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.
The school of the twentieth century, flourishing anew on this firm
ground, shall have to unfold to the rising youth not only the wonderful
truths of the evolution of the cosmos, but also the inexhaustible
treasures of beauty lying everywhere hidden therein. Whether we marvel at
the majesty of the lofty mountains or the magic world of the sea, whether
with the telescope we explore the infinitely great wonders of the starry
heaven, or with the microscope the yet more surprising wonders of a life
infinitely small, everywhere does Divine Nature open up to us an
inexhaustible fountain of aesthetic enjoyment. Blind and insensible have
the great majority of mankind hitherto wandered through this glorious
wonderland of a world; a sickly and unnatural theology has made it
repulsive as a "vale of tears." But now, at last, it is given to the
mightily advancing human mind to have its eyes opened; it is given to it
to show that a true knowledge of nature affords full satisfaction and
inexhaustible nourishment not only for its searching understanding, but
also for its yearning spirit.
Monistic investigation of nature as knowledge of the true, monistic ethic
as training for the good, monistic aesthetic as pursuit of the
beautiful--these are the three great departments of our monism: by the
harmonious and consistent cultivation of these we effect at last the
truly beatific union of religion and science, so painfully longed after
by so many to-day. The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, these are the
three august Divine Ones before which we bow the knee in adoration; in
the unforced combination and mutual supplementing of these we gain the
pure idea of God.[20] To this "triune" Divine Ideal shall the coming
twentieth century build its altars.
Ten years ago I was present at the celebration of the third centenary of
the university of Würzburg, which forty years ago I had entered as a
medical student. The festal address on that occasion was delivered in the
university church by the then rector, the distinguished chemist, Johannes
Wislicenus. His concluding words were: "God, the Spirit of Goodness and
of Truth, grant it." I now add, "and the Spirit of Beauty." It is in this
sense that I also, on this commemorative occasion, dedicate to you my
best wishes. May the investigation of nature's secrets flourish and
prosper in this corner of our Thüringian land also, and may the fruits of
knowledge, ripening here in Altenburg, contribute no less to the culture
of the spirit and to the advancement of true religion, than those which
three hundred and seventy years ago the great reformer, Martin Luther,
brought to the light of day in another corner of Thüringen, on the
Wartburg at Eisenach.