From this opposition, which we can only briefly point out at present, there arise grave conflicts in our modern life which urgently demand a settlement. Our modern education, the outcome of our great advance in knowledge, has a claim upon every department of public and private life; it would see humanity raised, by the instrumentality of reason, to that higher grade of culture, and, consequently, to that better path towards happiness which has been opened out to us by the progress of modern science. That aim, however, is vigorously opposed by the influential parties who would detain the mind in the exploded views of the Middle Ages with regard to the most important problems of life; they linger in the fold of traditional dogma, and would have reason prostrate itself before their “higher revelation.” That is the condition of things, to a very large extent, in theology and philosophy, in sociology and jurisprudence. It is not that the motives of the latter are to be attributed, as a rule, to pure self-interest; they spring partly from ignorance of the facts, and partly from an indolent acquiescence in tradition. The most dangerous of the three great enemies of reason and knowledge is not malice; but ignorance, or, perhaps, indolence. The gods themselves still strive in vain against these two latter influences when they have happily vanquished the first.
One of the main supports of that reactionary system is still what we may call “anthropism.” I designate by this term “that powerful and world-wide group of erroneous opinions which opposes the human organism to the whole of the rest of nature, and represents it to be the preordained end of the organic creation, an entity essentially distinct from it, a godlike being.” Closer examination of this group of ideas shows it to be made up of three different dogmas, which we may distinguish as the anthropocentric, the anthropomorphic, and the anthropolatrous.[4]
I. The anthropocentric dogma culminates in the idea that man is the preordained centre and aim of all terrestrial life—or, in a wider sense, of the whole universe. As this error is extremely conducive to man’s interest, and as it is intimately connected with the creation-myth of the three great Mediterranean religions, and with the dogmas of the Mosaic, Christian, and Mohammedan theologies, it still dominates the greater part of the civilized world.
II. The anthropomorphic dogma is likewise connected with the creation-myth of the three aforesaid religions, and of many others. It likens the creation and control of the world by God to the artificial creation of a talented engineer or mechanic, and to the administration of a wise ruler. God, as creator, sustainer, and ruler of the world, is thus represented after a purely human fashion in his thought and work. Hence it follows, in turn, that man is godlike. “God made man to His own image and likeness.” The older, naïve mythology is pure “homotheism,” attributing human shape, flesh, and blood to the gods. It is more intelligible than the modern mystic theosophy that adores a personal God as an invisible—properly speaking, gaseous—being, yet makes him think, speak, and act in human fashion; it gives us the paradoxical picture of a “gaseous vertebrate.”
III. The anthropolatric dogma naturally results from this comparison of the activity of God and man; it ends in the apotheosis of the human organism. A further result is the belief in the personal immortality of the soul, and the dualistic dogma of the twofold nature of man, whose “immortal soul” is conceived as but the temporary inhabitant of the mortal frame. Thus these three anthropistic dogmas, variously adapted to the respective professions of the different religions, came at length to be vested with an extraordinary importance, and proved the source of the most dangerous errors. The anthropistic view of the world which springs from them is in irreconcilable opposition to our monistic system; indeed, it is at once disproved by our new cosmological perspective.
Not only the three anthropistic dogmas, but many other notions of the dualistic philosophy and orthodox religion, are found to be untenable as soon as we regard them critically from the cosmological perspective of our monistic system. We understand by that the comprehensive view of the universe which we have from the highest point of our monistic interpretation of nature. From that stand-point we see the truth of the following “cosmological theorems,” most of which, in our opinion, have already been amply demonstrated:
(1) The universe, or the cosmos, is eternal, infinite, and illimitable. (2) Its substance, with its two attributes (matter and energy), fills infinite space, and is in eternal motion. (3) This motion runs on through infinite time as an unbroken development, with a periodic change from life to death, from evolution to devolution. (4) The innumerable bodies which are scattered about the space-filling ether all obey the same “law of substance;” while the rotating masses slowly move towards their destruction and dissolution in one part of space others are springing into new life and development in other quarters of the universe. (5) Our sun is one of these unnumbered perishable bodies, and our earth is one of the countless transitory planets that encircle them. (6) Our earth has gone through a long process of cooling before water, in liquid form (the first condition of organic life), could settle thereon. (7) The ensuing biogenetic process, the slow development and transformation of countless organic forms, must have taken many millions of years—considerably over a hundred.[5] (8) Among the different kinds of animals which arose in the later stages of the biogenetic process on earth the vertebrates have far outstripped all other competitors in the evolutionary race. (9) The most important branch of the vertebrates, the mammals, were developed later (during the triassic period) from the lower amphibia and the reptilia. (10) The most perfect and most highly developed branch of the class mammalia is the order of primates, which first put in an appearance, by development from the lowest prochoriata, at the beginning of the Tertiary period—at least three million years ago. (11) The youngest and most perfect twig of the branch primates is man, who sprang from a series of manlike apes towards the end of the Tertiary period. (12) Consequently, the so-called “history of the world”—that is, the brief period of a few thousand years which measures the duration of civilization—is an evanescently short episode in the long course of organic evolution, just as this, in turn, is merely a small portion of the history of our planetary system; and as our mother-earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature.
Nothing seems to me better adapted than this magnificent cosmological perspective to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us. It not only clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man’s supreme importance, and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe, and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element. This boundless presumption of conceited man has misled him into making himself “the image of God,” claiming an “eternal life” for his ephemeral personality, and imagining that he possesses unlimited “freedom of will.” The ridiculous imperial folly of Caligula is but a special form of man’s arrogant assumption of divinity. Only when we have abandoned this untenable illusion, and taken up the correct cosmological perspective, can we hope to reach the solution of the “riddles of the universe.”
The uneducated member of a civilized community is surrounded with countless enigmas at every step, just as truly as the savage. Their number, however, decreases with every stride of civilization and of science; and the monistic philosophy is ultimately confronted with but one simple and comprehensive enigma—the “problem of substance.” Still, we may find it useful to include a certain number of problems under that title. In the famous speech which Emil du Bois-Reymond delivered in 1880, in the Leibnitz session of the Berlin Academy of Sciences, he distinguished seven world-enigmas, which he enumerated as follows: (1) The nature of matter and force. (2) The origin of motion. (3) The origin of life. (4) The (apparently preordained) orderly arrangement of nature. (5) The origin of simple sensation and consciousness. (6) Rational thought, and the origin of the cognate faculty, speech. (7) The question of the freedom of the will. Three of these seven enigmas are considered by the orator of the Berlin Academy to be entirely transcendental and insoluble—they are the first, second, and fifth; three others (the third, fourth, and sixth) he considers to be capable of solution, though extremely difficult; as to the seventh and last “world-enigma,” the freedom of the will, which is the one of the greatest practical importance, he remains undecided.
As my monism differs materially from that of the Berlin orator, and as his idea of the “seven great enigmas” has been very widely accepted, it may be useful to indicate their true position at once. In my opinion, the three transcendental problems (1, 2, and 5) are settled by our conception of substance (vide [chap. xii].); the three which he considers difficult, though soluble, (3, 4, and 6), are decisively answered by our modern theory of evolution; the seventh and last, the freedom of the will, is not an object for critical, scientific inquiry at all, for it is a pure dogma, based on an illusion, and has no real existence.