance that hides between physical phenomena and psychic phenomena, is for him matter, not spirit. Consciousness itself has the brain as its organ, nor any reality other than in this. The material world is regulated by a continuous circulation of forces, of the various types and orders of existence, which help one another and transform into one another. Thus the mutual relations of nature and society, of stock and environment keep man alive. These quite naive views were compared by his contemporaries to the scholastic metaphysics of substances and to medieval hylomorphism (v.): but they do not go beyond the materialistic method.

Santino Caramella