CHAPTER I.
MORE OR LESS NEGATIVE POSITION IN REFERENCE TO RELIGION.
§ 1. Extreme Negation. L. Büchner and Consistent Materialism.
The common point of beginning and attack of all those who take a negative position against religion, is the rejection of teleology. The most advanced of all materialists, Ludwig Büchner, in his self-criticism, which he gives in his "Natur und Wissenschaft" ("Nature and Science"), on page 465, openly declares, and quite correctly, that with the success or failure of the attacks upon teleology materialism itself stands or falls.
Now while many, as we shall immediately see, although opposed to a teleological view of the world, still are inclined to give a more or less lasting value to certain psychical processes which may be called by the name religion, Büchner, on the contrary, makes a direct attack upon everything which is thus called. He does not render it difficult for us to review his position. For, after having given it openly, but still with certain relative modifications, in different publications (especially in his book "Force and Matter," which appeared in 1855 in the first edition, and in 1872 in the twelfth) he gives it in cynical nakedness in the lectures with which he travelled through America and
Germany in 1872-1874, and the contents of which he has made public in his pamphlet: "Der Gottesbegriff und dessen Bedeutung in der Gegenwart" ("The Idea of God, and its Importance at the Present Time"), Leipzig, 1874, Theo. Thomas. As is said in the preface, the design of the lecture is "to give a renewed impulse to the final and definitive elimination of an idea which, according to the opinion of the author, obstructs our whole spiritual, social, and political development, as no other idea does." He means the idea of God; not merely the theistic idea of a personal God, but the idea of God in general. For even the pantheistic idea of God, which he had formerly treated with a certain polite reserve, finds in his eyes even less favor than the theistic. He says: "If the absurdity is already great enough in theism, it is possibly still greater in pantheism, which moreover has always played a great rôle in philosophy;" and, "Christianity has but injured the spiritual and material progress of mankind." In agreement with Strauss, he sees the earliest origin of the idea of God only in ignorance and fear. "Every creating, preserving, or reigning principle in the world is done away with, and there remains as highest spiritual power present in the world only human reason. Atheism or philosophic monism alone leads to freedom, to reason, progress, acknowledgment of true humanity,—in short to humanism."
This materialistic opposition to everything which is called religion, is certainly independent of Darwinism, and originated before its time; but since Büchner himself sees in Darwinism but a grand confirmation of his view of the world, and believes that he has found in it
that principle which, with urgent necessity, banishes teleology from the contemplation of nature—teleology, with the defeat or victory of which materialism stands or falls,—we are entitled and obliged to rank even this view of the world among the conclusions which in reference to religion have been drawn from the theories of Darwin. And, indeed, it is a most extreme conclusion, and simply puts itself in the category of negation to the contents of religion, as well as to religion in a subjective sense, to religious and pious conduct. It can be clearly seen how firmly a view of the world which makes war against religion and the idea of God its special life-task, is connected with all those destructive elements which lie in human nature, and especially in the social circumstances of the present, and which have their only and final ethical limit in the consciousness of God which, as a power never wholly to be effaced, lies in the depth of the soul of even those who wander farthest from a moral and spiritual life.
§ 2. Replacement of Religion through a Religious Worship of the Universe. Strauss, Oskar Schmidt, Häckel.
Strauss, in that testament of his scientific life and activity, "The Old Faith and the New," takes a somewhat different position in reference to religion. Even for him, the whole idea of God is abolished and replaced by the idea of the cosmos; but he makes this cosmos the object of religious worship, and has exactly the same feeling of absolute dependence in regard to it, which, according to Schleiermacher, constitutes the nature of religion. When Arthur Schopenhauer or
Eduard von Hartmann bring forth their pessimistic accusations against the universe, his religious sensation reacts against it in the same manner as the organism against the prick of a needle. This pessimism, he says, acts upon reason as an absurdity, but upon sensation as blasphemy. "We demand the same piety for our cosmos that the devout of old demanded for his God. If wounded, our feeling for the cosmos simply reacts in a religious manner." While, therefore, Strauss, to the question, "Are we still Christians?" gives an emphatic "No," he answers the question, "Have we still a religion?" with "Yes or No, according to the spirit of the inquiry."
