Monism as Connecting Religion and Science
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Ernst Haeckel >> Monism as Connecting Religion and Science
In answer to this great and fundamental question, various physical
hypotheses have been put forward. But, like the various atomic theories
of chemistry, they have not as yet been clearly established, and the same
appears to me to be the case also with the ingenious hypothesis which the
lecturer has unfolded to us with reference to the Influence of Space. As
he himself rightly says, in all these endeavours after a philosophy of
nature we are still, for the present, dealing with "scientific articles
of faith," concerning the validity of which different persons, according
to their subjective judgment and stage of culture, may have widely
divergent views. I believe that the solution of these fundamental
questions still lies as yet beyond the limits of our knowledge of nature,
and that we shall be obliged, for a long time yet to come, to content
ourselves with an "Ignoramus"--if not even with an "Ignorabimus."
The case is very different, however, if we turn from these atomistic
element hypotheses and direct our attention to the historical conditions
of the evolution of the world, as these have been revealed to us by the
magnificent advances in our knowledge of nature which have been made
within the last thirty years. An immense new territory has here been
opened up to us in the realms of knowledge--a territory in which a series
of most important problems, formerly held to be insoluble, has been
answered in the most surprising manner.[12]
Among the triumphs of the human mind the modern doctrine of evolution
takes a foremost place. Guessed at by Goethe a hundred years ago, but not
expressed in definite form until formulated by Lamarck in the beginning
of the present century, it was at last, thirty years ago, decisively
established by Charles Darwin, his theory of selection filling up the gap
which Lamarck in his doctrine of the reciprocal influence of heredity and
adaptation had left open. We now definitely know that the organic world
on our earth has been as continuously developed, "in accordance with
eternal iron laws," as Lyell had in 1830 shown to be the case for the
inorganic frame of the earth itself; we know that the innumerable
varieties of animals and plants which during the course of millions of
years have peopled our planet are all simply branches of one single
genealogical tree; we know that the human race itself forms only one of
the newest, highest, and most perfect offshoots from the race of the
Vertebrates.
An unbroken series of natural events, following an orderly course of
evolution according to fixed laws, now leads the reflecting human spirit
through long aeons from a primeval chaos to the present "order of the
cosmos." At the outset there is nothing in infinite space but mobile
elastic ether, and innumerable similar separate particles--the primitive
atoms--scattered throughout it in the form of dust; perhaps these are
themselves originally "points of condensation" of the vibrating
"substance," the remainder of which constitutes the ether. The atoms of
our elements arise from the grouping together in definite numbers of the
primitive atoms or atoms of mass. As the Kant-Laplace nebular hypothesis
has it, the rotating heavenly bodies separate themselves out from that
vibrating primeval cloud. A single unit among many thousands of celestial
bodies is our sun, with its planets, which originated by being
centrifugally thrown off from it. Our insignificant earth is a single
planet of our solar system; its entire individual life is a product of
the sunlight. After the glowing sphere of the earth has cooled down to a
certain degree, drops of fluid water precipitate themselves on the
hardened crust of its surface--the first preliminary condition of organic
life. Carbon atoms begin their organism-engendering activity, and unite
with the other elements into plasma-combinations capable of growing. One
small plasma-group oversteps the limits of cohesion and individual
growth; it falls asunder into two similar halves. With this first moneron
begins organic life and its most distinctive function, heredity. In the
homogeneous plasma of the monera, a firmer central nucleus is separated
from a softer outer mass; through this differentiation of nucleus and
protoplasm arises the first organic cell. For a long time our planet was
inhabited solely by such Protista or single-celled primitive creatures.
From coenobia or social unions of these afterwards arose the lowest
histones, multicellular plants and animals.
