_________
Nationality	German
Known for	Extreme materialism Extreme atheism
Alma matter	University of Giessen University of Strasbourg University of Würzburg University of Vienna

See main: Extreme atheism

“The universe, that is the all, is made neither of gods nor of men, but ever has been and ever will be an eternal living fire, kindling and extinguishing in destined measure.”

— Heraclitus (c.475BC)

“Where there are three students of nature, there are two atheists.”

— Buchner (1884) or an old saying [?]

“Just as man and woman attract one another, so oxygen attracts hydrogen, and, in loving union with it, forms water, that mighty omnipresent element, without which no life nor thought would be possible.”

— Ludwig Buchner (c.1855), cited by Henry Finck (1887) in Romantic Love and Beauty (pgs. 6-7)

“Potassium and phosphorous entertain such a violent passion for oxygen that even under water they burn—i.e. unite themselves with the beloved object.”

— Ludwig Buchner (c.1855), cited by Henry Finck (1887) in Romantic Love and Beauty (pgs. 6-7)

“For it is love, in the form of attraction, which chains stone to stone, earth to earth, star to star, and which holds together the mighty edifice on which we stand, and on the surface of which, like parasites, we carry on our existence, barely noticeable in the infinite universe; and on which we shall continue to exist till that distant period when its component parts will again be resolved into that primal chaos from which it laboriously severed itself millions of years ago, and became a separate planet.”

— Ludwig Buchner (c.1855), cited by Henry Finck (1887) in Romantic Love and Beauty (pgs. 6-7)

In 1852, Buchner became lecturer in medicine at the university of Tübingen, where he published his great work Kraft und Stoff [Force and Matter] (1855). In this work, the product, according to Lange, of a fanatical enthusiasm for humanity, he sought to demonstrate the indestructibility of matter and force, and the finality of physical force. The extreme materialism of this work excited so much opposition that he was compelled to give up his post at Tübingen. He retired to Darmstadt, where he practised as a physician and contributed regularly to pathological and physiological magazines.

Buchner continued his philosophical work in defense of materialism, and published Natur und Geist [Nature and Spirit] (1857), Aus Natur und Wissenschaft [From Nature and Science] (vol. i., 1862; vol. ii., 1884), Fremdes und Eigenes aus dem geistigen Leben der Gegenwart [Foreign and Private from the Spiritual Life of the Present] (1890), Darwinismus und Socialismus [Darwinism and Socialism] (1894), Im Dienste der Wahrheit [In the Service of Truth] (1899). He died at Darmstadt on the 1st of May 1899.

In estimating Büchner's philosophy it must be remembered that he was primarily a physiologist, not a metaphysician. Matter and force (or energy) are infinite; the conservation of force follows from the imperishability of matter, the ultimate basis of all science. Büchner is not always clear in his theory of the relation between matter and force. At one time he refuses to explain it, but generally he assumes that all natural and spiritual forces are indwelling in matter:

"Just as a steam engine produces motion, so the intricate organic complex of force-bearing substance in an animal organism produces a total sum of certain effects, which, when bound together in a unity, are called by us mind, soul, thought." (Kraft und Stoff, 7th ed., p. 130)

Here he postulates force and mind as emanating from original matter—a materialistic monism. But in other parts of his works he suggests that mind and matter are two different aspects of that which is the basis of all things—a monism which is not necessarily materialistic, and which, in the absence of further explanation, constitutes a confession of failure. Büchner was much less concerned to establish a scientific metaphysic than to protest against the romantic idealism of his predecessors and the theological interpretations of the universe. Nature according to him is purely physical; it has no purpose, no will, no laws imposed by extraneous authority, no supernatural ethical sanction.”

“Throughout his life Einstein was a man of the book, to a much higher degree than other scientists. The remarkably diverse collection of volumes in his library grew constantly. If we look only at the German-language books published before 1910 that survived Einstein’s Princeton household, the list includes much of the cannon of the time: Boltzmann, Buchner, Friedrich Hebbel, the works of Heine in two editions, Helmholtz, von Humboldt, the many books of Kant, Gotthold Lessing, Mach, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. But what looms largest are the collected works of Johann von Goethe in a thirty-six volume edition and another of twelve volumes, plus two volumes on his Optics, the exchange of letters between Goethe and Schiller, and a separate volume of Faust.”

— Gerald Holton (2008), on the contents of Einstein’s personal library. [6]

“Mach crowed that he had slain the ‘stuff and force’ dragon of the mechanistic materialism of Buchner, Vogt (Ѻ), and Moleschott. Mach, in short, confused the laws with definitions, and inverted the correct logical relation ‘dynamics entails kinematics.’ He thus sacrificed Newtonian mechanics on the idealist altar.”

— Mario Bunge (2010), Matter and Mind: a Philosophical Inquiry [7]