Among men of science who wrote about Darwinism, Oskar Schmidt, in his before-quoted publication, "The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism," seems to take exactly the same position in reference to religion. At least, he unreservedly professes monism, rejects all teleological conceptions as imperfections, speaks of the caprice of a personal God, and sees the conception that the idea of God is immanent in human nature invalidated by the fact "that many millions in the most cultivated nations, and among them the most eminent and lucid thinkers, have not the consciousness of a personal God; those millions of whom the heroic Strauss became the spokesman."
Häckel, it is true, mentions Strauss only in the preface of the fourth edition of his "Natural History of Creation," but here he greets "The Old Faith and the New" as the confession which he also makes, and thus gives us an express right to place him in this class, although he calls his worship of the universe religion;
it is, however, a classification which his whole position compelled us to give him. It is true, he speaks very warmly of his own religion, which is founded on the clear knowledge of nature and its inexhaustible abundance of manifestations, and which, as "simple religion of nature," will in the future act upon the course of development of mankind, ennobling and perfecting it in a far higher degree than the various ecclesiastic religions of the different nations, "resting on a blind belief in the vague secrets and mythical revelations of a sacerdotal caste." (Nat. Hist. of Cr., Vol. II, p. 369.) He also repeatedly speaks of "manifestations of nature," and even of a "divine Spirit which is everywhere active in nature." In that respect he seems to take in reference to religion, without regard to the historical form in which it appeared as Christian religion, a still more friendly and less problematic position than Strauss. Moreover, he demands for every individual the full right of forming his own religion; among the more highly developed species of men, he says, every independent and highly developed individual, every original person, has his own religion, his own God; and it would certainly, therefore, not be arrogant if he should also claim the right of forming his own conception of God, his own religion. But when we try to form a more complete idea of his position in reference to religion, we really do not find any essential difference between it and that of Strauss. According to repeated utterances, he can not imagine the personal Creator without caprice and arbitrariness; again and again he advocates monism with great warmth, and also identifies, in express words, God and the universe, God and nature.
"Corresponding to our progressive perception of nature and our immovable conviction of the truth of the evolution theory, our religion can be only a religion of nature." "In rejecting the dualistic conception of nature and the herewith connected amphitheistic conception of God, ... we certainly lose the hypothesis of a personal Creator; but we gain in its place the undoubtedly more worthy and more perfect conception of a divine Spirit which penetrates and fills the universe." Furthermore, the faith in a personal Creator is called a low dualistic conception of God, which corresponds to a low animal stage of development of the human organism. The more highly developed man of the present, he says, is capable of and intended for an infinitely nobler and sublimer monistic idea of God, to which belongs the future, and through which we attain a more sublime conception of the unity of God and nature. According to his Anthropogeny, the belief that the hand of a Creator has arranged all things with wisdom and intelligence is an ancient story and an empty phrase.
§ 3. Pious Renunciation of the Knowability of God. Wilhelm Bleek, Albert Lange, Herbert Spencer.
A more friendly position in reference to religion is taken by those who hold, not directly negative, but only decidedly sceptical views of the existence of God; who reduce the relative unsearchableness of God, which every religious standpoint admits, to an absolute unknowability; and who find the nature of religion either in a pious acknowledgment of this unknowability, or in a poetical substitute for the knowledge of God, i.e., comprehending the unknowable in a figure. The most prominent
advocates of this position are, on the side of exact investigation, Wilhelm Bleek; and on that of philosophy, Albert Lange in Germany and Herbert Spencer in England. Since all three use the Darwinian theories for their systems, they also belong to the ranks of our historico-critical essay.
