stition that philosophical idealism pivots around a belief in
moral, that is in social ideals, arose with the German non-philosophical
Philistine, who commits to memory the few philosophical morsels which he
finds in Schiller's poems. Nobody has criticised more severely the
feeble Categorical Imperative of Kant--feeble because it demands the
impossible and therefore never attains to any reality--nobody has
ridiculed more cruelly the Philistine sentimentality imparted by
Schiller, because of its unrealizable ideals, than just the idealist par
excellence, Hegel. (See e. g. Phenomenology.)

In the second place, it cannot be avoided that all human sensations pass
through the brain--even eating and drinking which are commenced
consequent upon hunger and thirst felt by the brain and ended in
consequence of sensations of satisfaction similarly experienced by the
brain. The realities of the outer world impress themselves upon the
brain of man, reflect themselves there, as feelings, thoughts, impulses,
volitions, in short, as ideal tendencies, and in this form become ideal
forces. If the circumstance that this man follows ideal tendencies at
all, and admits that ideal forces exercise an influence over him, if
this makes an idealist of him, every normally developed man is in some
sense a born idealist, and under such circumstances how can materialists
exist?

In the third place, the conviction that humanity, at least at present,
as a whole, progresses, has absolutely nothing to do with the antagonism
between materialism and idealism. The French materialists had this
conviction, to a fanatical degree, no less than the deists, Voltaire and
Rousseau, and made the greatest personal sacrifices for it. If anybody
ever concentrated his whole life to the enthusiasm for truth and
justice, taking the words in a moral sense, it was Diderot, for example.
Therefore, since Starcke has explained all this as idealism, it simply
proves that the word materialism has lost all significance for him, as
has also the antagonism between the aims of the two.

The fact is that Starcke here makes an unpardonable concession to the
prejudices of the Philistines caused by the long continued slanders of
the clergy against the word materialism, even if without consciously
doing so. The Philistine understands by the word materialism, gluttony,
drunkenness, carnal lust, and fraudulent speculation, in short all the
enormous vices to which he himself is secretly