Carl Vogt
From Philosopedia
Vogt, Carl (5 July 1817 - 5 May 1895)
Vogt, the son of a distinguished naturalist, was born in Gießen, Germany, then emigrated to Geneva, Switzerland. He was a scientist, a geologist, a physiologist, an atheist, and a scientific materialist.
Finngeir Hiorth has compared Vogt with Karl Marx, “but it is clear that Vogt’s anarchism and laissez-faire ideology were quite different from Marx’s ideas. Vogt spoke of ‘false prophets’ without thinking of Marx. But eventually his words applied to authoritarian Marxism.” (New Humanist, February 1994). In fact, he came to dislike Marx, and the hatred was mutual, as found in Marx's Herr Vogt (1860).
In Neuchâtel, Vogt at one time worked as an assistant for Louis Agassiz [[1]], where in 1842 he discovered the mechanism of apoptosis, the programmed cell death, while studying the development of the tadpole of the midwife toad.
In Paris, the writer of books on physiology and science met anarchists such as Michael Bakunin and Pierre Joseph Proudhon.
In Germany, he was engaged in politics, serving in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848-1849 and later in Switzerland.
According to Hiorth, Vogt came to denounce the middle class, religion, and all forms of government, and he called for the establishment of anarchy. He attacked Rudolf Wagner as a superstitious scientist who still believed in a Creator. Vogt’s importance, Hiorth wrote, is that he “influenced the philosophical pattern of ‘scientific’ or physicalistic materialism, as different from historical and dialectical materialism."
In this way Vogt played an important role in the rise of atheism and materialism in Germany. He once referred to Christmas as “the festival which brought the hypocrisy of humility into the world.”
In addition Vogt was a political radical. In Vogt’s Lectures on Man, His Position in Creation and in the History of the Earth (1863), he endorsed Darwinism. Charles Darwin mentioned Vogt's support for the theory of evolution in the introduction to his The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871).
Also, Vogt contributed to leading freethought journals in Germany and Switzerland.