Wilhelm Bleek, in the preface to his "Ursprung der Sprache" ("Origin of Language"), rejects all claims of a positively revealed religion to an objective truth—not in such a way as to substitute the universe in place of God, but so that he remains sceptical in reference to every attempt at forming an idea of God, demands a pious and modest confession of this non-understanding by man, and sees in this reverential modesty the certainly not very significant nature of his religion. In the preface he says that all worship originates in reverence for ancestors, and that even the doctrine of the atonement of modern theology has its origin there. The next step after reverence for ancestors was the worship of nature. But the grand turning-point at which the mythological mode of view gives way—in which mode of view he also reckons Christianity—is the giving up of the idea of the necessity of an atonement; for this whole idea is but anthropomorphism. It is when man has recognized the impossibility of a being, similar to man, as the final cause of all existences, and in reverential modesty has admitted his ignorance in reference to the nature of the origin of things, that he learns to understand how narrow a view he has of God when he thinks that he understands him.
On the side of philosophy, Albert Lange and Herbert Spencer reach similar results. Albert Lange, in his
"History of Materialism," starting especially from premises of Kant, reaches the conclusion that the "thing per se," the "intelligible world," is absolutely hidden to us. What we perceive is but the world of appearances; and the fact that we perceive it, and perceive it as we do, is originally founded in the human organization. By virtue of this organization we are bound, in all our knowledge of the world of appearances, to the law of causality. Science does not get beyond this causal chain of finite and relative causes and effects; to the "thing per se" there is nowhere to be found a bridge, not even as Kant supposes, in the categoric imperative, nor in ideas. Inasmuch as science does not get beyond this chain, it is materialistic; inasmuch as it must nevertheless perceive the existence, or at least the possibility of the existence, of a "thing per se," even if it does not see any way to its perception, it is idealistic. But man also has ideal impulses, and he has to follow them just as much as the impulse of perception. By virtue of these ideal impulses, he makes in imagination a picture of the "thing per se" in the activity of philosophic speculation, art, and religion. Philosophic speculation is but imaginative conceptions. It has always a value in the history of culture, as a summing-up of the elements of culture and of the spiritual impulses and treasures of a certain time; but it errs as soon as it claims to be more than imaginative conceptions—namely, an adequate representation of the final cause of all things—for it lacks the necessary basis of experience. Art does not claim this, and therefore is not exposed to that danger of deception. Religion satisfies a need of the heart, to have a home of the spirit in the "thing per se"; but
since the "thing per se" is not accessible for us, religion creates in mind that home, in order to rise above the common reality to it. Lange finds the highest realization of a perfect satisfaction of that impulse in the philosophic poems of Schiller. He sees the quintessence of religion expressly "in the elevation of minds above the real, and in the creation of a home of the spirit." Religion remains untouched in its full vital power, as long as it retains that as its quintessence; but it is exposed to all the dangers of a destructive criticism as soon as it seeks its quintessence in something else—for instance, in certain doctrines of God, the human soul, creation of the world, etc.
Herbert Spencer is in full accord with Lange in regard to the theory of an absolute indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things; but he reaches this result in a somewhat different way, and from his premises infers a different modification of the nature of religion. In his "First Principles" he appears to be a true scholar of the English and Scotch schools of philosophy, from which he takes his start in conscious and express opposition to the German modes of speculation, and begins with an empiric comparison of all actual contrasts existing in the world and in human life. He follows the axiom that a particle of truth lies at the basis of every error, and that each contrast becomes a contrast only by the fact that the two poles of the contrast have something in common. Now, in comparing with one another all contrasts between religion and science, and all forms of religiousness and irreligiousness, from fetishism up to monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, all imaginable cosmogonies, he finds, as the last truth common to all, and therefore
alone absolutely certain, the absolute indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things. On page 44 he says, that religions diametrically opposed in their overt dogmas, are yet perfectly at one in the tacit conviction that there is a problem to be solved, that the existence of the world with all it contains is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation; and on page 45, that the omnipresence of something which passes comprehension, is that which remains unquestionable. And on page 46 he concludes: "If Religion and Science are to be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts—that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." The acknowledgment of this fact is religiousness; the contrary of it is irreligiousness and anthropomorphistic arrogance, even if it appears in the name of religiousness. "Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious" (p. 110).
