Such a topic, supreme in its importance, is that concerning "Scientific Articles of Faith," upon which Professor Schlesinger has already expounded his views.[1] I am glad to be able to agree with him in many important points, but as to others I should like to express some hesitation, and to ask consideration for some views which do not coincide with his. At the outset, I am entirely at one with him as to that unifying conception of nature as a whole which we designate in a single word as Monism. By this we unambiguously express our conviction that there lives "one spirit in all things," and that the whole cognisable world is constituted, and has been developed, in accordance with one common fundamental law. We emphasise by it, in particular, the essential unity of inorganic and organic nature, the latter having been evolved from the former only at a relatively late period.[2] We cannot draw a sharp line of distinction between these two great divisions of nature, any more than we can recognise an absolute distinction between the animal and the vegetable kingdom, or between the lower animals and man. Similarly, we regard the whole of human knowledge as a structural unity; in this sphere we refuse to accept the distinction usually drawn between the natural and the spiritual. The latter is only a part of the former (or vice versa); both are one. Our monistic view of the world belongs, therefore, to that group of philosophical systems which from other points of view have been designated also as mechanical or as pantheistic. However differently expressed in the philosophical systems of an Empedocles or a Lucretius, a Spinoza or a Giordano Bruno, a Lamarck or a David Strauss, the fundamental thought common to them all is ever that of the oneness of the cosmos, of the indissoluble connection between energy and matter, between mind and embodiment—or, as we may also say, between God and the world—to which Goethe, Germany's greatest poet and thinker, has given poetical expression in his Faust and in the wonderful series of poems entitled Gott und Welt.
That we may rightly appreciate what this Monism is, let us now, from a philosophico-historical point of view cast a comprehensive glance over the development in time of man's knowledge of nature. A long series of varied conceptions and stages of human culture here passes before our mental vision. At the lowest stage, the rude—we may say animal—phase of prehistoric primitive man, is the "ape-man," who, in the course of the tertiary period, has only to a limited degree raised himself above his immediate pithecoid ancestors, the anthropoid apes. Next come successive stages of the lowest and simplest kind of culture, such as only the rudest of still existing primitive peoples enable us in some measure to conceive. These "savages" are succeeded by peoples of a low civilisation, and from these again, by a long series of intermediate steps, we rise little by little to the more highly civilised nations. To these alone—of the twelve races of mankind only to the Mediterranean and Mongolian—are we indebted for what is usually called "universal history." This last, extending over somewhat less than six thousand years, represents a period of infinitesimal duration in the long millions of years of the organic world's development.
Neither of the primitive men we have spoken of, nor of those who immediately succeeded them, can we rightly predicate any knowledge of nature. The rude primitive child of nature at this lowest stage of development is as yet far from being the restless Ursachenthier (cause-seeking animal) of Lichtenberg; his demand for causes has not yet risen above that of apes and dogs; his curiosity has not yet mounted to pure desire of knowledge. If we must speak of "reason" in connection with pithecoid primitive man, it can only be in the same sense as that in which we use the expression with reference to those other most highly developed Mammals, and the same remark holds true of the first beginnings of religion.[3]
It is indeed still not infrequently the custom to deny absolutely to the lower animals reason and religion. An unprejudiced comparison, however, convinces us that this is wrong. The slow and gradual process towards completeness which, in the course of thousands of years, civilised life has been working in the soul of man, has not passed away without leaving some trace on the soul of our highest domestic animals also (above all, of dogs and horses). Constant association with man, and the steady influence of his training, have gradually, and by heredity, developed in their brain higher associations of ideas and a more perfect judgment. Drill has become instinct, an undeniable example of "the transmission of acquired characters."[4]
Comparative psychology teaches us to recognise a very long series of successive steps in the development of soul in the animal kingdom. But it is only in the most highly developed vertebrates-birds and mammals—that we discern the first beginnings of reason, the first traces of religious and ethical conduct. In them we find not only the social virtues common to all the higher socially-living animals,—neighbourly love, friendship, fidelity, self-sacrifice, etc.,—but also consciousness, sense of duty, and conscience; in relation to man their lord, the same obedience, the same submissiveness, and the same craving for protection, which primitive man in his turn shows towards his "gods." But in him, as in them, there is yet wanting that higher degree of consciousness and of reason, which strives after a knowledge of the surrounding world, and which marks the first beginning of philosophy or "wisdom." This last is the much later attainment of civilised races; slowly and gradually has it been built up from lower religious conceptions.
At all stages of primitive religion and early philosophy, man is as yet far removed from monistic ideas. In searching out the causes of phenomena, and exercising his understanding thereon, he is in the first instance prone in every case to regard personal beings—in fact, anthropomorphic deities—as the agents at work. In thunder and lightning, in storm and earthquake, in the circling of sun and moon, in every striking meteorological and geological occurrence, he sees the direct activity of a personal god or spirit, who is usually thought of in a more or less anthropomorphic way. Gods are distinguished as good and bad, friendly and hostile, preserving and destroying, angels and devils.
