On the side of philosophy, Albert Lange and Herbert Spencer reach similar results. Albert Lange, in his"History of Materialism," starting especially from premises of Kant, reaches the conclusion that the "thingper se," the "intelligible world," is absolutely hidden to us. What we perceive is but the world of appearances; and the fact that we perceive it, and perceive it as we do, is originally founded in the human organization. By virtue of this organization we are bound, in all our knowledge of the world of appearances, to the law of causality. Science does not get beyond this causal chain of finite and relative causes and effects; to the "thingper se" there is nowhere to be found a bridge, not even as Kant supposes, in the categoric imperative, nor in ideas. Inasmuch as science does not get beyond this chain, it is materialistic; inasmuch as it must nevertheless perceive the existence, or at least the possibility of the existence, of a "thingper se," even if it does not see any way to its perception, it is idealistic. But man also has ideal impulses, and he has to follow them just as much as the impulse of perception. By virtue of these ideal impulses, he makes in imagination a picture of the "thingper se" in the activity of philosophic speculation, art, and religion. Philosophic speculation is but imaginative conceptions. It has always a value in the history of culture, as a summing-up of the elements of culture and of the spiritual impulses and treasures of a certain time; but it errs as soon as it claims to be more than imaginative conceptions—namely, an adequate representation of the final cause of all things—for it lacks the necessary basis of experience. Art does not claim this, and therefore is not exposed to that danger of deception. Religion satisfies a need of the heart, to have a home of the spirit in the "thingper se"; butsince the "thingper se" is not accessible for us, religion creates in mind that home, in order to rise above the common reality to it. Lange finds the highest realization of a perfect satisfaction of that impulse in the philosophic poems of Schiller. He sees the quintessence of religion expressly "in the elevation of minds above the real, and in the creation of a home of the spirit." Religion remains untouched in its full vital power, as long as it retains that as its quintessence; but it is exposed to all the dangers of a destructive criticism as soon as it seeks its quintessence in something else—for instance, in certain doctrines of God, the human soul, creation of the world, etc.
Herbert Spencer is in full accord with Lange in regard to the theory of an absolute indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things; but he reaches this result in a somewhat different way, and from his premises infers a different modification of the nature of religion. In his "First Principles" he appears to be a true scholar of the English and Scotch schools of philosophy, from which he takes his start in conscious and express opposition to the German modes of speculation, and begins with an empiric comparison of all actual contrasts existing in the world and in human life. He follows the axiom that a particle of truth lies at the basis of every error, and that each contrast becomes a contrast only by the fact that the two poles of the contrast have something in common. Now, in comparing with one another all contrasts between religion and science, and all forms of religiousness and irreligiousness, from fetishism up to monotheism, pantheism, and atheism, all imaginable cosmogonies, he finds, as the last truth common to all, and thereforealone absolutely certain, theabsolute indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things. On page 44 he says, that religions diametrically opposed in their overt dogmas, are yet perfectly at one in the tacit conviction that there is a problem to be solved, that the existence of the world with all it contains is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation; and on page 45, that the omnipresence of something which passes comprehension, is that which remains unquestionable. And on page 46 he concludes: "If Religion and Science are to be reconciled, the basis of reconciliation must be this deepest, widest, and most certain of all facts—that the Power which the Universe manifests to us is utterly inscrutable." The acknowledgment of this fact is religiousness; the contrary of it is irreligiousness and anthropomorphistic arrogance, even if it appears in the name of religiousness. "Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious" (p. 110).
A comparison of the two philosophers is interesting.
In one direction, Lange does more justice to the religious need than Spencer does. While he sees in religion the metaphorical realization of the needs of the heart, of a "creation of a home of the spirit," he gives to the heart full play to satisfy its need, and to create and arrange for itself a spiritual home entirely according to its need. He especially acknowledges repeatedly the need of the heart foratonement, and vigorously defends this need and its satisfaction against Liberal Theologians (Reformtheologen), like Heinrich Lang; he also stands, as we see, in satisfactory contrast to Wilhelm Bleek. Without reserve, he admits into the hymn-book of his religion of the future hymns like that of Gerhard: "O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden" ("O Sacred Head,now wounded"). To be sure, all the concessions he makes to religion sink again to the value of a beautiful illusion, from the fact that for him they are but metaphorical approaches to the cause of all things, which after all still remains inaccessible. But nevertheless, in consequence of that idea of religion, religious life, and especially also religious service, has infinitely more room for rich development in Lange than in Spencer. For, according to the view of the latter, religiousness consists in nothing else but the perception and acknowledgment of this indiscernibleness of the final cause. All other things which may be still connected with religious life and reasoning, are but a misty veil. The acknowledgment of the indiscernibleness of the final cause of all things alone is the quintessence of religion. But such a religiousness, which expressly forbids imagining any quality or any state of the highest being, certainly would be, as Prof. Huxley correctly says in his "Lay Sermons," for the most part of the silent sort.
