Materialism is a system of philosophical thought that explains the nature of the world as entirely dependent on matter.  As a rational cultural movement it has had intermittant success in influencing the course of human social development starting as early as the 4th century BC, when the Greek Democritus set out his system of atomism in which all phenomena are explained by sub- visual particles and their motions in otherwise empty space.  Epicurus and the Stoics also conceived of reality as material in its nature.  For the next millennium or so Christianity ensured the dominance of transcendental thought about matter and its divine origins, and European materialism did not emerge as a strong social force again until the 17th century when Thomas Hobbes took the position that consciousness essentially belongs to the physiological world of the senses.  The culminating expression of materialism came in 18th century France with the 'Systeme de la nature' of Baron d'Holbach.

Throughout history, materialism has always gained ground at times of scientific advance and this is particularly evident in Victorian Britain when prominent scientists clashed repeatedly with religious orthodoxy. A good example of this conflict is John Tyndall's confrontation with the religious establishment who he regarded as promoting anti- intellectual and anti-scientific tenets.  The public clash came in 1874 when he gave the Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Belfast. Tyndall was a self- educated physicist who climbed to the top of the European scientific establishment and was a member of a Royal Society presssure group promoting the adoption of a national scientific education system, a group which included Thomas Henry Huxley and Michael Faraday.  His Belfast lecture was denounced from the pulpits and pamphlets attacking its content continued to appear for years afterwards. 

As a European polymath, among his friends  Tyndall numbered Louis Pasteur, Thomas Carlyle and Alfred Tennyson. The latter was deeply disturbed by the difficulties he had in making a personal adjustment to a universe in which the great designer-God of his childhood was being replaced by a 'force of nature' with no interest in the ultimate fate of humanity.  His poems reflect this dilemma.  They include exquisite descriptions of natural history alongside others expressing despair at the inhumanity of man who is part of a process of evolution that is blind to humanity's greatest intellectual achievements.  His lifelong efforts to provide a personal religion for reconciling science and religion did not produce any novel philosophy, but his poems remain timeless expressions of the utterences of 'thinking man' who wants desparately to fit into a greater scheme of things.