Chapter 3

This has all been completely changed in the course of the last half-century. Modern physiology has already to a great extent demonstrated the localisation of the various activities of mind, and their connection with definite parts of the brain; psychiatry has shown that those psychical processes are disturbed or destroyed if these parts of the brain become diseased or degenerate. Histology has revealed to us the extremely complicated structure and arrangement of the ganglion-cells. But, for the settlement of this momentous question, the discoveries of the last ten years with regard to the more minute occurrences in the process of fertilisation are of decisive importance. We now know that this process essentially consists simply in the copulation or fusion of two microscopical cells, the female egg-cell and the male sperm-cell. The fusion of the nuclei of these two sexual cells indicates with the utmost precision the exact moment at which the new human individual arises. The newly-formed parent-cell, or fertilised egg-cell, contains potentially, in their rudiments, all the bodily and mental characteristics which the child inherits from both parents. It is clearly against reason to assume an eternal and unending life for an individual phenomenon whose beginning in time we can determine to a hair's breadth, by direct observation. Judging of human spiritual life from a rational point of view, we can as little think of our individual soul as separated from our brain, as we can conceive the voluntary motion of our arm apart from the contraction of its muscles, or the circulation of our blood apart from the action of the heart.

Against this strictly physiological conception, as against our whole monistic view of the relations of energy and matter, of soul and substance, the reproach of "materialism" continues to be raised. I have repeatedly before now pointed out that this is an ambiguous party word which conveys absolutely nothing; its apparent opposite, "spiritualism," could quite easily be substituted for it. Every critical thinker, who is familiar with the history of philosophy, knows that, as systems change, such words assume the most varied meanings, In addition to this, the word "materialism" has the disadvantage of being liable to continual confusion between its theoretical and practical meanings, which two are totally distinct. Our conception of Monism, or the unity-philosophy, on the contrary, is clear and unambiguous; for it an immaterial living spirit is just as unthinkable as a dead, spiritless material; the two are inseparably combined in every atom. The opposed conception of dualism (or even pluralism in other anti-monistic systems) regards spirit and material, energy and matter, as two essentially different substances; but not a single empirical proof can be adduced to show that either of these can exist or become perceptible to us by itself alone.

In thus shortly indicating the far-reaching psychological consequences of the monistic doctrine of evolution, I trench at the same time upon a most important field, to which our lecturer in his address has more than once alluded--that of religion and the belief in God connected therewith. I am at one with him in the conviction that the formation of clear philosophical conceptions upon these fundamental matters of belief is of the highest importance, and I would therefore crave the permission of this assembly briefly to lay before it on this occasion a frank confession of faith. This monistic confession has the greater claim to an unprejudiced consideration, in that it is shared, I am firmly convinced, by at least nine-tenths of the men of science now living; indeed, I believe, by all men of science in whom the following four conditions are realised: (1) Sufficient acquaintance with the various departments of natural science, and in particular with the modern doctrine of evolution; (2) Sufficient acuteness and clearness of judgment to draw, by induction and deduction, the necessary logical consequences that flow from such empirical knowledge; (3) Sufficient moral courage to maintain the monistic knowledge, so gained, against the attacks of hostile dualistic and pluralistic systems; and (4) Sufficient strength of mind to free himself, by sound, independent reasoning, from dominant religious prejudices, and especially from those irrational dogmas which have been firmly lodged in our minds from earliest youth as indisputable revelations.

If from this unprejudiced point of view of the thinker, we compare the numerous religions of the various races of mankind, we shall be compelled, in the first instance, to put aside as untenable all those conceptions which stand in irreconcilable contradiction to those principles of our empirical knowledge of nature which are now clearly discerned and established by critical reasoning. We can thus at once set aside all mythological stories, all "miracles," and so-called "revelations," for which it is claimed that they have come to us in some supernatural way. All such mystical teachings are irrational, inasmuch as they are confirmed by no actual experience, but, on the contrary, are irreconcilable with the known facts which have been confirmed to us by a rational investigation of nature.

