Philosophers.
Von Schelling (1775-1854) taught that “God is the indifference of the ideal and real, soul and body, and the identity of subjectivity and objectivity. In a word, the All.” He held that health is the harmony of reproduction, irritability, and sensibility; disease, the alteration of dimensions of the organism, by which it ceases to be a pure, untroubled reflex of the All.
G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) was the philosopher whose supreme principle was absolute reason, and to whom in a great measure is due what is known as Modern Materialism. He was opposed by R. H. Lotze (1817-1884), a medical philosopher of Göttingen, the author of the Mikrokosmos and works on pathology, physiology, and psychology. He laid it down that the significance of the phenomena of life and mind would only unfold itself when by an exhausted survey of the entire life of man, individually, socially, and historically, we gain the necessary data for explaining the microcosm by the macrocosm of the universe. The world of facts and the laws of nature are only to be understood by the idea of a personal deity.
Charles Darwin (1809-1882), grandson of Erasmus Darwin, startled and shocked the whole Christian world by his theory that man has possibly descended at a highly remote period from “a group of marine animals resembling the larvæ of existing Ascidians.” He traced our ancestry through the fish, amphibian, marsupial, and ape species; a theory which, despite the original opposition it excited, is now generally accepted. He is best known in connection with medical science by his famous work, On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, 1859, his Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871, and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872. At first his theory of the Descent of Man was held to teach that
“A very tall pig with a very long nose
Puts forth a proboscis quite down to his toes,
And then by the name of an elephant goes.”
Darwin recognised not merely a God but a Creator.