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 addicted, and by the word idealism he understands the belief in virtue, universal humanitarianism, and a better world as a whole, of which he boasts before others, and in which he himself at the very most believes, only as long as he must endure the blues which follow necessarily from his customary "materialistic" excesses, and so sings his favorite song--"What is man?--Half beast, half angel." As for the rest, Starcke takes great pains to defend Feuerbach against the attacks and doctrines of those collegians who plume themselves in Germany as philosophers now-a-days. It is true that this is a matter of importance to those people who take an interest in the afterbirth of the German classic philosophy, to Starcke himself this might appear necessary. We spare the reader this, however. FOOTNOTE: