IV.—MONISTIC ANTHROPOGENY
The fourth and last phase of the world’s history must be for us men that latest period of time which has witnessed the development of our own race. Lamarck (1809) had already recognized that this evolution is only rationally conceivable as the outcome of a natural process, by “descent from the apes,” our next of kin among the mammals. Huxley then proved, in his famous essay on The Place of Man in Nature, that this momentous thesis is an inevitable consequence of the theory of descent, and is thoroughly established by the facts of anatomy, embryology, and palæontology. He considered this “question of all questions” to be substantially answered. Darwin followed with a brilliant discussion of the question under many aspects in his Descent of Man (1871). I had myself devoted a special chapter to this important problem of the science of evolution in my General Morphology (1866). In 1874 I published my Anthropogeny, which contains the first attempt to trace the descent of man through the entire chain of his ancestry right up to the earliest archigonous monera; the attempt was based equally on the three great “documents” of evolutionary science—anatomy, embryology, and palæontology. The progress we have made in anthropogenetic research during the last few years is described in the paper which I read on “Our Present Knowledge of the Origin of Man” at the International Congress of Zoologists at Cambridge in 1898.[28]
[CHAPTER XIV]
THE UNITY OF NATURE
The Monism of the Cosmos—Essential Unity of Organic and Inorganic Nature—Carbon-Theory—The Hypothesis of Abiogenesis—Mechanical and Purposive Causes—Mechanicism and Teleology in Kant’s Works—Design in the Organic and Inorganic Worlds—Vitalism—Neovitalism—Dysteleology (the Moral of the Rudimentary Organs)—Absence of Design in, and Imperfection of, Nature—Telic Action in Organized Bodies—Its Absence in Ontogeny and Phylogeny—The Platonist “Ideas”—No Moral Order Discoverable in the History of the Organic World, of the Vertebrates, or of the Human Race—Prevision—Design and Chance
One of the first things to be proved by the law of substance is the basic fact that any natural force can be directly or indirectly converted into any other. Mechanical and chemical energy, sound and heat, light and electricity, are mutually convertible; they seem to be but different modes of one and the same fundamental force or energy. Thence follows the important thesis of the unity of all natural forces, or, as it may also be expressed, the “monism of energy.” This fundamental principle is now generally recognized in the entire province of physics and chemistry, as far as it applies to inorganic substances.
It seems to be otherwise with the organic world and its wealth of color and form. It is, of course, obvious that a great part of the phenomena of life may be immediately traced to mechanical and chemical energy, and to the effects of electricity and light. For other vital processes, however, especially for psychic activity and consciousness, such an interpretation is vigorously contested. Yet the modern science of evolution has achieved the task of constructing a bridge between these two apparently irreconcilable provinces. We are now certain that all the phenomena of organic life are subject to the universal law of substance no less than the phenomena of the inorganic universe.
The unity of nature which necessarily follows, and the demolition of the earlier dualism, are certainly among the most valuable results of modern evolution. Thirty-three years ago I made an exhaustive effort to establish this “monism of the cosmos” and the essential unity of organic and inorganic nature by a thorough, critical demonstration, and a comparison of the accordance of these two great divisions of nature with regard to matter, form, and force.[29] A short epitome of the result is given in the fifteenth chapter of my Natural History of Creation. The views I put forward are accepted by the majority of modern scientists, but an attempt has been made in many quarters lately to dispute them and to maintain the old antithesis of the two divisions of nature. The ablest of these is to be found in the recent Welt als That of the botanist Reinke. It defends pure cosmological dualism with admirable lucidity and consistency, and only goes to prove how utterly untenable the teleological system is that is connected therewith. According to the author, physical and chemical forces alone are at work in the entire field of inorganic nature, while in the organic world we find “intelligent forces,” regulative or dominant forces. The law of substance is supposed to apply to the one, but not to the other. On the whole, it is a question of the old antithesis of a mechanical and a teleological system. But before we go more fully into it, let us glance briefly at two other theories, which seem to me to be of great importance in the decision of that controversy—the carbon-theory and the theory of spontaneous generation.
Physiological chemistry has, after countless analyses, established the following five facts during the last forty years:
I. No other elements are found in organic bodies than those of the inorganic world.
II. The combinations of elements which are peculiar to organisms, and which are responsible for their vital phenomena, are compound protoplasmic substances, of the group of albuminates.
III. Organic life itself is a chemico-physical process, based on the metabolism (or interchange of material) of these albuminates.
IV. The only element which is capable of building up these compound albuminates, in combination with other elements (oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulphur), is carbon.
V. These protoplasmic compounds of carbon are distinguished from most other chemical combinations by their very intricate molecular structure, their instability, and their jelly-like consistency.
On the basis of these five fundamental facts the following “carbon-theory” was erected thirty-three years ago: “The peculiar chemico-physical properties of carbon—especially the fluidity and the facility of decomposition of the most elaborate albuminoid compounds of carbon—are the sole and the mechanical causes of the specific phenomena of movement, which distinguish organic from inorganic substances, and which are called life, in the usual sense of the word” (see The Natural History of Creation). Although this “carbon-theory” is warmly disputed in some quarters, no better monistic theory has yet appeared to replace it. We have now a much better and more thorough knowledge of the physiological relations of cell-life, and of the chemistry and physics of the living protoplasm, than we had thirty-three years ago, and so it is possible to make a more confident and effective defence of the carbon-theory.
The old idea of spontaneous generation is now taken in many different senses. It is owing to this indistinctness of the idea, and its application to so many different hypotheses, that the problem is one of the most contentious and confused of the science of the day. I restrict the idea of spontaneous generation—also called abiogenesis or archigony—to the first development of living protoplasm out of inorganic carbonates, and distinguish two phases in this “beginning of biogenesis”: (1) autogony, or the rise of the simplest protoplasmic substances in a formative fluid, and (2) plasmogony, the differentiation of individual primitive organisms out of these protoplasmic compounds, in the form of monera. I have treated this important, though difficult, problem so exhaustively in the fifteenth chapter of my Natural History of Creation that I may content myself here with referring to it. There is also a very searching and severely scientific inquiry into it in my General Morphology (1866). Naegeli has also treated the hypothesis in quite the same sense in his mechanico-physiological theory of descent (1884), and has represented it to be an indispensable thesis in any natural theory of evolution. I entirely agree with his assertion that “to reject abiogenesis is to admit a miracle.”
The hypothesis of spontaneous generation and the allied carbon-theory are of great importance in deciding the long-standing conflict between the teleological (dualistic) and the mechanical (monistic) interpretation of phenomena. Since Darwin gave us the key to the monistic explanation of organization in his theory of selection forty years ago, it has become possible for us to trace the splendid variety of orderly tendencies of the organic world to mechanical, natural causes, just as we could formerly in the inorganic world alone. Hence the supernatural and telic forces, to which the scientist had had recourse, have been rendered superfluous. Modern metaphysics, however, continues to regard the latter as indispensable and the former as inadequate.
No philosopher has done more than Immanuel Kant in defining the profound distinction between efficient and final causes, with relation to the interpretation of the whole cosmos. In his well-known earlier work on The General Natural History and Theory of the Heavens he made a bold attempt “to treat the constitution and the mechanical origin of the entire fabric of the universe according to Newtonian laws.” This “cosmological nebular theory” was based entirely on the mechanical phenomena of gravitation. It was expanded and mathematically established later on by Laplace. When the famous French astronomer was asked by Napoleon I. where God, the creator and sustainer of all things, came in in his system, he clearly and honestly replied: “Sire, I have managed without that hypothesis.” That indicated the atheistic character which this mechanical cosmogony shares with all the other inorganic sciences. This is the more noteworthy because the theory of Kant and Laplace is now almost universally accepted; every attempt to supersede it has failed. When atheism is denounced as a grave reproach, as it so often is, it is well to remember that the reproach extends to the whole of modern science, in so far as it gives a purely mechanical interpretation of the inorganic world.
Mechanicism (in the Kantian sense) alone can give us a true explanation of natural phenomena, for it traces them to their real efficient causes, to blind and unconscious agencies, which are determined in their action only by the material constitution of the bodies we are investigating. Kant himself emphatically affirms that “there can be no science without this mechanicism of nature,” and that the capacity of human reason to give a mechanical interpretation of phenomena is unlimited. But when he came subsequently to give an elucidation of the complex phenomena of organic nature in his critique of the teleological system, he declared that these mechanical causes were inadequate; that in this we must call final causes to our assistance. It is true, he said, that even here we must recognize the theoretical faculty of the mind to give a mechanical interpretation, but its actual competence to do so is restricted. He grants it this capacity to some extent; but for the majority of the vital processes (and especially for man’s psychic activity) he thinks we are bound to postulate final causes. The remarkable §79 of the critique of judgment bears the characteristic heading: “On the Necessity for the Subordination of the Mechanical Principle to the Teleological in the Explanation of a Thing as a Natural End.” It seemed to Kant so impossible to explain the orderly processes in the living organism without postulating supernatural final causes (that is, a purposive creative force) that he said: “It is quite certain that we cannot even satisfactorily understand, much less elucidate, the nature of an organism and its internal faculty on purely mechanical natural principles; it is so certain, indeed, that we may confidently say, ‘It is absurd for a man to conceive the idea even that some day a Newton will arise who can explain the origin of a single blade of grass by natural laws which are uncontrolled by design’—such a hope is entirely forbidden us.” Seventy years afterwards this impossible “Newton of the organic world” appeared in the person of Charles Darwin, and achieved the great task that Kant had deemed impracticable.
Since Newton (1682) formulated the law of gravitation, and Kant (1755) established “the constitution and mechanical origin of the entire fabric of the world on Newtonian laws,” and Laplace (1796) provided a mathematical foundation for this law of cosmic mechanicism, the whole of the inorganic sciences have become purely mechanical, and at the same time purely atheistic. Astronomy, cosmogony, geology, meteorology, and inorganic physics and chemistry are now absolutely ruled by mechanical laws on a mathematical foundation. The idea of “design” has wholly disappeared from this vast province of science. At the close of the nineteenth century, now that this monistic view has fought its way to general recognition, no scientist ever asks seriously of the “purpose” of any single phenomenon in the whole of this great field. Is any astronomer likely to inquire seriously to-day into the purpose of planetary motion, or a mineralogist to seek design in the structure of a crystal? Does the physicist investigate the purpose of electric force, or the chemist that of atomic weight? We may confidently answer in the negative—certainly not, in the sense that God, or a purposive natural force, had at some time created these fundamental laws of the mechanism of the universe with a definite design, and causes them to work daily in accordance with his rational will. The anthropomorphic notion of a deliberate architect and ruler of the world has gone forever from this field; the “eternal, iron laws of nature” have taken his place.
But the idea of design has a very great significance and application in the organic world. We do undeniably perceive a purpose in the structure and in the life of an organism. The plant and the animal seem to be controlled by a definite design in the combination of their several parts, just as clearly as we see in the machines which man invents and constructs; as long as life continues the functions of the several organs are directed to definite ends, just as is the operation of the various parts of a machine. Hence it was quite natural that the older naïve study of nature, in explaining the origin and activity of the living being, should postulate a creator who had “arranged all things with wisdom and understanding,” and had constructed each plant and animal according to the special purpose of its life. The conception of this “almighty creator of heaven and earth” was usually quite anthropomorphic; he created “everything after its kind.” As long as the creator seemed to man to be of human shape, to think with his brain, see with his eyes, and fashion with his hands, it was possible to form a definite picture of this “divine engineer” and his artistic work in the great workshop of creation. This was not so easy when the idea of God became refined, and man saw in his “invisible God” a creator without organs—a gaseous being. Still more unintelligible did these anthropomorphic ideas become when physiology substituted for the conscious, divine architect an unconscious, creative “vital force”—a mysterious, purposive, natural force, which differed from the familiar forces of physics and chemistry, and only took these in part, during life, into its service. This vitalism prevailed until about the middle of the nineteenth century. Johannes Müller, the great Berlin physiologist, was the first to menace it with a destructive dose of facts. It is true that the distinguished biologist had himself (like all others in the first half of the century) been educated in a belief in this vital force, and deemed it indispensable for an elucidation of the ultimate sources of life; nevertheless, in his classical and still unrivalled Manual of Physiology (1833) he gave a demonstrative proof that there is really nothing to be said for this vital force. Müller himself, in a long series of remarkable observations and experiments, showed that most of the vital processes in the human organism (and in the other animals) take place according to physical and chemical laws, and that many of them are capable of mathematical determination. That was no less true of the animal functions of the muscles and nerves, and of both the higher and the lower sense-organs, than of the vegetal functions of digestion, assimilation, and circulation. Only two branches of the life of the organism, mental action and reproduction, retained any element of mystery, and seemed inexplicable without assuming a vital force. But immediately after Müller’s death such important discoveries and advances were made in these two branches that the uneasy “phantom of vital force” was driven from its last refuge. By a very remarkable coincidence Johannes Müller died in the year 1858, which saw the publication of Darwin’s first communication concerning his famous theory. The theory of selection solved the great problem that had mastered Müller—the question of the origin of orderly arrangements from purely mechanical causes.
Darwin, as we have often said, had a twofold immortal merit in the field of philosophy—firstly, the reform of Lamarck’s theory of descent, and its establishment on the mass of facts accumulated in the course of the half-century; secondly, the conception of the theory of selection, which first revealed to us the true causes of the gradual formation of species. Darwin was the first to point out that the “struggle for life” is the unconscious regulator which controls the reciprocal action of heredity and adaptation in the gradual transformation of species; it is the great “selective divinity” which, by a purely “natural choice,” without preconceived design, creates new forms, just as selective man creates new types by an “artificial choice” with a definite design. That gave us the solution of the great philosophic problem: “How can purposive contrivances be produced by purely mechanical processes without design?” Kant held the problem to be insoluble, although Empedocles had pointed out the direction of the solution two thousand years before. His principle of “teleological mechanism” has become more and more accepted of late years, and has furnished a mechanical explanation even of the finest and most recondite processes of organic life by “the functional self-production of the purposive structure.” Thus have we got rid of the transcendental “design” of the ideological philosophy of the schools, which was the greatest obstacle to the growth of a rational and monistic conception of nature.
Very recently, however, this ancient phantom of a mystic vital force, which seemed to be effectually banished, has put in a fresh appearance; a number of distinguished biologists have attempted to reintroduce it under another name. The clearest presentation of it is to be found in the Welt als That, of the Kiel botanist, J. Reinke. He takes upon himself the defence of the notion of miracle, of theism, of the Mosaic story of creation, and of the constancy of species; he calls “vital forces,” in opposition to physical forces, the directive or dominant forces. Other neovitalists prefer, in the good old anthropomorphic style, a “supreme” engineer, who has endowed organic substance with a purposive structure, directed to the realization of a definite plan. These curious teleological hypotheses, and the objections to Darwinism which generally accompany them, do not call for serious scientific refutation to-day.
Thirty-three years ago I gave the title of “dysteleology” to the science of those extremely interesting and significant biological facts, which, in the most striking fashion, give a direct contradiction to the teleological idea “of the purposive arrangement of the living organism.”[30] This “science of rudimentary, abortive, arrested, distorted, atrophied, and cataplastic individuals” is based on an immense quantity of remarkable phenomena, which were long familiar to zoologists and botanists, but were not properly interpreted, and their great philosophic significance appreciated, until Darwin.
All the higher animals and plants, or, in general, all organisms which are not entirely simple in structure, but are made up of a number of organs in orderly co-operation, are found, on close examination, to possess a number of useless or inoperative members, sometimes, indeed, hurtful and dangerous. In the flowers of most plants we find, besides the actual sex-leaves that effect reproduction, a number of other leaf-organs which have no use or meaning (arrested or “miscarried” pistils, fruit, corona, and calix-leaves, etc.). In the two large and variegated classes of flying animals, birds and insects, there are, besides the forms which make constant use of their wings, a number of species which have undeveloped wings and cannot fly. In nearly every class of the higher animals which have eyes there are certain types that live in the dark; they have eyes, as a rule, but undeveloped and useless for vision. In our own human organism we have similar useless rudimentary structures in the muscles of the ear, in the eye-lid, in the nipple and milk-gland of the male, and in other parts of the body; indeed, the vermiform appendix of our cæcum is not only useless, but extremely dangerous, and inflammation of it is responsible for a number of deaths every year.
Neither the old mystic vitalism nor the new, equally irrational, neovitalism can give any explanation of these and many other purposeless contrivances in the structure of the plant and the animal; but they are very simple in the light of the theory of descent. It shows that these rudimentary organs are atrophied, owing to disuse. Just as our muscles, nerves, and organs of sense are strengthened by exercise and frequent use, so, on the other hand, they are liable to degenerate more or less by disuse or suspended exercise. But, although the development of the organs is promoted by exercise and adaptation, they by no means disappear without leaving a trace after neglect; the force of heredity retains them for many generations, and only permits their gradual disappearance after the lapse of a considerable time. The blind “struggle for existence between the organs” determines their historical disappearance, just as it effected their first origin and development. There is no internal “purpose” whatever in the drama.
The life of the animal and the plant bears the same universal character of incompleteness as the life of man. This is directly attributable to the circumstance that nature—organic as well as inorganic—is in a perennial state of evolution, change, and transformation. This evolution seems on the whole—at least as far as we can survey the development of organic life on our planet—to be a progressive improvement, an historical advance from the simple to the complex, the lower to the higher, the imperfect to the perfect. I have proved in my General Morphology that this historical progress—or gradual perfecting (teleosis)—is the inevitable result of selection, and not the outcome of a preconceived design. That is clear from the fact that no organism is perfect; even if it does perfectly adapt itself to its environment at a given moment, this condition would not last very long; the conditions of existence of the environment are themselves subject to perpetual change and they thus necessitate a continuous adaptation on the part of the organism.
Under the title of Design in the Living Organism, the famous embryologist, Karl Ernst Baer, published a work in 1876 which, together with the article on Darwinism which accompanied it, proved very acceptable to our opponents, and is still much quoted in opposition to evolution. It was a revival of the old teleological system under a new name, and we must devote a line of criticism to it. We must premise that, though Baer was a scientist of the highest order, his original monistic views were gradually marred by a tinge of mysticism with the advance of age, and he eventually became a thorough dualist. In his profound work on “the evolution of animals” (1828), which he himself entitled Observation and Experiment, these two methods of investigation are equally applied. By careful observation of the various phenomena of the development of the animal ovum Baer succeeded in giving the first consistent presentation of the remarkable changes which take place in the growth of the vertebrate from a simple egg-cell. At the same time he endeavored, by far-seeing comparison and keen reflection, to learn the causes of the transformation, and to reduce them to general constructive laws. He expressed the general result of his research in the following thesis: “The evolution of the individual is the story of the growth of individuality in every respect.” He meant that “the one great thought that controls all the different aspects of animal evolution is the same that gathered the scattered fragments of space into spheres and linked them into solar systems. This thought is no other than life itself, and the words and syllables in which it finds utterance are the varied forms of living things.”
Baer, however, did not attain to a deeper knowledge of this great genetic truth and a clearer insight into the real efficient causes of organic evolution, because his attention was exclusively given to one half of evolutionary science, the science of the evolution of the individual, embryology, or, in a wider sense, ontogeny. The other half, the science of the evolution of species, phylogeny, was not yet in existence, although Lamarck had already pointed out the way to it in 1809. When it was established by Darwin in 1859, the aged Baer was no longer in a position to appreciate it; the fruitless struggle which he led against the theory of selection clearly proved that he understood neither its real meaning nor its philosophic importance. Teleological and, subsequently, theological speculations had incapacitated the ageing scientist from appreciating this greatest reform of biology. The teleological observations which he published against it in his Species and Studies in his eighty-fourth year are mere repetitions of errors which the teleology of the dualists has opposed to the mechanical or monistic system for more than two thousand years. The “telic idea” which, according to Baer, controls the entire evolution of the animal from the ovum, is only another expression for the eternal “idea” of Plato and the entelecheia of his pupil Aristotle.
Our modern biogeny gives a purely physiological explanation of the facts of embryology, in assigning the functions of heredity and adaptation as their causes. The great biogenetic law, which Baer failed to appreciate, reveals the intimate causal connection between the ontogenesis of the individual and the phylogenesis of its ancestors; the former seems to be a recapitulation of the latter. Nowhere, however, in the evolution of animals and plants do we find any trace of design, but merely the inevitable outcome of the struggle for existence, the blind controller, instead of the provident God, that effects the changes of organic forms by a mutual action of the laws of heredity and adaptation. And there is no more trace of “design” in the embryology of the individual plant, animal, or man. This ontogeny is but a brief epitome of phylogeny, an abbreviated and condensed recapitulation of it, determined by the physiological laws of heredity.
Baer ended the preface to his classical Evolution of Animals (1828) with these words: “The palm will be awarded to the fortunate scientist who succeeds in reducing the constructive forces of the animal body to the general forces or life-processes of the entire world. The tree has not yet been planted which is to make his cradle.” The great embryologist erred once more. That very year, 1828, witnessed the arrival of Charles Darwin at Cambridge University (for the purpose of studying theology!)—the “fortunate scientist” who richly earned the palm thirty years afterwards by his theory of selection.