This becomes true in a yet higher degree when the advancing pursuit of knowledge begins to take into consideration the more complicated phenomena of organic life also, the appearance and disappearance of plants and animals, the life and death of man. The constitution of organised life, so suggestive as it is of art and purpose, leads one at once to compare it with the deliberately designed works of man, and thus the vague conception of a personal god becomes transformed into that of a creator working according to plan. As we know, this conception of organic creation as the artistic work of an anthropomorphic god—of a divine mechanic—generally maintained its ground almost everywhere, down even to the middle of our own century, in spite of the fact that eminent thinkers had demonstrated its untenability more than two thousand years ago. The last noteworthy scientist to defend and apply this idea was Louis Agassiz (died 1873). His notable Essay on Classification, 1857, developed that theosophy with logical vigour, and thereby reduced it to an absurdity.[5]
All these older religious and teleological conceptions, as well as the philosophical systems (such as those of Plato and of the Church fathers) which sprang from them, are antimonistic; they stand in direct antithesis to our monistic philosophy of nature. Most of them are dualistic, regarding God and the world, creator and creature, spirit and matter, as two completely separated substances. We find this express dualism also in most of the purer church-religions, especially in the three most important forms of monotheism which the three most renowned prophets of the eastern Mediterranean—Moses, Christ, and Mohammed—founded. But soon, in a number of impure varieties of these three religions, and yet more in the lower forms of paganism, the place of this dualism is taken by a philosophical pluralism, and over against the good and world-sustaining deity (Osiris, Ormuzd, Vishnu), there is placed a wicked and destroying god (Typhon, Ahriman, Siva). Numerous demi-gods or saints, good and bad, sons and daughters of the gods, are associated with these two chief deities, and take part with them in the administration and government of the cosmos.
In all these dualistic and pluralistic systems the fundamental idea is that of anthropomorphism, or the humanising of God; man himself, as godlike (or directly descended from God), occupies a special position in the world, and is separated by a great gulf from the rest of nature. Conjoined with this, for the most part, is the anthropocentric idea, the conviction that man is the central point of the universe, the last and highest final cause of creation, and that the rest of nature was created merely for the purpose of serving man. In the Middle Ages there was associated at the same time with this last conception the geocentric idea, according to which the earth as the abode of man was taken for the fixed middle point of the universe, round which sun, moon, and stars revolve. As Copernicus (1543) gave the death-blow to the geocentric dogma, so did Darwin (1859) to the anthropocentric one closely associated with it.[6] A broad historical and critical comparison of religious and philosophical systems, as a whole, leads as a main result to the conclusion that every great advance in the direction of profounder knowledge has meant a breaking away from the traditional dualism (or pluralism) and an approach to monism. Ever more clearly are we compelled by reflection to recognise that God is not to be placed over against the material world as an external being, but must be placed as a "divine power" or "moving spirit" within the cosmos itself. Ever clearer does it become that all the wonderful phenomena of nature around us, organic as well as inorganic, are only various products of one and the same original force, various combinations of one and the same primitive matter. Ever more irresistibly is it borne in upon us that even the human soul is but an insignificant part of the all-embracing "world-soul"; just as the human body is only a small individual fraction of the great organised physical world.
The great general principles of theoretical physics and chemistry are now in a position to afford to this unifying conception of nature an exact, to a certain extent, indeed, a mathematical confirmation. In establishing the law of the "conservation of energy," Robert Mayer and Helmholtz showed that the energy of the universe is a constant unchangeable magnitude; if any energy whatever seems to vanish or to come anew into play, this is only due to the transformation of one form of energy into another. In the same way Lavoisier's law of the "conservation of matter" shows us that the material of the cosmos is a constant unchangeable magnitude; if any body seems to vanish (as, for example, by burning), or to come anew into being (as, for example, by crystallisation), this also is simply due to change of form or of combination. Both these great laws—in physics, the fundamental law of the conservation of energy, and in chemistry, of the conservation of matter—may be brought under one philosophical conception as the law of the conservation of substance; for, according to our monistic conception, energy and matter are inseparable, being only different inalienable manifestations of one single universal being-substance.[7] In a certain sense we can regard the conception of "animated atoms" as essentially partaking of the nature of this pure monism—a very ancient idea which more than two thousand years ago Empedocles enunciated in his doctrine of "hate and love of the elements." Modern physics and chemistry have indeed in the main accepted the atomic hypothesis first enunciated by Democritus, in so far as they regard all bodies as built up of atoms, and reduce all changes to movements of these minutest-discrete particles. All these changes, however, in organic as well as in inorganic nature, become truly intelligible to us only if we conceive these atoms not as dead masses, but as living elementary particles endowed with the power of attraction and repulsion. "Pleasure" and "pain," and "love" and "hate," as predicates of atoms are only other expressions for this power of attraction and repulsion.