Monism as Connecting Religion and Science | Page 3

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 remark holds true
of the first beginnings of religion.[3]
It is indeed still not infrequently the custom to deny absolutely to the
lower animals reason and religion. An unprejudiced comparison,
however, convinces us that this is wrong. The slow and gradual process
towards completeness which, in the course of thousands of years,
civilised life has been working in the soul of man, has not passed away
without leaving some trace on the soul of our highest domestic animals
also (above all, of dogs and horses). Constant association with man,
and the steady influence of his training, have gradually, and by heredity,
developed in their brain higher associations of ideas and a more perfect
judgment. Drill has become instinct, an undeniable example of "the
transmission of acquired characters."[4]
Comparative psychology teaches us to recognise a very long series of
successive steps in the development of soul in the animal kingdom. But
it is only in the most highly developed vertebrates-birds and
mammals--that we discern the first beginnings of reason, the first traces
of religious and ethical conduct. In them we find not only the social
virtues common to all the higher socially-living animals,--neighbourly
love, friendship, fidelity, self-sacrifice, etc.,--but also consciousness,
sense of duty, and conscience; in relation to man their lord, the same
obedience, the same submissiveness, and the same craving for
protection, which primitive man in his turn shows towards his "gods."
But in him, as in them, there is yet wanting that higher degree of
consciousness and of reason, which strives after a knowledge of the
surrounding world, and which marks the first beginning of philosophy
or "wisdom." This last is the much later attainment of civilised races;
slowly and gradually has it been built up from lower religious
conceptions.
At all stages of primitive religion and early philosophy, man is as yet
far removed from monistic ideas. In searching out the causes of
phenomena, and exercising his understanding thereon, he is in the first
instance prone in every case to regard personal beings--in fact,
anthropomorphic deities--as the agents at work. In thunder and

lightning, in storm and earthquake, in the circling of sun and moon, in
every striking meteorological and geological occurrence, he sees the
direct activity of a personal god or spirit, who is usually thought of in a
more or less anthropomorphic way. Gods are distinguished as good and
bad, friendly and hostile, preserving and destroying, angels and devils.
This becomes true in a yet higher degree when the advancing pursuit of
knowledge begins to take into consideration the more complicated
phenomena of organic life also, the appearance and disappearance of
plants and animals, the life and death of man. The constitution of
organised life, so suggestive as it is of art and purpose, leads one at
once to compare it with the deliberately designed works of man, and
thus the vague conception of a personal god becomes transformed into
that of a creator working according to plan. As we know, this
conception of organic creation as the artistic work of an
anthropomorphic god--of a divine mechanic--generally maintained its
ground almost everywhere, down even to the middle of our own
century, in spite of the fact that eminent thinkers had demonstrated its
untenability more than two thousand years ago. The last noteworthy
scientist to defend and apply this idea was Louis Agassiz (died 1873).
His notable Essay on Classification, 1857, developed that theosophy
with logical vigour, and thereby reduced it to an absurdity.[5]
All these older religious and teleological conceptions, as well as the
philosophical systems (such as those of Plato and of the Church fathers)
which sprang from them, are antimonistic; they stand in direct
antithesis to our monistic philosophy of nature. Most of them are
dualistic, regarding God and the world, creator and creature, spirit and
matter, as two completely separated substances. We find this express
dualism also in most of the purer church-religions, especially in the
three most important forms of monotheism which the three most
renowned prophets of the eastern Mediterranean--Moses, Christ, and
Mohammed--founded. But soon, in a number of impure varieties of
these three religions, and yet more in the lower forms of paganism, the
place of this dualism is taken by a philosophical pluralism, and over
against the good and world-sustaining deity (Osiris, Ormuzd, Vishnu),
there is placed a wicked and destroying god (Typhon, Ahriman, Siva).
Numerous demi-gods or saints, good and bad, sons and daughters of
the gods, are associated with these two chief deities, and take part with

them in the administration and government of the cosmos.
In all these dualistic and pluralistic systems the fundamental idea is that