While thus Lange's conception of religion is superior to that of Spencer in admitting a richer development of religious life, a more various satisfaction of the religious need, in another direction Spencer is superior. He comes considerably nearer to a correct and fullconception of Godthan Lange. His idea of the final cause of all things does not lie entirely in the conception that it is the absolute indiscernible; but Spencer is fully in earnest with the idea that this indiscernible is the real cause of the world and of all single existences in it. He accordingly forbids giving certain attributes to the absolute—not because it would be doubtful whether it has attributes or not, but because it standsaboveall theseimaginable attributes as their real cause. Therefore he forbids, for instance, attributing personality, intelligence, will, to the highest being—not because it could also be impersonal, and in want of intelligence and will, but because it standsaboveall these attributes as their highest real cause, and because we can think of all these attributes only in human analogy, and therefore, when attributed to the highest being, can think of them only in rejectable anthropomorphism. He says, on page 109: "Those who espouse this position [personality of God], make the erroneous assumption that the choice is between personality and something lower than personality; whereas the choice is rather between personality and something higher. Is it not just possible that there is a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence and Will, as these transcend mechanical motion? It is true that we are totally unable to conceive any such higher mode of being. But this is not a reason for questioning its existence; it is rather the reverse.... The Ultimate Cause cannot in any respect be conceived by us because it is in every respect greater than can be conceived."
Thus we find in Lange a fuller and richer conception of the subject of religion; but this conception is in want of one thing—without which it is in want of everything—namely, of nothing less than of the objective reality. Spencer's religiousness has a much more meagre and less varied character: the acknowledgment and veneration of the indiscernible; but he nevertheless gives us with this content and object arealobject, even an object of veneration, in which the abundance of all reality is hidden, with the only conception that the indiscernibledoes not let us look into its cornucopia, but only lets us judge of the abundance of its contents by the richness of that which it pours over us in the world of the relatively perceptible.
It will not be difficult to show the points at which each of these writers would have been able, had he so wished, to lead his conception of religion, the one to a real, the other to a full content.
Lange finds the last principle of perception which is accessible to us, in ourorganization. Now from our organization originate not only all modes of the perception of the empirical world, but just as well all our ideal impulses, especially the ethical. Which one of all those dispositions, impulses, and activities has the precedence, mainly depends upon the value which man places upon them. Now, when man attributes to the ideal and ethical a higher value than to the empirical, when in reflecting about himself he finds that even in the normal individual the empirical, sensual, and material is subordinate and subject to the ideal and especially to the ethical, then from the standpoint of Lange he is right, and obliged to estimate the truth of that ideal and ethical as higher than the truth of the empirical world, and to look at the whole empirical world only as being in the service of that ideal world. When, at the same time, we observe an inner harmony in our organization, this observation gives us the right and the duty of controlling the truth of our empirical perception by the truth of the results of our ideal and our ethical activity, and the latter again by the former. For if we do not wish to suppose that the human organization aims at a grand deception of mankind, we have, in spite ofthe superiority of the ideal and ethical activities, to establish the axiom that the empirical and the ideal and ethical cannot remain in lasting contradiction. Besides, if we should add to this that a religion like Christianity offers to man that which it gives to him on the ground of historical facts, then the reports of these facts will certainly be subject to historical criticism just as surely as all historical reports; but if they are confirmed, the ideal and ethical convincing power which lies in this religion, unites for us with the whole weight of the convincing power of the historical and empirical facts, although the reproduction and systematization of its contents is still deficient and capable of further development.