By the sure help of the three great empirical "records of creation,"
palaeontology, comparative anatomy, and ontogeny, the history of descent
now leads us on step by step from the oldest Metazoa, the simplest
pluricellular animals, up to man.[13] At the lowest root of the common
genealogy of the Metazoa stand the Gastraeadae and Spongidae; their whole
body consists, in the simplest case, solely of a round digestive sac, the
thin wall of which is formed by two layers of cells--the two primitive
germinal layers. A corresponding germinal condition, the two-layered
gastrula, occurs transitorily in the embryological history of all the
other Metazoa, from the lowest Cnidaria and Vermes up to man. From the
common stock of the Helminthes, or simple worms, there develop as
independent main branches the four separate stems of the Molluscs,
Star-fishes, Arthropods, and Vertebrates. It is only these last whose
bodily structure and development in all essential respects coincide with
those of man. A long series of lower aquatic Vertebrates (lancelets,
lampreys, fishes) precedes the lungbreathing Amphibians, which appear for
the first time in the Carboniferous period. The Amphibians are followed
in the Permian period by the first Amniota, the oldest reptiles; from
these develop later, in the Triassic period, the Birds on the one hand,
and the Mammals on the other. That man in his whole bodily frame is a
true mammal, becomes obvious as soon as the natural unity of this highest
class of animals is recognised. The simplest comparison must have
convinced the unprejudiced observer of the close constitutional
relationship between man and the ape, which of all the Mammals comes
nearest him. Comparative anatomy, with its deeper vision, showed that all
differences in bodily structure between man and the Anthropoidea
(gorilla, chimpanzee, orang) are less important than the corresponding
differences in bodily structure between these anthropoid apes and the
lower apes. The phylogenetic significance of this fact, first emphasised
by Huxley, is quite clear. The great question of the origin of the human
race, or of "man's place in Nature," the "question of all questions," was
then scientifically answered: "Man is descended from a series of ape-like
Mammals." The descent of man (anthropogeny) discloses the long series of
vertebrate ancestors, which preceded the late origin of this, its most
highly developed offshoot.[13]
The incalculable importance of the light cast over the whole field of
human knowledge of nature by these results is patent to everyone. They
are destined every year increasingly to manifest their transforming
influence in all departments of knowledge, the more the conviction of
their irrefragable truth forces its way. And it is only the ignorant or
narrow-minded who can now doubt their truth. If, indeed, here and there,
one of the older naturalists still disputes, the foundation on which they
rest, or demands proofs which are wanting (as happened a few weeks ago on
the part of a famous German pathologist at the Anthropological Congress
in Moscow), he only shows by this that he has remained a stranger to the
stupendous advances of recent biology, and above all of anthropogeny. The
whole literature of modern biology, the whole of our present zoology and
botany, morphology and physiology, anthropology and psychology, are
pervaded and fertilised by the theory of descent.[14]
Just as the natural doctrine of development on a monistic basis has
cleared up and elucidated the whole field of natural phenomena in their
physical aspect, it has also modified that of the phenomena of mind,
which is inseparably connected with the other. Our human body has been
built up slowly and by degrees from a long series of vertebrate
ancestors, and this is also true of our soul; as a function of our brain
it has gradually been developed in reciprocal action and re-action with
this its bodily organ. What we briefly designate as the "human soul," is
only the sum of our feeling, willing, and thinking--the sum of those
physiological functions whose elementary organs are constituted by the
microscopic ganglion-cells of our brain. Comparative anatomy and ontogeny
show us how the wonderful structure of this last, the organ of our human
soul, has in the course of millions of years been gradually built up from
the brains of higher and lower vertebrates. Comparative psychology
teaches us how, hand in hand therewith, the soul itself, as function of
the brain, has been developed. The last-named science teaches us also
that a primitive form of soul-activity is already present even in the
lowest animals, the single-celled primitive animals, Infusoria and
Rhizopoda. Every scientific man who has long observed the life-activity
of these single-celled Protista, is positively convinced that they also
possess a soul; that this "cell-soul" also consists of a sum of
sensations, perceptions, and volitions; the feeling, thinking, and
willing of our human soul differ from these only in degree. In like
manner there is present in the egg-cell (as potential energy) a
hereditary cell-soul, out of which man, like every other animal, is
developed.[15]
The first task of a truly scientific psychology will therefore be, not,
as hitherto, idle speculation about an independent immaterial
soul-existence and its puzzling temporary connection with the animal
body, but rather the comparative investigation of the organs of the soul
and the experimental examination of their psychical functions. For
scientific psychology is a part of physiology, the doctrine of the
functions and the life-activities of organisms. The psychology and
psychiatry of the future, like the physiology and pathology of to-day,
must take the form of a cellular study, and in the first instance
investigate the soul-functions of the cells. Max Verworn, in his fine
_Psycho-physiological Protistastudies_, has lately shown us what
important disclosures such a cellular psychology can make, even in
dealing with the lowest grades of organic life, in the single-celled
Protista (especially Rhizopoda and Infusoria).
