Monism as Connecting Religion and Science | Page 2

by a discussion of its highest general problems. It must be regarded, therefore, with satisfaction that the speaker on such an august occasion as this--the seventy-fifth anniversary of your Society--has selected as the subject of his address a theme of the highest general importance. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more the custom on such occasions, and even at the general meetings of the great "Association of German Naturalists and Physicians," to take the subject of address from a narrow and specialised territory of restricted interest. If this growing custom is to be excused on the grounds of increasing division of labour and of diverging specialisation in all departments of work, it becomes all the more necessary that, on such anniversaries as the present, the attention of the audience should be invited to larger matters of common interest.
Such a topic, supreme in its importance, is that concerning "Scientific Articles of Faith," upon which Professor Schlesinger has already expounded his views.[1] I am glad to be able to agree with him in many important points, but as to others I should like to express some hesitation, and to ask consideration for some views which do not coincide with his. At the outset, I am entirely at one with him as to that unifying conception of nature as a whole which we designate in a single word as Monism. By this we unambiguously express our conviction that there lives "one spirit in all things," and that the whole cognisable world is constituted, and has been developed, in accordance with one common fundamental law. We emphasise by it, in particular, the essential unity of inorganic and organic nature, the latter having been evolved from the former only at a relatively late period.[2] We cannot draw a sharp line of distinction between these two great divisions of nature, any more than we can recognise an absolute distinction between the animal and the vegetable kingdom, or between the lower animals and man. Similarly, we regard the whole of human knowledge as a structural unity; in this sphere we refuse to accept the distinction usually drawn between the natural and the spiritual. The latter is only a part of the former (or _vice versa_); both are one. Our monistic view of the world belongs, therefore, to that group of philosophical systems which from other points of view have been designated also as mechanical or as pantheistic. However differently expressed in the philosophical systems of an Empedocles or a Lucretius, a Spinoza or a Giordano Bruno, a Lamarck or a David Strauss, the fundamental thought common to them all is ever that of the oneness of the cosmos, of the indissoluble connection between energy and matter, between mind and embodiment--or, as we may also say, between God and the world--to which Goethe, Germany's greatest poet and thinker, has given poetical expression in his Faust and in the wonderful series of poems entitled Gott und Welt.
That we may rightly appreciate what this Monism is, let us now, from a philosophico-historical point of view cast a comprehensive glance over the development in time of man's knowledge of nature. A long series of varied conceptions and stages of human culture here passes before our mental vision. At the lowest stage, the rude--we may say animal--phase of prehistoric primitive man, is the "ape-man," who, in the course of the tertiary period, has only to a limited degree raised himself above his immediate pithecoid ancestors, the anthropoid apes. Next come successive stages of the lowest and simplest kind of culture, such as only the rudest of still existing primitive peoples enable us in some measure to conceive. These "savages" are succeeded by peoples of a low civilisation, and from these again, by a long series of intermediate steps, we rise little by little to the more highly civilised nations. To these alone--of the twelve races of mankind only to the Mediterranean and Mongolian--are we indebted for what is usually called "universal history." This last, extending over somewhat less than six thousand years, represents a period of infinitesimal duration in the long millions of years of the organic world's development.
Neither of the primitive men we have spoken of, nor of those who immediately succeeded them, can we rightly predicate any knowledge of nature. The rude primitive child of nature at this lowest stage of development is as yet far from being the restless Ursachenthier (cause-seeking animal) of Lichtenberg; his demand for causes has not yet risen above that of apes and dogs; his curiosity has not yet mounted to pure desire of knowledge. If we must speak of "reason" in connection with pithecoid primitive man, it can only be in the same sense as that in which we use the expression with reference to those other most highly developed Mammals, and the same