A comparison of the two philosophers is interesting.
In one direction, Lange does more justice to the religious need than Spencer does. While he sees in religion the metaphorical realization of the needs of the heart, of a "creation of a home of the spirit," he gives to the heart full play to satisfy its need, and to create and arrange for itself a spiritual home entirely according to its need. He especially acknowledges repeatedly the need of the heart for atonement, and vigorously defends this need and its satisfaction against Liberal Theologians (Reformtheologen), like Heinrich Lang; he also stands, as we see, in satisfactory contrast to Wilhelm Bleek. Without reserve, he admits into the hymn-book of his religion of the future hymns like that of Gerhard: "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" ("O Sacred Head,
now wounded"). To be sure, all the concessions he makes to religion sink again to the value of a beautiful illusion, from the fact that for him they are but metaphorical approaches to the cause of all things, which after all still remains inaccessible. But nevertheless, in consequence of that idea of religion, religious life, and especially also religious service, has infinitely more room for rich development in Lange than in Spencer. For, according to the view of the latter, religiousness consists in nothing else but the perception and acknowledgment of this indiscernibleness of the final cause. All other things which may be still connected with religious life and reasoning, are but a misty veil. The acknowledgment of the indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things alone is the quintessence of religion. But such a religiousness, which expressly forbids imagining any quality or any state of the highest being, certainly would be, as Prof. Huxley correctly says in his "Lay Sermons," for the most part of the silent sort.
While thus Lange's conception of religion is superior to that of Spencer in admitting a richer development of religious life, a more various satisfaction of the religious need, in another direction Spencer is superior. He comes considerably nearer to a correct and full conception of God than Lange. His idea of the final cause of all things does not lie entirely in the conception that it is the absolute indiscernible; but Spencer is fully in earnest with the idea that this indiscernible is the real cause of the world and of all single existences in it. He accordingly forbids giving certain attributes to the absolute—not because it would be doubtful whether it has attributes or not, but because it stands above all these
imaginable attributes as their real cause. Therefore he forbids, for instance, attributing personality, intelligence, will, to the highest being—not because it could also be impersonal, and in want of intelligence and will, but because it stands above all these attributes as their highest real cause, and because we can think of all these attributes only in human analogy, and therefore, when attributed to the highest being, can think of them only in rejectable anthropomorphism. He says, on page 109: "Those who espouse this position [personality of God], make the erroneous assumption that the choice is between personality and something lower than personality; whereas the choice is rather between personality and something higher. Is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will, as these transcend mechanical motion? It is true that we are totally unable to conceive any such higher mode of being. But this is not a reason for questioning its existence; it is rather the reverse.... The Ultimate Cause cannot in any respect be conceived by us because it is in every respect greater than can be conceived."
Thus we find in Lange a fuller and richer conception of the subject of religion; but this conception is in want of one thing—without which it is in want of everything—namely, of nothing less than of the objective reality. Spencer's religiousness has a much more meagre and less varied character: the acknowledgment and veneration of the indiscernible; but he nevertheless gives us with this content and object a real object, even an object of veneration, in which the abundance of all reality is hidden, with the only conception that the indiscernible
does not let us look into its cornucopia, but only lets us judge of the abundance of its contents by the richness of that which it pours over us in the world of the relatively perceptible.
It will not be difficult to show the points at which each of these writers would have been able, had he so wished, to lead his conception of religion, the one to a real, the other to a full content.