In the philosophy of history—that is, in the general reflections which historians make on the destinies of nations and the complicated course of political evolution—there still prevails the notion of a “moral order of the universe.” Historians seek in the vivid drama of history a leading design, an ideal purpose, which has ordained one or other race or state to a special triumph, and to dominion over the others. This teleological view of history has recently become more strongly contrasted with our monistic view in proportion as monism has proved to be the only possible interpretation of inorganic nature. Throughout the whole of astronomy, geology, physics, and chemistry there is no question to-day of a “moral order,” or a personal God, whose “hand hath disposed all things in wisdom and understanding.” And the same must be said of the entire field of biology, the whole constitution and history of organic nature, if we set aside the question of man for the moment. Darwin has not only proved by his theory of selection that the orderly processes in the life and structure of animals and plants have arisen by mechanical laws without any preconceived design, but he has shown us in the “struggle for life” the powerful natural force which has exerted supreme control over the entire course of organic evolution for millions of years. It may be said that the struggle for life is the “survival of the fittest” or the “victory of the best”; that is only correct when we regard the strongest as the best (in a moral sense). Moreover, the whole history of the organic world goes to prove that, besides the predominant advance towards perfection, there are at all times cases of retrogression to lower stages. Even Baer’s notion of “design” has no moral feature whatever.
Do we find a different state of things in the history of peoples, which man, in his anthropocentric presumption, loves to call “the history of the world”? Do we find in every phase of it a lofty moral principle or a wise ruler, guiding the destinies of nations? There can be but one answer in the present advanced stage of natural and human history: No. The fate of those branches of the human family, those nations and races which have struggled for existence and progress for thousands of years, is determined by the same “eternal laws of iron” as the history of the whole organic world which has peopled the earth for millions of years.
Geologists distinguish three great epochs in the organic history of the earth, as far as we can read it in the monuments of the science of fossils—the primary, secondary, and tertiary epochs. According to a recent calculation, the first occupied at least thirty-four million, the second eleven million, and the third three million years. The history of the family of vertebrates, from which our own race has sprung, unfolds clearly before our eyes during this long period. Three different stages in the evolution of the vertebrate correspond to the three epochs; the fishes characterized the primary (palæozoic) age, the reptiles the secondary (mesozoic), and the mammals the tertiary (cænozoic). Of the three groups the fishes rank lowest in organization, the reptiles come next, and the mammals take the highest place. We find, on nearer examination of the history of the three classes, that their various orders and families also advanced progressively during the three epochs towards a higher stage of perfection. May we consider this progressive development as the outcome of a conscious design or a moral order of the universe? Certainly not. The theory of selection teaches us that this organic progress, like the earlier organic differentiation, is an inevitable consequence of the struggle for existence. Thousands of beautiful and remarkable species of animals and plants have perished during those forty-eight million years, to give place to stronger competitors, and the victors in this struggle for life were not always the noblest or most perfect forms in a moral sense.
It has been just the same with the history of humanity. The splendid civilization of classical antiquity perished because Christianity, with its faith in a loving God and its hope of a better life beyond the grave, gave a fresh, strong impetus to the soaring human mind. The Papal Church quickly degenerated into a pitiful caricature of real Christianity, and ruthlessly scattered the treasures of knowledge which the Hellenic philosophy had gathered; it gained the dominion of the world through the ignorance of the credulous masses. In time the Reformation broke the chains of this mental slavery, and assisted reason to secure its right once more. But in the new, as in the older, period the great struggle for existence went on in its eternal fluctuation, with no trace of a moral order.
And it is just as impossible for the impartial and critical observer to detect a “wise providence” in the fate of individual human beings as a moral order in the history of peoples. Both are determined with iron necessity by a mechanical causality which connects every single phenomenon with one or more antecedent causes. Even the ancient Greeks recognized ananke, the blind heimarmene, the fate “that rules gods and men,” as the supreme principle of the universe. Christianity replaced it by a conscious Providence, which is not blind, but sees, and which governs the world in patriarchal fashion. The anthropomorphic character of this notion, generally closely connected with belief in a personal God, is quite obvious. Belief in a “loving Father,” who unceasingly guides the destinies of one billion five hundred million men on our planet, and is attentive at all times to their millions of contradictory prayers and pious wishes, is absolutely impossible; that is at once perceived on laying aside the colored spectacles of “faith” and reflecting rationally on the subject.
