"But now we ask further, wherein does this higher law manifest itself to us, as the physical law does in the material world? Nowhere but in man, and in him only through the medium of his cultivated and refined reason. What we feel, what we remember, nay, the very inmost sensations of our individual existence, may be referred to the world which surrounds us. Thought alone, exalted to the highest degree shows us another world. We are ourselves therefore not spirit, but we watch, as it were, what we call by that name, and which manifests itself to us only by its laws. (Est Deus in nobis.) Man, therefore, should be the link which connects the two worlds; and this is the problem, this is the enigma, which can never be solved." He adds in a note: "Materialism, that is, the view which will not allow the separation of the intellectual principle from the corporeal, but looks upon the former as a higher power of the latter, not only explains nothing, but makes the enigma still more obscure. Medical Psychology, Ed. Sydenham, pp. 15-16.
[149] Compare footnote (c) pp. 56-7 ante. This whole theory is dreamlike,—a sort of romance or revel of a half-metaphysical, half-materializing imagination. The following rather long extract from Haeckel's book will shew the hypothesis on its most poetical side. But alas for its prose, and its plain practical application! "It is indeed," he writes, "not difficult to arrive through an unprejudiced consideration of facts, at a clear conviction that Theism, which has its origin in Mythology, and which, under the name of "Pure Monotheism," rules the civilized peoples of modern day, and plays even now so conspicuous a part in organic Morphology as the Myth of Creation, is in fact not Monotheism but Amphitheism. This predominant religion was Monotheism only so long as all Natural Phenomena were, without any exception, taken to be the direct result of the personal divine government of the world,—only so long as all inorganic or organic Phenomena—from the blowing of the wind and the rolling of the thunder, to the light of the sun and the course of the stars; from the flowery fragrance of plants and the wing of the bird, to the Mind-formation of Man and the development-history of peoples;—were direct actions of a monarchical, personal Creator. But when modern Natural Science demonstrated that the whole realm of inorganic Nature was governed by fixed, unvarying laws of Nature; when Physics and Chemistry reduced Abiology to mathematical formulæ, then the half of his realm was wrested from the personal Creator, and there remained to him organic Nature alone, and even the half of this was next set free by recent Physiology, so that organic Morphology alone remained subject to the personal, arbitrary government of the mediatised ruler of the world. Thus, out of the earlier Monotheism grew up that full-blown Amphitheism which at present rules the modern Cosmology of civilized peoples; and which appears in Science as the thoroughly perverted Dualism against which we have contended most determinedly in our General Morphology. For, what else is this Dualism but the battle between two Gods of fundamentally distinct natures? On the one hand, we see in the realm of Abiology, dominated by Mechanism, the exclusive sovereignty of unvarying and necessary Nature-laws, of the ἀναγκη, which at all times and in all places constantly remains one and the same.
"On the other hand, in the realm of Biology (which is still governed by Teleology), and especially in the realm of organic Morphology, we see the ridiculous arbitrary government of a personal and thoroughly humanlike Creator, who vainly wearies himself with endeavouring to create a 'perfect' Organism, and constantly rejects the earlier creations of a 'former age,' in that he is continually setting up new and improved editions in their places. We have already shewn, in our sixth chapter, why we must entirely reject this pitiful idea of a personal Creator (Vol. I. p. 173). It is in fact a degradation of the pure God-Idea. Most men picture to themselves this 'beloved God' as being thoroughly humanlike: he is in their eyes an architect, who is engaged in carrying on the construction of the world according to some previously rejected plan; but who never gets done with it, because during the process of completion, he is always hitting on new and better ideas; he is a Stage-manager, who directs the earth like a great puppet-play, and generally knows how to handle with tolerable skill the numerous threads by which he manages the hearts of men: he is a half-deprived king who only rules over the inorganic realm conditionally, and according to firmly fixed laws; rules on the other hand over the organic realm absolutely as patriarchal land-father, who in this domain allows himself to be led into a daily alteration of his world-plan by the wishes and prayers of his own children, among whom the most perfect Vertebrates are those principally favoured.
"Let us turn away from this unworthy Anthropomorphism of modern Dogmatics, which degrade God himself into an aerial Vertebrate, and let us look on the contrary at the infinitely higher God-Idea to which Monism conducts us; in that it demonstrates the Unity of God in the whole of Nature, and abolishes the antithesis of an organic and inorganic God which sows the germ of a death-agony in the heart of that predominating Amphitheism. Our Cosmology knows only One Sole God, and this Almighty God rules the whole of Nature without exception. We contemplate his operation in all phenomena of every description. To it the whole inorganic material world is subject, and so too the whole world of organization. If each body in vacuo falls fifteen feet in the first second; if three atoms of Oxygen to one of Sulphur always produce Sulphuric Acid; if the angle which one columnar surface of rock crystal makes with the neighbouring one is always 120°; then, these phenomena are the immediate operations of God, equally with the blossoms of plants, the movements of animals, the thoughts of Mankind. We all exist by 'God's grace'; the stone as well as the water, the Radiolarian as well as the pine tree, the gorilla as much as the Emperor of China.
"This Cosmology which contemplates God's spirit and power in all natural phenomena is alone worthy of His all-comprehensive greatness; only when we refer all forces and all phenomena of movement, all forms and properties of matter, to God, as the Author of all things, do we attain to that human intuition of God, and veneration of God, which really befits his immeasurable greatness. For 'in Him we live and move and have our being.' Thus the philosophy of Nature becomes in fact Theology. The worship of Nature becomes that true worship of God of which Göethe says:—'Certainly there is no more beautiful veneration of God, than that which arises from communion with Nature in our own breasts.'
"God is Almighty; he is the sole Author, the prime Cause of all things; that is, in other words, God is the Universal Causal Law. God is absolutely perfect; he can never act otherwise than perfectly rightly, therefore he can never act arbitrarily or freely; that is to say, God is Necessity. God is the sum of all forces; so also, therefore, of all Matter. Every conception of God, which separates him from Matter, opposes to him a sum of forces which are not of divine Nature; every such conception leads to Amphitheism, consequently to Polytheism.
"Since Monism demonstrates the Unity of the whole of Nature, it proves, likewise, that only One God exists, and that this God manifests himself in the collective phenomena of Nature. Since Monism grounds the collective phenomena of organic and inorganic Nature on the Universal Causal Law, and displays them as the effects of 'active causes,' it shews at the same time, that God is the necessary Cause of all things and is the Law itself. Since Monism acknowledges no other beside the divine Forces in Nature, since it recognizes all laws of Nature as divine, it raises itself to the greatest and most elevated conception of which man, as the most perfect of all animals, is capable, to the conception of the Unity of God and Nature.
'Was wär' ein Gott, der nur von aussen stiesse,
Im Kreis das All am Finger laufen liesse!
Ihm ziemt's, die Welt im Innern zu bewegen,