Monism as Connecting Religion and Science | Page 9

system, all spring from a common
source, and, from a monistic point of view, come under the same
category. The "exact" Berlin physiologist shut this knowledge out from
his mind, and, with a short-sightedness almost inconceivable, placed
this special neurological question alongside of the one great
"world-riddle," the fundamental question of substance, the general
question of the connection between matter and energy.[16]
As I long ago pointed out, these two great questions are not two
separate "world-riddles." The neurological problem of consciousness is
only a special case of the all comprehending cosmological problem, the
question of substance. "If we understood the nature of matter and
energy, we should also understand how the substance underlying them
can under certain conditions feel, desire, and think." Consciousness,
like feeling and willing, among the higher animals is a mechanical
work of the ganglion-cells, and as such must be carried back to
chemical and physical events in the plasma of these. And by the
employment of the genetic and comparative method we reach the
conviction that consciousness, and consequently reason also, is not a
brain-function exclusively peculiar to man; it occurs also in many of
the higher animals, not in Vertebrates only, but even in Articulates.
Only in degree, through a higher stage of cultivation, does the
consciousness of man differ from that of the more perfect lower
animals, and the same is true of all other activities of the human soul.
By these and other results of comparative physiology our whole
psychology is placed on a new and firm monistic basis. The older
mystical conception of the soul, as we find it amongst primitive peoples,
but also in the systems of the dualistic philosophers of to-day, is refuted
by them. According to these systems, the soul of man (and of the
higher animals) is a separate entity, which inhabits and rules the body
only during its individual life, but leaves it at death. The widespread
"piano-theory" (_Claviertheorie_) compares the "immortal soul" to a
pianist who executes an interesting piece--the individual life--on the
instrument of the mortal body, but at death withdraws into the other
world. This "immortal soul" is usually represented as an immaterial
being; but in fact it is really thought of as quite material, only as a finer
invisible being, aerial or gaseous, or as resembling the mobile, light,

and thin substance of the ether, as conceived by modern physics. The
same is true also for most of the conceptions which rude primitive
peoples and the uneducated classes among the civilised races have, for
thousands of years, cherished as to spectral "ghosts" and "gods."
Serious reflection on the matter shows that here--as in modern
spiritualism--it is not with really immaterial beings, but with gaseous,
invisible bodies, that we are dealing. And further, we are utterly
incapable of imagining a truly immaterial being. As Goethe clearly said,
"matter can never exist or act apart from spirit, neither can spirit apart
from matter."
As regards immortality, it is well known that this important idea is
interpreted and applied in a great variety of ways. It is often made a
reproach against our Monism that it altogether denies immortality; this,
however, is erroneous. Rather do we hold it, in a strictly scientific
sense, as an indispensable fundamental conception of our monistic
philosophy of nature. Immortality in a scientific sense is conservation
of substance, therefore the same as conservation of energy as defined
by physics, or conservation of matter as defined by chemistry. The
cosmos as a whole is immortal. It is just as inconceivable that any of
the atoms of our brain or of the energies of our spirit should vanish out
of the world, as that any other particle of matter or energy could do so.
At our death there disappears only the individual form in which the
nerve-substance was fashioned, and the personal "soul" which
represented the work performed by this. The complicated chemical
combinations of that nervous mass pass over into other combinations
by decomposition, and the kinetic energy produced by them is
transformed into other forms of motion.
"Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the
wind away. O that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch
a wall to expel the winter's flaw."
On the other hand, the conception of a personal immortality cannot be
maintained. If this idea is still widely held, the fact is to be explained
by the physical law of inertia; for the property of persistence in a state
of rest exercises its influence in the region of the ganglion-cells of the
brain, as well as in all other natural bodies. Traditional ideas handed
down through many generations are maintained with the greatest
tenacity by the human brain, especially if, in early youth, they have

been instilled into the