As a rule, this belief in Providence and the tutelage of a “loving Father” is more intense in the modern civilized man—just as in the uncultured savage—when some good fortune has fallen him: an escape from peril of life, recovery from a severe illness, the winning of the first prize in a lottery, the birth of a long-delayed child, and so forth. When, on the other hand, a misfortune is met with, or an ardent wish is not fulfilled, “Providence” is forgotten. The wise ruler of the world slumbered—or refused his blessing.
In the extraordinary development of commerce of the nineteenth century the number of catastrophes and accidents has necessarily increased beyond all imagination; of that the journal is a daily witness. Thousands are killed every year by shipwreck, railway accidents, mine accidents, etc. Thousands slay each other every year in war, and the preparation for this wholesale massacre absorbs much the greater part of the revenue in the highest civilized nations, the chief professors of “Christian charity.” And among these hundreds of thousands of annual victims of modern civilization strong, industrious, courageous workers predominate. Yet the talk of a “moral order” goes on.
Since impartial study of the evolution of the world teaches us that there is no definite aim and no special purpose to be traced in it, there seems to be no alternative but to leave everything to “blind chance.” This reproach has been made to the transformism of Lamarck and Darwin, as it had been to the previous systems of Kant and Laplace; there are a number of dualist philosophers who lay great stress on it. It is, therefore, worth while to make a brief remark upon it.
One group of philosophers affirms, in accordance with its teleological conception, that the whole cosmos is an orderly system, in which every phenomenon has its aim and purpose; there is no such thing as chance. The other group, holding a mechanical theory, expresses itself thus: The development of the universe is a monistic mechanical process, in which we discover no aim or purpose whatever; what we call design in the organic world is a special result of biological agencies; neither in the evolution of the heavenly bodies nor in that of the crust of our earth do we find any trace of a controlling purpose—all is the result of chance. Each party is right—according to its definition of chance. The general law of causality, taken in conjunction with the law of substance, teaches us that every phenomenon has a mechanical cause; in this sense there is no such thing as chance. Yet it is not only lawful, but necessary, to retain the term for the purpose of expressing the simultaneous occurrence of two phenomena, which are not causally related to each other, but of which each has its own mechanical cause, independent of that of the other. Everybody knows that chance, in its monistic sense, plays an important part in the life of man and in the universe at large. That, however, does not prevent us from recognizing in each “chance” event, as we do in the evolution of the entire cosmos, the universal sovereignty of nature’s supreme law, the law of substance.
[CHAPTER XV]
GOD AND THE WORLD
The Idea of God in General—Antithesis of God and the World; the Supernatural and Nature—Theism and Pantheism—Chief Forms of Theism—Polytheism—Triplotheism—Amphitheism—Monotheism—Religious Statistics—Naturalistic Monotheism—Solarism—Anthropistic Monotheism—The Three Great Mediterranean Religions—Mosaism—Christianity—The Cult of the Madonna and the Saints—Papal Polytheism—Islam—Mixotheism—Nature of Theism—An Extra-mundane and Anthropomorphic God; a Gaseous Vertebrate—Pantheism—Intramundane God (Nature)—The Hylozoism of the Ionic Monists (Anaximander)—Conflict of Pantheism and Christianity—Spinoza—Modern Monism—Atheism
For thousands of years humanity has placed the last and supreme basis of all phenomena in an efficient cause, to which it gives the title of God (deus, theos). Like all general ideas, this notion of God has undergone a series of remarkable modifications and transformations in the course of the evolution of reason. Indeed, it may be said that no other idea has had so many metamorphoses; for no other belief affects in so high a degree the chief objects of the mind and of rational science, as well as the deepest interests of the emotion and poetic fancy of the believer.
A comparative criticism of the many different forms of the idea of God would be extremely interesting and instructive; but we have not space for it in the present work. We must be content with a passing glance at the most important forms of the belief and their relation to the modern thought that has been evoked by a sound study of nature. For further information on this interesting question the reader would do well to consult the distinguished work of Adalbert Svoboda, Forms of Faith (1897).
When we pass over the finer shades and the variegated clothing of the God-idea and confine our attention to its chief element, we can distribute all the different presentations of it in two groups—the theistic and pantheistic group. The latter is closely connected with the monistic, or rational, view of things, and the former is associated with dualism and mysticism.