This is true alike of Christian and Mosaic, of Mohammedan and Indian legends. If now we thus lay aside the whole mass of mystical dogmas and transcendental revelations, there is left behind, as the precious and priceless kernel of true religion, the purified ethic that rests on rational anthropology.[18]

Among the numerous and varied forms of religion which, in the course of the past ten thousand years and more, have been evolved from the crudest prehistoric beginnings, the foremost rank undoubtedly belongs to those two forms which still continue to be the most widely accepted among civilised races--the older Buddhism and the younger Christianity. The two have very many features in common, alike in their mythology and in their ethics; indeed, a considerable part of Christianity has come directly from Indian Buddhism, just as another part is drawn from the Mosaic and Platonic systems. But, looked at from the point of view of our present stage of culture, the ethic of Christianity appears to us much more perfect and pure than that of any other religion. We must, it is true, hasten to add that it is exactly the weightiest and noblest principles of Christian ethic--brotherly love, fidelity to duty, love of truth, obedience to law--that are by no means peculiar to the Christian faith as such, but are of much older origin. Comparative psychology proves that these ethical principles were more or less recognised and practised by much older civilised races thousands of years before Christ.

Love remains the supreme moral law of rational religion, the love, that is to say, that holds the balance between egoism and altruism, between self-love and love of others. "Do to others as you would they should do to you." This natural and highest command had been taught and followed thousands of years before Christ said: "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." In the human family this maxim has always been accepted as self-evident; as ethical instinct it was an inheritance derived from our animal ancestors. It had already found a place among the herds of Apes and other social Mammals; in a similar manner, but with a wider scope, it was already present in the most primitive communities and among the hordes of the least advanced savages. Brotherly love--mutual support, succour, protection, and the like---had already made its appearance among gregarious animals as a social duty; for without it the continued existence of such societies is impossible. Although at a later period, in the case of man, these moral foundations of society came to be much more highly developed, their oldest prehistoric source, as Darwin has shown, is to be sought in the social instincts of animals. Among the higher Vertebrates (dogs, horses, elephants, etc.), as among the higher Articulates (ants, bees, termites, etc.) also, the development of social relations and duties is the indispensable condition of their living together in orderly societies. Such societies have for man also been the most important instrument of intellectual and moral progress.

Beyond all doubt the present degree of human culture owes in great part its perfection to the propagation of the Christian system of morals and its ennobling influence, although the great value of this has been impaired, often in the most deplorable manner, by its association with untenable myths and so-called "revelations." How little these last contribute to the perfection of the first, can be seen from the acknowledged historical fact that it is just orthodoxy and the hierarchical system based on it (especially that of the Papacy) that has least of all striven to fulfil the precepts of Christian morality; the more loudly they preach it in theory, the less do they themselves fulfil its commands in practice.

It is, moreover, to be borne in mind that another and very considerable portion of our modern culture and morality has been developed quite independently of Christianity, mainly through continual study of the highly-elaborated mental treasures of classical antiquity. The thorough study of Greek and Roman classics has at least contributed much more to it than that of the Christian Church fathers. To this we must now add, in our own century (rightly called the "century of the natural sciences"), the immense advance in the higher culture which we owe to a purified knowledge of nature and to the monistic philosophy founded upon this. That these must also exercise an advancing and ennobling influence cannot be doubted, and has already been shown by many eminent authors (Spencer, Carneri, and others) in the course of the last thirty years.[18]

Against this monistic ethic founded on a rational knowledge of nature, it has been objected that it is fitted to undermine existing civilisation, and especially that it encourages the subversive aims of social democracy. This reproach is wholly unjustified. The application of philosophical principles to the practical conditions of life, and in particular to social and political questions, can be made in the most various ways. Political "free-thinking," so called, has nothing whatever to do with the "freedom of thought" of our monistic natural religion. Moreover, I am convinced that the rational morality of monistic religion is in no way contrary to the good and truly valuable elements of the Christian ethic, but is destined in conjunction with these to promote the true progress of humanity in the future.

With Christian mythology and the special form of theistic belief associated with it the case is different. In so far as that belief involves the notion of a "personal God," it has been rendered quite untenable by the recent advances of monistic science. But, more than this, it was shown more than two thousand years ago, by eminent exponents of the monistic philosophy, that the conception of a personal God, creator and ruler of the world, does not give the slightest help toward a truly rational view of the world. For even if the question of "creation," in the ordinary and trivial sense of the term, be answered by referring it to the miraculous agency of a creator working according to plan apart from the world, there immediately arises upon that the new inquiry: "Whence comes this personal God? What was He doing before creation? And whence did He derive the material for it?" and such like questions. The antiquated conception of an anthropomorphic personal God is destined, before the present century is ended, to drop out of currency throughout the entire domain of truly scientific philosophy; the corresponding conception of a personal devil--even as late as last century connected with the former and very generally accepted--has already been given up once for all by all persons of education.

