e principal part of natural
science. Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, are
frequently quoted as his authorities. According to his doctrine, the
senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is
based upon experience and consists in subjecting the data furnished by
the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis,
comparison, observation, experiment, are the chief instruments of such
a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter movement is
the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and
mathematical movement, but even more as an impulse, a vital spirit, a
tension, as a qual (a torture)--to use an expression of Jacob
Bohme's--of matter.

In Bacon, as its first creator, materialism still conceals within
itself in an ingenuous manner the germs of a many-sided development.
On the one hand, the sensuous poetic glamour in which matter is bathed
entices the whole personality of man. On the other, the aphoristically
formulated doctrine swarms with theological inconsistencies.

In its further development, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is
the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon
the senses loses its poetic bloom, and Becomes the abstract experience
of the mathematician. The physical movement is sacrificed to the
mechanical or mathematical; geometry is proclaimed as the chief
science. Materialism takes to misanthropy. In order to overcome
misanthropic, fleshless spiritualism on the latter's own ground,
materialism must mortify its own flesh and turn ascetic. It reappears
as an intellectual entity, but it also develops all the ruthless
consistency of the intellect.

Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues that if the senses furnish men
with all knowledge, then concepts and ideas are nothing but phantoms
of the material world more or less divested of their sensual forms.
All philosophy can do is to give these phantoms names. One name may be
applied to several phantoms. There may even be names of names. It
would, however, imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we
contended that all ideas had their origin in the world of senses, and,
on the other hand, that a word was worth more than a word; that
besides the individual beings known to us by our senses, there existed
also beings of a general nature. An immaterial substance is rather the
same absurdity as an immaterial body. Bodies, being, substance are b