The sum-total of force or energy in the universe remains constant, no matter what changes take place around us; it is eternal and infinite, like the matter on which it is inseparably dependent. The whole drama of nature apparently consists in an alternation of movement and repose; yet the bodies at rest have an inalienable quantity of force, just as truly as those that are in motion. It is in this movement that the potential energy of the former is converted into the kinetic energy of the latter. “As the principle of the persistence of force takes into account repulsion as well as attraction, it affirms that the mechanical value of the potential energy and the kinetic energy in the material world is a constant quantity. To put it briefly, the force of the universe is divided into two parts, which may be mutually converted, according to a fixed relation of value. The diminution of the one involves the increase of the other; the total value remains unchanged in the universe.” The potential energy and the actual, or kinetic, energy are being continually transformed from one condition to the other; but the infinite sum of force in the world at large never suffers the slightest curtailment.
Once modern physics had established the law of substance as far as the simpler relations of inorganic bodies are concerned, physiology took up the story, and proved its application to the entire province of the organic world. It showed that all the vital activities of the organism—without exception—are based on a constant “reciprocity of force” and a correlative change of material, or metabolism, just as much as the simplest processes in “lifeless” bodies. Not only the growth and the nutrition of plants and animals, but even their functions of sensation and movement, their sense-action and psychic life, depend on the conversion of potential into kinetic energy, and vice versâ. This supreme law dominates also those elaborate performances of the nervous system which we call, in the higher animals and man, “the action of the mind.”
Our monistic view, that the great cosmic law applies throughout the whole of nature, is of the highest moment. For it not only involves, on its positive side, the essential unity of the cosmos and the causal connection of all phenomena that come within our cognizance, but it also, in a negative way, marks the highest intellectual progress, in that it definitely rules out the three central dogmas of metaphysics—God, freedom, and immortality. In assigning mechanical causes to phenomena everywhere, the law of substance comes into line with the universal law of causality.
[CHAPTER XIII]
THE EVOLUTION OF THE WORLD
The Notion of Creation—Miracles—Creation of the Whole Universe and of its Various Parts—Creation of Substance (Cosmological Creation)—Deism: One Creative Day—Creation of Separate Entities—Five Forms of Ontological Creationism—Theory of Evolution—I. Monistic Cosmogony—Beginning and End of the World—The Infinity and Eternity of the Universe—Space and Time—Universum perpetuum mobile—Entropy of the Universe—II. Monistic Geogeny—History of the Inorganic and Organic Worlds—III. Monistic Biogeny—Transformism and the Theory of Descent: Lamarck and Darwin—IV. Monistic Anthropogeny—Origin of Man
The greatest, vastest, and most difficult of all cosmic problems is that of the origin and development of the world—the “question of creation,” in a word. Even to the solution of this most difficult world-riddle the nineteenth century has contributed more than all its predecessors; in a certain sense, indeed, it has found the solution. We have at least attained to a clear view of the fact that all the partial questions of creation are indivisibly connected, that they represent one single, comprehensive “cosmic problem,” and that the key to this problem is found in the one magic word—evolution. The great questions of the creation of man, the creation of the animals and plants, the creation of the earth and the sun, etc., are all parts of the general question, What is the origin of the whole world? Has it been created by supernatural power, or has it been evolved by a natural process? What are the causes and the manner of this evolution? If we succeed in finding the correct answer to one of these questions, we have, according to our monistic conception of the world, cast a brilliant light on the solution of them all, and on the entire cosmic problem.
The current opinion as to the origin of the world in earlier ages was almost a universal belief in creation. This belief has been expressed in thousands of interesting, more or less fabulous, legends, poems, cosmogonies, and myths. A few great philosophers were devoid of it, especially those remarkable free-thinkers of classical antiquity who first conceived the idea of natural evolution. All the creation-myths, on the contrary, were of a supernatural, miraculous, and transcendental character. Incompetent, as it was, to investigate for itself the nature of the world and its origin by natural causes, the undeveloped mind naturally had recourse to the idea of miracle. In most of these creation-myths anthropism was blended with the belief in the miraculous. The creator was supposed to have constructed the world on a definite plan, just as man accomplishes his artificial constructions; the conception of the creator was generally completely anthropomorphic, a palpable “anthropistic creationism.” The “all-mighty maker of heaven and earth,” as he is called in Genesis and the Catechism, is just as humanly conceived as the modern creator of Agassiz and Reinke, or the intelligent “engineer” of other recent biologists.
Entering more fully into the notion of creation, we can distinguish as two entirely different acts the production of the universe as a whole and the partial production of its various parts, in harmony with Spinoza’s idea of substance (the universe) and accidents (or modes, the individual phenomena of substance). This distinction is of great importance, because there are many eminent philosophers who admit the one and reject the other.