Lange finds the last principle of perception which is accessible to us, in our organization. Now from our organization originate not only all modes of the perception of the empirical world, but just as well all our ideal impulses, especially the ethical. Which one of all those dispositions, impulses, and activities has the precedence, mainly depends upon the value which man places upon them. Now, when man attributes to the ideal and ethical a higher value than to the empirical, when in reflecting about himself he finds that even in the normal individual the empirical, sensual, and material is subordinate and subject to the ideal and especially to the ethical, then from the standpoint of Lange he is right, and obliged to estimate the truth of that ideal and ethical as higher than the truth of the empirical world, and to look at the whole empirical world only as being in the service of that ideal world. When, at the same time, we observe an inner harmony in our organization, this observation gives us the right and the duty of controlling the truth of our empirical perception by the truth of the results of our ideal and our ethical activity, and the latter again by the former. For if we do not wish to suppose that the human organization aims at a grand deception of mankind, we have, in spite of
the superiority of the ideal and ethical activities, to establish the axiom that the empirical and the ideal and ethical cannot remain in lasting contradiction. Besides, if we should add to this that a religion like Christianity offers to man that which it gives to him on the ground of historical facts, then the reports of these facts will certainly be subject to historical criticism just as surely as all historical reports; but if they are confirmed, the ideal and ethical convincing power which lies in this religion, unites for us with the whole weight of the convincing power of the historical and empirical facts, although the reproduction and systematization of its contents is still deficient and capable of further development.
In Spencer's system, there are two points by which his own course of reasoning is able to bridge over the poverty of his conception of religion. The first point, given on pages 107-108 of his "First Principles," and also elsewhere in his works, is the acknowledgment that the final cause of all things is higher than all that we know, and is of such a nature that it really can be the real cause of everything, even the real cause of the spiritual and ethical. Thus he forbids us to think of qualities of the highest being, but he himself thinks of them; for this conception of the highest being as an impersonal is certainly something else and something much more valuable than the mere negation of personality. The other point which might be able to lead him out of the vacuum of his idea of God, lies in the method of his own investigation. When he seeks the truth by collecting what is common in all the contrasts, he also must seek and find something common between the highest cause
of all things on one side and of the world as a whole and in detail on the other; and this something will consist of the necessity of the highest cause of all things being so qualified that it is able to bring into existence the world as a whole and in detail. If such ideas are also rejected as anthropomorphisms, then all reasoning and investigating is anthropomorphistic; and in that respect we refer to what we had to say above, when treating of teleology (p. 170 ff.). The same Duke of Argyll whom we there had occasion to quote, in an article in the "Contemporary Review" (May, 1871), upon "Variety as an Aim in Nature," has admirably shown that it is the mind of man from which we may draw conclusions as to the nature of the Creator, and that the picture which we thus get of him, can at the same time be seen true and yet dim, at the same time real and yet from a distance; for the human mind does not feel anything so much as its own limitations, and therefore can easily imagine each of his powers and talents as being present in the highest being in infinite perfection. If Spencer had made this comparison, and drawn the conclusions which follow from it for the nature of the final cause of all things, the indiscernibleness of God would for him be reduced to an unsearchableness, the unknowable be changed into an unsearchable, and we could willingly acknowledge the humble modesty in regard to the infinity of the deity, which his philosophy requires, as a factor of all true religiousness. But we have to present to him as an expression, not only of true religiousness, but also of true science, that passage of the Psalms: "He that planted the ear, shall he
not hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?" (Psalm XCIV, 9.)
§ 4. Spinoza and Hegel in the Garb of Darwin: Carneri. Eduard von Hartmann.
To the Austrian philosopher Carneri in his "Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus" ("Morality and Darwinism"), three books of Ethics, Vienna, Braumüller, 1871, we shall have to give a place of his own.
Inasmuch as religion and the beautiful are to him but a preliminary stage of truth which has to dissolve itself into philosophy—a philosophy which, inclined to monism, prefers to call itself pantheism—he takes a position in reference to religion similar to that toward materialism, namely: a negative position. But inasmuch as he still grants to religion in a subjective sense, to "religion in the form of piety," a lasting position and truth (religion, he says, has truth, but the positive God of religion has no reality, page 114), and inasmuch as he ascribes to it not only a transitory pedagogical value for the masses, which are not yet elevated to the height of philosophic reasoning, but a value also for the philosopher—namely, the value of religiousness and of piety—he rather belongs to the second and third of the before-mentioned groups.
