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a tentative explanation of some phenomena, but it is quite helpless to explain others; whilst as to the theory of the evolution of mind' from matter, or from a substance' for which force' has been assumed, by means of psychoplasmic molecular vibrations, it is not only at present destitute of philosophical validity, but never can be otherwise. If there be no distinction twixt mind and motion, if thought can be identified with physical force, 'or energy,' then there is indeed no longer the semblance of reason' in any philosophy on earth. In such case, as Professor J. J. Thomson has put it, 'there is nothing for it but to sit down and whittle a stick till death passes our way.'

Thus, at its best and utmost, Monism is but a bewildered syncretism. Once and for all, the pseudophilosophy which vaunts its power to 'carry back to the mechanism of the atom all phenomena, without exception,' has to reckon not merely with Monads, or Protista, but with a Gladstone and a Shakespeare, with a Lincoln and a Roosevelt, to say no more. The 'system' which for the explanation of these, and all else that belongs to the life and love of earth, has nothing to offer but mechanical and

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'There is really no answer to Schoeler's putting of this case.' 'Die Schwierigkeit liegt in dem Verständniss dessen, was bei der Entwicklung eigentlich herauskommt-der Entfaltung des inneren Kernes der Natur, des wachsenden Bewusstseins der Lebewesen und des Gegensatzes von Geistigkeit und Körperlichkeit überhaupt. Denn "Entwicklung" ist, wie schon das Wort es andeutet, nur Mittel zum Zweck: und der Zweck kann nur die Offenbarung dessen sein was, zunächst noch durch die Involution larviert, sich allmählich aber mit unwiderstehlichem Drange heraus wickelt und herausschält.'-Probleme, p. 74.

chemical movements, sets a cap and bells upon its own brow. It really accomplishes nothing more than to call special attention to the 'gaps' upon which it is compelled to build. Its most prominent feature cannot but be the effrontery which styles its castle in the air a 'scientific, citadel, and appraises its incoherent assumptions as a 'theory of the universe.'

'If this science is tested by its own principles, we shall see that it does one thing of which itself it has no adequate conception. It does not answer the riddle; but what it does do is to restate it with an amplitude and clearness of detail never attained till now. Professor Haeckel's work, for example, which purports to provide us with a solution of it, is in effect a magnifying glass of enormous power, which helps us to see clearly what the question to be solved is, little as he himself understands what he has done so much to reveal.'-W. H. Mallock, The Reconstruction of Belief, p. 180.

V

THE THOUGHT OF GOD

'We only know God in His works; but we are absolutely forced by science to believe with perfect confidence in a Directive Power-in an influence other than physical, or dynamical, or electrical forces. There is nothing between absolute belief in a Creative Power and the acceptance of the theory of a fortuitous concourse of atoms.'

LORD KELVIN, Nineteenth Century, June, 1903.

'Because reference to the Deity will not serve for a physical explanation in physics, or a chemical explanation in chemistry, it does not therefore follow that the sum total of scientific knowledge is equally intelligible, whether we accept the theistic hypothesis or not.'

PROF. WARD, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. i. p. 24.

'The natural sequel of the argument would be this. Sight, being a fact not precedent but subsequent to the putting together of the organic structure of the eye, can only be connected with the production of that structure in the character of a final, not an efficient cause-that is, it is not sight itself, but an antecedent idea of sight, that must be the efficient cause. But this at once marks the origin as proceeding from an intelligent will.'

J. S. MILL, Three Essays on Religion, cheap edition, p. 74. 'It were as easy to believe that, say, Milton's Paradise Lost had been set up in all its stately march of balanced syllables by an anthropoid ape, or that the letters composing it had been blown together by a whirlwind, as to believe that the visible universe about us-built upon mathematical laws, knitted together by a million correspondences, and crowded thick with marks of purpose-is the creation of some mindless Force.'

DR. FITCHETT, The Unrealized Logic of Religion, Fernley

Lecture, p. 134.

'Science, then, in proportion as it is completely rationalized, not merely permits but actually compels the reason to recognize a purposive Mind as the First Cause of the universe; thus completely revolutionizing the atheistic or agnostic conclusion to which it seemed to lead when its implications were insufficiently realized.'

W. H. MALLOCK, The Reconstruction of Belief, p. 290.

V

THE THOUGHT OF GOD

Ir is now necessary to estimate the bearing of the monism of Professor Haeckel, upon the doctrine of Christian theism. This does not involve a comprehensive statement of the whole grounds upon which that doctrine rests. For the present we have simply to scrutinize the strange admixture of dogmatisms, assumptions, misrepresentations, false logic, and self-contradictions-to say nothing of sneers— which, here as elsewhere, enter into the composition of what is termed 'monistic philosophy.' The following sentence from the ostensible answer' to 'Haeckel's critics,' will serve at once to link this section on to the preceding, and show to what straits this alleged 'system' is reduced, in its attempts to formulate general conclusions:

It is no less scientific than philosophical to see in the growth of the human mind a further extension of the life-force of the cosmos, a further embodiment of the great matter-force-reality which unfolds itself in the universe about us, and in the wonderful self-conscious mechanism of the human mind.'

This, however, I hope to attempt ere long in a following volume upon the general theme of God and the Universe.

Haeckel's Critics Answered, p. 60.

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