Critical philosophy, moreover, long ago pronounced its doom. In the first place, the most famous critical thinker, Immanuel Kant, proved in his Critique of Pure Reason that absolute science affords no support to the three central dogmas of metaphysics, the personal God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will. It is true that he afterwards (in the course of his dualistic and dogmatic metamorphosis) taught that we must believe these three great mystic forces, and that they are indispensable postulates of practical reason; and that the latter must take precedence over pure reason. Modern German philosophy, which clamours for a "return to Kant," sees his chief distinction in this impossible reconciliation of polar contradictions. The Churches, and the ruling powers in alliance with them, accord a welcome to this diametrical contradiction, recognised by all candid readers of the Königsberg philosopher, between the two reasons. They use the confusion that results for the purpose of putting the light of the creeds in the darkness of doubting reason, and imagine that they save religion in this way.
Whilst we are engaged with the important subject of religion, we must refute the charge, often made, and renewed of recent years, that our Monistic philosophy and the theory of evolution that forms its chief foundation destroy religion. It is only opposed to those lower forms of religion that are based on superstition and ignorance, and would hold man's reason in bondage by empty formalism and belief in the miraculous, in order to control it for political purposes. This is chiefly the case with Romanism or Ultramontanism, that pitiful caricature of pure Christianity that still plays so important a part in the world. Luther would turn in his grave if he could see the predominance of the Roman Centre party in the German Empire to-day. We find the papacy, the deadly enemy of Protestant Germany, controlling its destiny, and the Reichstag submitting willingly to be led by the Jesuits. Not a voice do we hear raised in it against the three most dangerous and mischievous institutions of Romanism—the obligatory celibacy of the clergy, the confessional, and indulgences. Though these later institutions of the Roman Church have nothing to do with the original teaching of the Church and pure Christianity; though their immoral consequences, so prejudicial to the life of the family and the State, are known to all, they exist just as they did before the Reformation. Unfortunately, many German princes foster the ambition of the Roman clergy, making their "Canossa-journey" to Rome, and bending the knee to the great charlatan at the Vatican.
It is also very regrettable that the increasing tendency to external show and festive parade at what is called "the new court" does grave injury to real and inner religion. We have a striking instance of this external religion in the new cathedral at Berlin, which many would have us regard as "Catholic," not Protestant and Evangelical. I often met in India priests and pilgrims who believed they were pleasing their God by turning prayer-wheels, or setting up prayer-mills that were set in motion by the wind. One might utilise the modern invention of automatic machines for the same purposes, and set up praying automata in the new cathedral, or indulgence-machines that would give relief from lighter sins for one mark [shilling], and from graver sins for twenty marks. It would prove a great source of revenue to the Church, especially if similar machines were set up in the other churches that have lately been erected in Berlin at a cost of millions of marks. It would have been better to have spent the money on schools.
These observations on the more repellent characters of modern orthodoxy and piety may be taken as some reply to the sharp attacks to which I have been exposed for forty years, and which have lately been renewed with great violence. The spokesmen of Catholic and Evangelical beliefs, especially the Romanist Germania and the Lutheran Reichsbote, have vied with each other in deploring my lectures as "a desecration of this venerable hall," and in damning my theory of evolution—without, of course, making any attempt to repute its scientific truth. They have, in their Christian charity, thought fit to put sandwich-men at the doors of this room, to distribute scurrilous attacks on my person and my teaching to those who enter. They have made a generous use of the fanatical calumnies that the court chaplain, Stöcker, the theologian, Loofs, the philologist, Dennert, and other opponents of my Riddle of the Universe, have disseminated, and to which I make a brief reply at the end of that work. I pass by the many untruths of these zealous protagonists of theology. We men of science have a different conception of truth from that which prevails in ecclesiastical circles.[10]
As regards the relation of science to Christianity, I will only point out that it is quite irreconcilable with the mystic and supernatural Christian beliefs, but that it fully recognises the high ethical value of Christian morality. It is true that the highest commands of the Christian religion, especially those of sympathy and brotherly love, are not discoveries of its own; the golden rule was taught and practised centuries before the time of Christ. However, Christianity has the distinction of preaching and developing it with a fresh force. In its time it has had a beneficial influence on the development of civilisation, though in the Middle Ages the Roman Church became, with its Inquisition, its witch-drowning, its burning of heretics, and its religious wars, the bloodiest caricature of the gentle religion of love. Orthodox historical Christianity is not directly destroyed by modern science, but by its own learned and zealous theologians. The enlightened Protestantism that was so effectively advocated by Schleiermacher in Berlin eighty years ago, the later works of Feuerbach, the inquiries into the life of Jesus of David Strauss and Ernest Renan, the lectures recently delivered here by Delitzsch and Harnack, have left very little of what strict orthodoxy regards as the indispensable foundations of historical Christianity. Kalthoff, of Bremen, goes so far as to declare that all Christian traditions are myths, and that the development of Christianity is a necessary outcome of the civilisation of the time.