Carneri, in his "Three Books of Ethics," gives us a whole philosophic encyclopedia. In thoughts sometimes rich, but without regularly arranged and quiet reasoning, and in full command and employment of modern terms which he uses sometimes like a genius, but often superficially and unjustly, he develops a view of the world which, although it appears in an independent way
in all its fundamentals, as regards its contents takes its origin from Spinoza, and as regards form and dialectics from Hegel, but sometimes, it is true, sinks into weaknesses of which these philosophers would hardly have been guilty. So, for instance, when he simply identifies religious faith with conjecture, he takes a superficial view which he has in common with Häckel who, among other things, repeatedly says that faith begins where knowledge ceases. Dialectical motion is everything to him. In pursuing this dialectical motion, he gives us a multitude of outlooks into all imaginable realms of knowledge and life, but he always follows at the same time the formula of dialectical motion, and, where the difficulties of the real world are most invincibly opposed to this dialectics, knows, like his master, with almost chivalric ease, to mingle and confound abstract formalistic reasoning and thoughts naturally following from the given thought. Want of clearness in general makes the reading of this otherwise not unimportant book very difficult. On a Darwinian foundation in his conception of nature and its development, he puts a Hegelian structure into his conception of human spiritual life, but finally lets mankind, although it is the highest form of appearance in this development, sink back into death and destruction.
The God of this view of the world is the causal law; the conception of this causal law is the worship of the philosopher—a God, of course, so incapable of filling and quieting a mind longing for God—a worship so leathern that Carneri himself cannot get rid of the opinion that, with such religious ideas of reform, he will finally lose the last reader of his book. The aim of the
development, also, does not promise to the mind any substitute for the rigidness of God, for the aim of the development is death—the death of the individual as well as of the universe. "He who has learned to get comfort in the deepest affliction from the absolute impartiality of the causal law, is on so good terms with death, whose inflexibility he comprehends, that without reluctance he gives to it the universe into the bargain." (p. 353.)
We give these glimpses into the dreary waste of the very latest advocate of pessimism which, as it seems, has fully and formally become the fashion, in order to show what monstrosities are demanded from thought, what revolting hardness from feeling, what nonentities of ethical striving, are offered as valuable wares, if man has once begun to break the bond between himself and his living Creator and Master. For this reason, not only the anti-teleological monists meet the fate of Nihilism, whether they appear in the plebeian roughness of Büchner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind than nothingness, because he did not wish to be driven from his perception of ends in the world to the only conclusion to which it leads—namely: to the perception of an absolute intelligent and ethical personality that directs these ends. He prefers, rather, to suppose an unconsciously seeing substance of the world, which, after having once in the dark impulse of its unconscious will, made the mistake of creating a world, leads the same by the instinct of unconscious teleology in sad, melancholy, and yet relatively
best development, until it is ripe to sink back into nothingness, and thereby to bring the absolute to rest.
Although we pity the individuals who came under the ban of such a pessimism, we nevertheless can be glad of the fact that the consequences of such a separation from God are at least exposed so clearly, and return from wandering through such barren steppes with renewed thankfulness to our Christian view of the world, with its divine plan and aim.
We have, next, however to review the representatives of theism and of the Christian view of the world—which review will show us that the song of triumph which monism began to raise before its expected victory, came very near disturbing the composure of persons here and there.
§ 5. Re-echo of Negation on the Side of the Christian View of the World.
In this condition of affairs, it certainly could not happen otherwise than that, even on the part of the theistic and positive Christian view of the world, some advocates were drawn into the contest who thought themselves obliged to see two irreconcilable antagonists in Darwinism and Christianity.
