Materialism coarsens and petrifies everything, making everything vulgar, and every truth false.

Amiel’s line treats “materialism” less as a technical doctrine than as a cultural habit: the tendency to measure reality only by tangible utility, profit, or physical fact. To “coarsen” and “petrify” suggests a double harm—sensibility becomes crude, and the mind becomes rigid. When everything is rendered “vulgar,” higher distinctions (moral, spiritual, aesthetic) are leveled; what once demanded reverence or nuance is treated as common merchandise. The final clause—“every truth false”—implies that even genuine truths are distorted when filtered through a purely material lens: they may be instrumentalized, stripped of meaning, or turned into slogans, losing their integrity as truths about human purpose and value.