Let it be noted, however, in passing, that the amphitheism which believes in God and devil alike is much more compatible with a rational explanation of the world than pure monotheism. The purest form of this is perhaps the amphitheism of the Zend religion of Persia, which Zoroaster (or Zarathustra, the "Golden Star") founded two thousand years before Christ. Here Ormuzd, the god of light and goodness, stands everywhere in conflict with Ahriman, the god of darkness and evil. The continual conflict between a good and an evil principle was personified in a similar manner in the mythology of many other amphitheistic religions: in the old Egyptian, the good Osiris was at war with the evil Typhon; in the old Indian, Vishnu the sustainer with Siva the destroyer, and so forth.

If we really must retain the conception of a personal God as the key to our view of the universe, then this amphitheism can explain the sorrows and defects of this world very simply, as being the work of the evil principle or devil. Pure monotheism, on the contrary, as represented in the religions of Moses and Mohammed in their original form, has no rational explanation of these to offer. If their "one God" is really the absolutely good, perfect being they proclaim, then the world which he has created must also be perfect. An organic world so imperfect and full of sorrows as exists on this earth he could not possibly have contrived.

These considerations gain in force when we advance to the deeper knowledge of nature acquired by modern biology; here it was Darwin, especially, who thirty-three years ago opened our eyes by his doctrine of the struggle for existence, and his theory of selection founded upon it. We now know that the whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all. Thousands of animals and plants must daily perish in every part of the earth, in order that a few chosen individuals may continue to subsist and to enjoy life. But even the existence of these favoured few is a continual conflict with threatening dangers of every kind. Thousands of hopeful germs perish uselessly every minute. The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of the unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world. The beautiful dream of God's goodness and wisdom in nature, to which as children we listened so devoutly fifty years ago, no longer finds credit now--at least among educated people who think. It has disappeared before our deeper acquaintance with the mutual relations of organisms, the advancement of oecology and sociology, and our knowledge of parasite life and pathology.

All these sad but insuperable facts--truly the dark side of nature--are made intelligible to religious faith by amphitheism; they are the "works of the devil," who opposes and disturbs the perfect moral order in the world of the "good God." For pure monotheism which knows only one God, one perfect highest being, they remain unintelligible. If, with a monotheistic creed, any one still continues to talk of the moral order of the world, he in so doing shuts his eyes to the undeniable facts of history, both natural and civil.

In view of these considerations, it is hard to understand how the large majority of the so-called educated classes can persevere, on the one hand, in declaring belief in a personal God to be an indispensable principle of religion, and, on the other hand, in at the same time rejecting the belief in a personal devil as an exploded superstition of the Middle Ages. This inconsistency on the part of educated Christians is all the more incomprehensible and censurable, inasmuch as both dogmas in equal degree form an integral part of the Christian creed. The personal devil, as "Satan," "the Tempter," "the Destroyer," and so forth, undeniably plays a most important part in the New Testament, though not met with in the earlier portions of the Old. Our great reformer, Martin Luther himself, who "sent to the devil" so many antiquated dogmas, was unable to rid himself of the conviction of the real existence and personal enmity of Beelzebub; we have only to think of the historical ink-spot at Wartburg! Moreover, our Christian art, in many thousands of paintings and other representations, has exhibited Satan in corporeal form just as realistically as it has the three "Divine Persons," about whose "hypostatical union" human reason has for eighteen hundred years been tormenting itself in vain. The deep impression made by such concrete representations, a million times repeated, especially on childish understandings, is usually under-estimated as to its tremendous influence; to it certainly is in large measure to be attributed the fact that irrational myths of such a kind, under the mask of "doctrines of faith," continue to hold their ground in spite of all protests of reason.

Liberal-minded Christian theologians have, it is true, often sought to eliminate the personal devil from Christian teaching, representing him as merely the personification of falsehood, the spirit of evil. But with equal right we must in that case substitute for a personal God the personified idea of truth, the Spirit of Goodness. To such a representation no objection can be made; rather do we recognise in it a bridge connecting the dim wonderland of religious poesy with the luminous realms of clear scientific knowledge.