These same main divisions of soul-activity, which are to be met with in
the single-celled organism,--the phenomena of irritability, sensation,
and motion,--can be shown to exist in all multicellular organisms as
functions of the cells of which their bodies are composed. In the lowest
Metazoa, the invertebrate sponges and polyps, there are, just as in
plants, no special soul-organs developed, and all the cells of the body
participate more or less in the "soul-life." It is only in the higher
animals that the soul-life is found to be localised and connected with
special organs. As a consequence of division of labour, there have here
been developed various sense-organs as organs of specific sensibility,
muscles as organs of motion and volition, nerve-centres or ganglia as
central co-ordinating and regulating organs. In the most highly developed
families of the animal kingdom, these last come more and more into the
foreground as independent soul-organs. In correspondence with the
extraordinarily complicated structure of their central nervous system
(the brain with its wonderful complex of ganglion-cells and
nerve-fibres), the many-sided activity of such animals attains a
wonderful degree of development.
It is only in these most highly-developed groups of the animal kingdom
that we can with certainty establish the existence of those most perfect
operations of the central nervous system, which we designate as
consciousness. As we know, it is precisely this highest brain-function
that still continues to be looked upon as a completely enigmatical
phenomenon, and as the best proof for the immaterial existence of an
immortal soul. It is usual at the same time to appeal to Du
Bois-Reymond's well-known "Ignorabimus address on the Boundaries of
Natural Knowledge" (1872). It was by a peculiar irony of fate that the
famous lecturer of the Berlin Academy of Science, in this much-discussed
address of twenty years ago, should be representing consciousness as an
incomprehensible marvel, and as presenting an insuperable barrier to
further advances of knowledge, at the very moment that David Friedrich
Strauss, the greatest theologian of our century, was showing it to be the
opposite. The clear-sighted author of _The Old Faith and the New_ had
already clearly perceived that the soul-activities of man, and therefore
also his consciousness, as functions of the central nervous 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 childish understanding as
indisputable dogmas. Such hereditary articles of faith take root all the
more firmly, the further they are removed from a rational knowledge of
nature, and enveloped in the mysterious mantle of mythological poesy. In
the case of the dogma of personal immortality, there comes into play also
the interest which man fancies himself to have in his individual future
existence after death, and the vain hope that in a blessed world to come
there is treasured up for him a compensation for the disappointed hopes
and the many sorrows of his earthly life.
It is often asserted by the numerous advocates of personal immortality
that this dogma is an innate one, common to all rational men, and that it
is taught in all the more perfect forms of religion. But this is not
correct. Neither Buddhism nor the religion of Moses originally contained
the dogma of personal immortality, and just as little did the majority of
educated people of classical antiquity believe it, at any rate during the
highest period of Greek culture. The monistic philosophy of that time,
which, five hundred years before our era, had reached speculative heights
so remarkable, knew nothing of any such dogma. It was through Plato and
Christ that it received its further elaboration, until, in the Middle
Ages, it was so universally accepted, that only now and then did some
bold thinker dare openly to gainsay it. The idea that a conviction of
personal immortality has a specially ennobling influence on the moral
nature of man, is not confirmed by the gruesome history of mediaeval
morals, and as little by the psychology of primitive peoples.[17]
If any antiquated school of purely speculative psychology still continues
to uphold this irrational dogma, the fact can only be regarded as a
deplorable anachronism. Sixty years ago such a doctrine was excusable,
for then nothing was accurately known either of the finer structure of
the brain, or of the physiological functions of its separate parts; its
elementary organs, the microscopic ganglion-cells, were almost unknown,
as was also the cell-soul of the Protista; very imperfect ideas were held
as to ontogenetic development, and as to phylogenetic there were none at
all.
This has all been completely changed in the course of the last
half-century. Modern physiology has already to a great extent
demonstrated the localisation of the various activities of mind, and
their connection with definite parts of the brain; psychiatry has shown
that those psychical processes are disturbed or destroyed if these parts
of the brain become diseased or degenerate. Histology has revealed to us
the extremely complicated structure and arrangement of the
ganglion-cells. But, for the settlement of this momentous question, the
discoveries of the last ten years with regard to the more minute
occurrences in the process of fertilisation are of decisive importance.
We now know that this process essentially consists simply in the
copulation or fusion of two microscopical cells, the female egg-cell and
the male sperm-cell. The fusion of the nuclei of these two sexual cells
indicates with the utmost precision the exact moment at which the new
human individual arises. The newly-formed parent-cell, or fertilised
egg-cell, contains potentially, in their rudiments, all the bodily and
mental characteristics which the child inherits from both parents. It is
clearly against reason to assume an eternal and unending life for an
individual phenomenon whose beginning in time we can determine to a
hair's breadth, by direct observation. Judging of human spiritual life
from a rational point of view, we can as little think of our individual
soul as separated from our brain, as we can conceive the voluntary motion
of our arm apart from the contraction of its muscles, or the circulation
of our blood apart from the action of the heart.
Against this strictly physiological conception, as against our whole
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.