In Spencer's system, there are two points by which his own course of reasoning is able to bridge over the poverty of his conception of religion. The first point, given on pages 107-108 of his "First Principles," and also elsewhere in his works, is the acknowledgment that the final cause of all things ishigherthan all that we know, and is of such a nature that it really can be the real cause of everything, even the real cause of the spiritual and ethical. Thus he forbids us to think of qualities of the highest being, but he himself thinks of them; for this conception of the highest being as animpersonalis certainly something else and something much more valuable than the mere negation of personality. The other point which might be able to lead him out of the vacuum of his idea of God, lies in the method of his own investigation. When he seeks the truth by collecting what is common in all the contrasts, he also must seek and find something common between the highest causeof all things on one side and of the world as a whole and in detail on the other; and this something will consist of the necessity of the highest cause of all things being so qualified thatit is ableto bring into existence the world as a whole and in detail. If such ideas are also rejected as anthropomorphisms, then all reasoning and investigating is anthropomorphistic; and in that respect we refer to what we had to say above, when treating of teleology (p. 170 ff.). The same Duke of Argyll whom we there had occasion to quote, in an article in the "Contemporary Review" (May, 1871), upon "Variety as an Aim in Nature," has admirably shown that it is the mind of man from which we may draw conclusions as to the nature of the Creator, and that the picture which we thus get of him, can at the same time be seen true and yet dim, at the same time real and yet from a distance; for the human mind does not feel anything so much as its own limitations, and therefore can easily imagine each of his powers and talents as being present in the highest being in infinite perfection. If Spencer had made this comparison, and drawn the conclusions which follow from it for the nature of the final cause of all things, the indiscernibleness of God would for him be reduced to an unsearchableness, the unknowable be changed into an unsearchable, and we could willingly acknowledge the humble modesty in regard to the infinity of the deity, which his philosophy requires, as a factor of all true religiousness. But we have to present to him as an expression, not only of true religiousness, but also of true science, that passage of the Psalms: "He that planted the ear, shall henot hear? He that formed the eye, shall he not see?" (PsalmXCIV, 9.)
§ 4.Spinoza and Hegel in the Garb of Darwin: Carneri. Eduard von Hartmann.
To the Austrian philosopher Carneri in his "Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus" ("Morality and Darwinism"), three books of Ethics, Vienna, Braumüller, 1871, we shall have to give a place of his own.
Inasmuch as religion and the beautiful are to him but a preliminary stage of truth which has to dissolve itself into philosophy—a philosophy which, inclined to monism, prefers to call itself pantheism—he takes a position in reference to religion similar to that toward materialism, namely: a negative position. But inasmuch as he still grants to religion in a subjective sense, to "religion in the form of piety," a lasting position and truth (religion, he says, has truth, but the positive God of religion has no reality, page 114), and inasmuch as he ascribes to it not only a transitory pedagogical value for the masses, which are not yet elevated to the height of philosophic reasoning, but a value also for the philosopher—namely, the value of religiousness and of piety—he rather belongs to the second and third of the before-mentioned groups.
Carneri, in his "Three Books of Ethics," gives us a whole philosophic encyclopedia. In thoughts sometimes rich, but without regularly arranged and quiet reasoning, and in full command and employment of modern terms which he uses sometimes like a genius, but often superficially and unjustly, he develops a view of the world which, although it appears in an independent wayin all its fundamentals, as regards its contents takes its origin from Spinoza, and as regards form and dialectics from Hegel, but sometimes, it is true, sinks into weaknesses of which these philosophers would hardly have been guilty. So, for instance, when he simply identifies religious faith with conjecture, he takes a superficial view which he has in common with Häckel who, among other things, repeatedly says that faith begins where knowledge ceases. Dialectical motion is everything to him. In pursuing this dialectical motion, he gives us a multitude of outlooks into all imaginable realms of knowledge and life, but he always follows at the same time the formula of dialectical motion, and, where the difficulties of the real world are most invincibly opposed to this dialectics, knows, like his master, with almost chivalric ease, to mingle and confound abstract formalistic reasoning and thoughts naturally following from the given thought. Want of clearness in general makes the reading of this otherwise not unimportant book very difficult. On a Darwinian foundation in his conception of nature and its development, he puts a Hegelian structure into his conception of human spiritual life, but finally lets mankind, although it is the highest form of appearance in this development, sink back into death and destruction.
The God of this view of the world is the causal law; the conception of this causal law is the worship of the philosopher—a God, of course, so incapable of filling and quieting a mind longing for God—a worship so leathern that Carneri himself cannot get rid of the opinion that, with such religious ideas of reform, he will finally lose the last reader of his book. The aim of thedevelopment, also, does not promise to the mind any substitute for the rigidness of God, for the aim of the development is death—the death of the individual as well as of the universe. "He who has learned to get comfort in the deepest affliction from the absolute impartiality of the causal law, is on so good terms with death, whose inflexibility he comprehends, that without reluctance he gives to it the universe into the bargain." (p. 353.)
We give these glimpses into the dreary waste of the very latest advocate of pessimism which, as it seems, has fully and formally become the fashion, in order to show what monstrosities are demanded from thought, what revolting hardness from feeling, what nonentities of ethical striving, are offered as valuable wares, if man has once begun to break the bond between himself and his living Creator and Master. For this reason, not only the anti-teleological monists meet the fate of Nihilism, whether they appear in the plebeian roughness of Büchner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind than nothingness, because he did not wish to be driven from his perception of ends in the world to the only conclusion to which it leads—namely: to the perception of an absolute intelligent and ethical personality that directs these ends. He prefers, rather, to suppose an unconsciously seeing substance of the world, which, after having once in the dark impulse of its unconscious will, made the mistake of creating a world, leads the same by the instinct of unconscious teleology in sad, melancholy, and yet relativelybest development, until it is ripe to sink back into nothingness, and thereby to bring the absolute to rest.
