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270 with matter, how life, and with life in turn, how thought—accomplishes its sublime cycle. He expounds the history of his ideas in his autobiography (An meine Freunde, Reminiscences, 1895) and says that as a matter of fact his only contention was against dualism, and that his theory—on account of the inherent relation of force, mind and matter—might quite as well be called idealism as materialism!

The physician, Louis Büchner (1824–1899), whose Kraft und Stoff (1855) was for a long time one of the most widely read books of the age, similarly goes beyond the specific views of materialism, only less clearly, and this is likewise the case with Heinrich Czolbe (1819–1873), who, like Büchner and Moleschott, was also a physician. Czolbe directly inverts the proposition that sensation is motion, and consequently attains an idealistic theory (Die Enistehung des Selbstbewusstseins, 1856). In his later works he undertook to establish a new world theory by the use of more speculative methods. It is a matter of peculiar interest in the case of Czolbe that he is fully aware of assuming certain axiomatic principles, namely, the theoretical requirement of the perspicuous and intuitive nature of thought, and the ethical requirement of life and its relations in the present world-order, with complete exclusion of everything transcendent.

A little later the famous zoologist, Ernst Haeckel (born 1834), undertook to organize the latest results and hypotheses of natural science into a system of Monism. The first work specifically devoted to this purpose was his Generalle Morphologie (1862–1866), which was followed by his more vigorous and more dogmatic Welträtzel (1899). He regards everything as animated; atoms and ceils have souls as well as the brain. These