Being a thorough materialist, Democritus held that thought can be explained in the same way that any other phenomenon can, namely, as the movement of atoms.
Skovorodnikoff was a materialist, a Darwinist, and considered every manifestation of abstract morality, or, worse still, piety, not only as contemptible and absurd but as an affront to his person.
Whether Berkeley's arguments for the reality of God and spiritual beings successfully refuted materialism and skepticism remains questionable, for his arguments contained some of the flaws he held against the materialists.
Idealists, materialists, and ordinary mortals have been in agreement on one point: that they knew sufficiently what they meant by the words " mind" and " matter" to be able to conduct their debate intelligently.
Since it is not likely to persuade the materialists who affirm the conditional clause in the first of these hypothetical statements, what is at issue here can be put to an empirical test in the following manner.