Word: materialistic
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Dates: during 1941-1941
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Girded like Siegfrieds, rabid Nazis had labeled evolution a British-Plutocratic-Jewish-Materialist theory. They abused it as "the theory of universal racelessness," a standing menace to Nazi racial dogma (Rasselehre). In Natur & Kultur, one Otto Muck recognized what democratic scientists had long pointed out, that "racial theory and evolutionary theory are incompatible and bluntly contradictory." So the Nazis "plugged" a different theory-a theory of creation, according to which man developed suddenly during some splendid Wagnerian cataclysm which thrust lower organisms into a new environment where only those creatures survived who modified themselves through sheer force of will power...
Tell such a man that you are not a Darwinian, and he will usually conclude that you must be a Fundamentalist. If you do not believe in the economic interpretation of history, you must be a "mystical Tory." If you are not a materialist, you must be an idealist. "Ours is a scientific world, a literate world, saturated with -I will not say, the precise ideas of the three materialists-but surely with their deeper spirit, their faith in matter, their love of system, their abstract scientism, and their one-sided interpretation of Nature." How directly their theoretical ideas have...