I. It is not our purpose here to pass judgment upon the theoretical pretensions of monism as a system of metaphysics. We observe simply that the trend of modern thought is toward this system. Materialism is simply a mechanical monism, the fundamental law of which is conceived as capable of being completely formulated in mathematical terms. Idealism is simply a monism the essential law of which is conceived as mental, as pertaining to the intelligence or to the will. This latter form of monism numbers many adherents in Germany and in England. In France it has been advocated by M. Taine, and we have just seen that it is maintained at the present moment under a somewhat different form by M. Fouillée, who regards it as a reconciliation of naturalism and idealism, and no doubt also as a possible reconciliation between what is essential in pantheism and in theism.[158] In our judgment the balance must be more evenly trimmed than the philosophers above cited have done, between the material and mental aspects of existence, between objective science and subjective, conscious knowledge. Monism, therefore, essentially consists simply in a hypothesis that combines the least questionable facts dealt with by science, those which are inseparable from the elementary facts of consciousness. The fundamental unity imported by the term monism is not to be confounded with Spinoza’s unity of substance, nor with the absolute unity advocated by the Alexandrians, nor with Spencer’s unknowable force, nor with anything in the nature of a final cause, such as is spoken of, for example, by Aristotle. Neither do we affirm the existence of any unity of figure and form in the universe. We are content to admit, by a hypothesis at once scientific and metaphysical, the fundamental homogeneity of all things, the fundamental identity of nature. Monism, in our judgment, should be neither transcendent nor mystical, but immanent and naturalistic. The world is one continuous Becoming; there are not two kinds of existence nor two lines of development, the history of which is the history of the universe.
The fundamental conception of philosophy is that of life.
Instead of endeavouring to resolve matter into mind or mind into matter, we recognize them both as united in this synthesis, which science itself (and science is a stranger to anything in the nature of moral or religious prejudice) is obliged to recognize: the synthesis known as life. Science tends every day still further to extend the domain of life, and there exists no fixed point of demarcation between the organic and the inorganic world. We do not know whether the foundation of life is will, or idea, or thought, or sensation, although in sensation we no doubt approach the central point; it seems to us probable simply that consciousness, which constitutes for us everything, should count for something in every mode of being, and that there is, so to speak, no being in the universe which is entirely abstracted from self. But, leaving these hypotheses to one side, what we can affirm with certainty is that life, by the very fact of its development, tends to engender consciousness; and that progress in life ultimately comes to be one with progress in consciousness, in which what is movement in one aspect is sensation in another. Considered from within everything, even the intellectual forms of time and space, is resolvable by the psychologist into sensation and desire;[159] and, considered from without, everything is resolvable by the physicist into emotion; to feel and to move seem to be the two formulæ that express the entire inner and outer universe, the concave and convex aspects of things; but to feel that one’s self moves is the formula that expresses self-conscious life which is still so infrequent in the great totality of things, but which is becoming increasingly more common. The very meaning of progress in life consists in what is expressed by the gradual fusion of these two. Life means, in fact, development toward sensation and thought.
Life and activity.
Side by side with the tendency which life thus displays to take possession of itself by consciousness, it seeks to widen the sphere of its operation by a more and more profound activity. Life is productivity. At the lowest stage of consciousness life leads only to the inner development of the solitary cell; at the highest stage of consciousness, life manifests itself in intelligent and moral productivity. Expansion, far from being opposed to the nature of life, is in harmony with its nature, is the very condition of life, properly so called, just as in generation the need to engender another individual results in that individual’s existence being, as it were, a condition of our own. The fact is that life does not consist in nutrition only, it consists in production, and pure egoism involves not an expansion of self but a diminution and mutilation of self. Also the individual, by the mere fact of growth, tends to become both social and moral.[160] It is this fact of the fundamental sociality of mankind which is the basis of the moral instinct, and of what is most profound and durable in the religious and metaphysical instinct. Metaphysical speculation, like moral action, thus springs from the very source of life. To live is to become a conscious, a moral, and ultimately a philosophical being. Life is activity in one or other of its more or less equivalent forms: moral activity, and what may be called metaphysical activity, that is to say, activity of thought, binds up the individual with the universe.
No final cause in nature.
Up to this point we have made no mention of anything in the nature of a final cause. Morality, in our judgment, is as independent as the so-called religious instinct of anything in the nature of a primordial end and aim. Morality in the beginning is simply a more or less blind, unconscious, or, at best, subconscious power. As this power becomes endowed with self-consciousness, it directs itself toward more and more rational objects: duty is self-conscious and organized morality. Just as humanity moves blindly forward without in the first instance possessing any notion of its destination, so also moves nature.
Monism and the problem of destiny.
All this being true, what is the destiny of mankind in the world? Does monism allow a place for the hopes on which the moral and metaphysical sentiments have always relied in their effort to save thought and good-will from the charge of vanity?