In view of this broadening tendency in theology and philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is an unfortunate anachronism that the Ministers of Public Instruction of Prussia and Bavaria sail in the wake of the Catholic Church, and seek to instil the spirit of the Jesuits in both lower and higher education. It is only a few weeks since the Prussian Minister of Worship made a dangerous attempt to suppress academic freedom, the palladium of mental life in Germany. This increasing reaction recalls the sad days of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when thousands of the finest citizens of Germany migrated to North America, in order to develop their mental powers in a free atmosphere. This selective process formed a blessing to the United States, but it was certainly very injurious to Germany. Large numbers of weak and servile characters and sycophants were thus favoured. The fossilised ideas of many of our leading jurists seem to take us back sometimes to the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods, while the palæozoic rhetoric of our theologians and synods even goes back to the Permian and Carboniferous epochs.
However, we must not take too seriously the anxiety that this increasing political and clerical reaction causes us. We must remember the vast resources of civilisation that are seen to-day in our enormous international intercourse, and must have confidence in the helpful exchange of ideas between east and west that is being effected daily by our means of transit. Even in Germany the darkness that now prevails will at length give place to the dazzling light of the sun. Nothing, in my opinion, will contribute more to that end than the unconditional victory of the idea of evolution.
Beside the law of evolution, and closely connected with it, we have that great triumph of modern science, the law of substance—the law of the conservation of matter (Lavoisier, 1789), and of the conservation of energy (Robert Mayer, 1842). These two laws are irreconcilable with the three central dogmas of metaphysics, which so many educated people still regard as the most precious treasures of their spiritual life—the belief in a personal God, the personal immortality of the soul, and the liberty of the human will. But these great objects of belief, so intimately bound up with numbers of our treasured achievements and institutions, are not on that account driven out of the world. They merely cease to pose as truths in the realm of pure science. As imaginative creations, they retain a certain value in the world of poetry. Here they will not only, as they have done hitherto, furnish thousands of the finest and most lofty motives for every branch of art—sculpture, painting, or music—but they will still have a high ethical and social value in the education of the young and in the organisation of society. Just as we derive artistic and ethical inspiration from the legends of classical antiquity (such as the Hercules myth, the Odyssey and the Iliad) and the story of William Tell, so we will continue to do in regard to the stories of the Christian mythology. But we must do the same with the poetical conceptions of other religions, which have given the most varied forms to the transcendental ideas of God, freedom, and immortality.
Thus the noble warmth of art will remain, together with—not in opposition to, but in harmony with—the splendid light of science, one of the most precious possessions of the human mind. As Goethe said: "He who has science and art has religion; he who has not these two had better have religion." Our Monistic system, the "connecting link between religion and science," brings God and the world into unity in the sense that Goethe willed, the sense that Spinoza clearly expressed long ago and Giordano Bruno had sealed with his martyrdom. It has been said repeatedly of late that Goethe was an orthodox Christian. A few years ago a young orator quoted him in support of the wonderful dogmas of the Christian religion. We may point out that Goethe himself expressly said he was "a decided non-Christian." The "great heathen of Weimar" has given the clearest expression to his Pantheistic views in his noblest poems, Faust, Prometheus, and God and the World. How could so vigorous a thinker, in whose mind the evolution of organic life ran through millions of years, have shared the narrow belief of a Jewish prophet and enthusiast who sought to give up his life for humanity 1,900 years ago?
Our Monistic god, the all-embracing essence of the world, the Nature-god of Spinoza and Goethe, is identical with the eternal, all-inspiring energy, and is one, in eternal and infinite substance, with space-filling matter. It "lives and moves in all things," as the Gospel says. And as we see that the law of substance is universal, that the conservation of matter and of energy is inseparably connected, and that the ceaseless development of this substance follows the same "eternal iron laws," we find God in natural law itself. The will of God is at work in every falling drop of rain and every growing crystal, in the scent of the rose and the spirit of man.