The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognises the divine spirit in all things. It can never recognise in God a "personal being," or, in other words, an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form. God is everywhere. As Giordano Bruno has it: "There is one spirit in all things, and nobody is so small that it does not contain a part of the divine substance whereby it is animated." Every atom is thus animated, and so is the ether; we might, therefore, represent God as the infinite sum of all natural forces, the sum of all atomic forces and all ether-vibrations. It comes virtually to the same thing when (as was done here by a speaker on a former occasion) God is defined as "the supreme law of the universe," and the latter is represented as the "working of universal space." In this most important article of belief it matters not as to the name but as to the unity of the underlying idea; the unity of God and the world; of spirit and nature. On the other hand, "homotheism," the anthropomorphic representation of God, degrades this loftiest cosmic idea to that of a "gaseous vertebrate."[19]

Of the various systems of pantheism which for long have given expression more or less clearly to the monistic conception of God, the most perfect is certainly that of Spinoza. To this system, as is well known, Goethe also paid the tribute of his highest admiration and approval. Of other, eminent men who have given a similar pantheistic form to their natural religion, we shall here mention only two of the greatest poets and students of man, Shakespeare and Lessing; two of the greatest German rulers, Frederick II. of Hohenstaufen and Frederick II. of Hohenzollern; two of the greatest scientists, Laplace and Darwin. In adding our own pantheistic confession to that of these great and untrammelled spirits, let it only be noted further, that it has received an empirical confirmation, never before imagined, through the wonderful advances of natural knowledge within the last thirty years.

The charge of atheism which still continues to be levelled against our pantheism, and against the monism which lies at its root, no longer finds a response among the really educated classes of the present day. It is true that not so very long ago the German Imperial Chancellor, in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies, found it in him to put forward such an alternative as this: "Either the Christian or the atheistic view of the world"; this in the defence of a most objectionable law, designed to hand over our school training, tied hand and foot, to the papal hierarchy. The vast distance which separates the last-named degenerate outgrowth of the Christian religion from pure primitive Christianity is not greater than that which separates those mediaeval alternatives from the cultured religious consciousness of the present day. To one who regards as true exercises of Christian religion the adoration of old clothes and wax dolls, or the thoughtless repetition of masses or rosaries, who believes in wonder-working relics, and purchases pardon for his sins by means of indulgence-money or Peter's pence, we willingly concede the claim to possess the "only saving religion"; but with such fetish-worshippers we will willingly submit to be ranked as "atheists."

In like case with the charge of atheism and irreligion are those so often heard against monism, that it destroys the poetry of life and fails to satisfy the spiritual wants of human nature; we are told, in particular, that aesthetics--certainly a most important department both in theoretical philosophy and in practical life--is prejudiced by a monistic philosophy. But David Friedrich Strauss, one of our subtlest exponents of aesthetics and also one of our noblest writers, has already refuted such a charge; and shown how, on the contrary, the care for poetry and the cultivation of the beautiful are in the "new faith" called upon to play a still greater part than ever. My present hearers, at once investigators and lovers of nature, do not need to be told that every new insight which we obtain into the secrets of nature at the same time also kindles our souls, affords new material for imagination to work on, and enlarges our perception of the beautiful. To convince ourselves how closely all these noblest spiritual activities of man hang together, how intimately the knowledge of truth is bound up with the love of goodness and veneration of the beautiful, it will be enough to mention a single name, Germany's greatest genius--Wolfgang Goethe.

If the perception of the aesthetic significance of our monistic nature-religion, as well as of its ethical value, has hitherto so little pervaded the educated classes, this is due chiefly to the defects of our school training. It is true that in the course of the last few decades an infinite deal has been spoken and written about school reform and the principles of education; but of any real progress there is as yet but little trace. Here also reigns the physical law of inertia; here also--and more especially in German schools--the scholasticism of the Middle Ages exhibits a power of inertia, against which any rational reform of education must laboriously contest every inch of ground. In this important department also, a department on which hangs the weal or woe of future generations, matters will not improve till the monistic doctrine of nature is accepted as the essential and sure foundation.