Science and religion had both been so much accustomed to see the origin of species, and especially the appearance of man on the stage of earth, hidden in impenetrable and unapproachable secrecy, that every attempt at clearing up this darkness very naturally appeared to both as an attack upon the creative activity of God. The mode of reasoning to which mankind, in its scientific as well as in its religious meditations, had
accustomed itself for hundreds of years, was used to exclude from the idea of creation the conception of intervening agencies; and this was true not only in regard to the idea of the first creation of the universe, where the idea of intervening agencies naturally is left out, but also in regard to the idea of the creation of single beings. Moreover, mankind was so accustomed to see a contrast between origination and creation, that in the same degree in which man tried or was able to perceive the modalities of the origin of species, the divine causality, or at least the idea of creation, seemed to disappear; and for the word of the Bible, that God created creatures each after its kind, a place could no longer be found.
To this was added the fact that not only all materialism took possession of Darwinism as the irresistible battering-ram which, as they said, forever demolishes the whole fortress of theism and buries under its ruins all those who take refuge in this decaying castle, but that even naturalists let themselves be carried away without opposition by this anti-theistic current, and even submitted to be heralds and prophets of this new anti-theistic wisdom of monism. Let the reader think of Häckel's "Natural History of Creation" and "Anthropogeny," where he will find the most interesting reports from all realms of exact natural science, together with a wholly unsolved entanglement of descent, selection, and mechanical view of the world, and this mode of contemplation of the world, with eloquent and enthusiastic proclamation of monism and with unconcealed derision of the capricious arbitrariness of a personal Creator, all thrown together as one great entire system, formed at one stroke.
Is it, then, to be wondered at, that not only the uncritical among believers, but also those who thoughtfully examined the movements of the mind, believed in the loudly-proclaimed connection of Darwinism with the whole anti-Christian view of the world, and therefore protested immediately against everything which is called Darwinism? Can we reproach theologians for not immediately becoming scientists themselves, in order to form an independent judgment in the question, when even the most eminent scientists declared that amalgamation of the most heterogenetic as an inevitable consequence of Darwinism, and as much as possible diminished or concealed their want of harmony with a few other investigators who, although small in number, yet by their weight counterbalanced dozens of names of the second and third rank?
Thus we could read, in the journals of specialists, in pamphlets, in religious and political journals, even in local newspapers, a great many articles which were guilty of exactly the same confounding of the scientific and the religious, and again of the scientific and the philosophic, as those who had caused this confounding, and who, under the supposition of this solidarity of wholly distinct things, attacked and contested in the interest of religion, not only the anti-religious conclusions of Darwinian philosophers, but also Darwinism as a merely scientific theory, and rendered the contrast as strong as possible by adhering to that above censured, unmotived, indefensible, and one-sided conception of creation.
And although on the part of positive Christian theology there was a gradually increasing number of voices
of those who in the idea of an origin of species through descent do not yet see an injury to the theistic and Christian conception of God and creation, still as a rule this concession was made only to the idea of descent, and not to that of selection and to that which is properly called Darwinism. As a rule, in most of the theological works which treat in general of the Darwinian questions, Darwinism and opposition to the Christian conception of God and creation were and are still taken as identical. For instance, Ebrard, in the first part of his "Apologetik" ("Apologetics"), Gütersloh, Bertelsmann, 1874, enumerates among the systems which are opposed to Christianity, in the same line with the doubtless anti-theistic and anti-Christian aposkopiology or negation of the idea of design, also the mechanistic system, or the negation of the organic vital force, and the Darwinian theory of descent. Besides, in reading his "Apologetics," we had earnestly wished, in the interest of science as well as of religion, that a theologian who writes a work which claims to be scientific and to advocate the Christian standpoint, had abstained from that coarse and disgusting contempt and derision of adversaries which we meet so often in his book, and which only causes friend and foe to take a position contrary to that which the author intended. Trümpelmann who, in an essay upon Darwinism, monistic philosophy, and Christianity (Jahrbücher für protestantische Theologie, 1876, I) gives a similar conception of the relation between Darwinism and religion, but defends his whole position with much more scientific acuteness and depth, has also not taken the tone which worthily treats an opposite opinion and its advocates.