Although we pity the individuals who came under the ban of such a pessimism, we nevertheless can be glad of the fact that the consequences of such a separation from God are at least exposed so clearly, and return from wandering through such barren steppes with renewed thankfulness to our Christian view of the world, with its divine plan and aim.
We have, next, however to review the representatives of theism and of the Christian view of the world—which review will show us that the song of triumph which monism began to raise before its expected victory, came very near disturbing the composure of persons here and there.
§ 5.Re-echo of Negation on the Side of the Christian View of the World.
In this condition of affairs, it certainly could not happen otherwise than that, even on the part of the theistic and positive Christian view of the world, some advocates were drawn into the contest who thought themselves obliged to see two irreconcilable antagonists in Darwinism and Christianity.
Science and religion had both been so much accustomed to see the origin of species, and especially the appearance of man on the stage of earth, hidden in impenetrable and unapproachable secrecy, that every attempt at clearing up this darkness very naturally appeared to both as an attack upon the creative activity of God. The mode of reasoning to which mankind, in its scientific as well as in its religious meditations, hadaccustomed itself for hundreds of years, was used to exclude from the idea of creation the conception of intervening agencies; and this was true not only in regard to the idea of the first creation of the universe, where the idea of intervening agencies naturally is left out, but also in regard to the idea of the creation of single beings. Moreover, mankind was so accustomed to see a contrast between origination and creation, that in the same degree in which man tried or was able to perceive the modalities of the origin of species, the divine causality, or at least the idea of creation, seemed to disappear; and for the word of the Bible, that God created creatureseach after its kind, a place could no longer be found.
To this was added the fact that not only all materialism took possession of Darwinism as the irresistible battering-ram which, as they said, forever demolishes the whole fortress of theism and buries under its ruins all those who take refuge in this decaying castle, but that evennaturalistslet themselves be carried away without opposition by this anti-theistic current, and even submitted to be heralds and prophets of this new anti-theistic wisdom of monism. Let the reader think of Häckel's "Natural History of Creation" and "Anthropogeny," where he will find the most interesting reports from all realms of exact natural science, together with a wholly unsolved entanglement of descent, selection, and mechanical view of the world, and this mode of contemplation of the world, with eloquent and enthusiastic proclamation of monism and with unconcealed derision of the capricious arbitrariness of a personal Creator, all thrown together as one great entire system, formed at one stroke.
Is it, then, to be wondered at, that not only the uncritical among believers, but also those who thoughtfully examined the movements of the mind, believed in the loudly-proclaimed connection of Darwinism with the whole anti-Christian view of the world, and therefore protested immediately against everything which is called Darwinism? Can we reproach theologians for not immediately becoming scientists themselves, in order to form an independent judgment in the question, when even the most eminent scientists declared that amalgamation of the most heterogenetic as an inevitable consequence of Darwinism, and as much as possible diminished or concealed their want of harmony with a few other investigators who, although small in number, yet by their weight counterbalanced dozens of names of the second and third rank?
Thus we could read, in the journals of specialists, in pamphlets, in religious and political journals, even in local newspapers, a great many articles which were guilty of exactly the same confounding of the scientific and the religious, and again of the scientific and the philosophic, as those who had caused this confounding, and who, under the supposition of this solidarity of wholly distinct things, attacked and contested in the interest of religion, not only the anti-religious conclusions of Darwinian philosophers, but also Darwinism as a merely scientific theory, and rendered the contrast as strong as possible by adhering to that above censured, unmotived, indefensible, and one-sided conception of creation.
And although on the part of positive Christian theology there was a gradually increasing number of voicesof those who in the idea of an origin of species throughdescentdo not yet see an injury to the theistic and Christian conception of God and creation, still as a rule this concession was made only to the idea of descent, and not to that of selection and to that which is properly called Darwinism. As a rule, in most of the theological works which treat in general of theDarwinianquestions, Darwinism and opposition to the Christian conception of God and creation were and are still taken as identical. For instance, Ebrard, in the first part of his "Apologetik" ("Apologetics"), Gütersloh, Bertelsmann, 1874, enumerates among the systems which are opposed to Christianity, in the same line with the doubtless anti-theistic and anti-Christianaposkopiologyor negation of the idea of design, also the mechanistic system, or the negation of the organic vital force, and the Darwinian theory of descent. Besides, in reading his "Apologetics," we had earnestly wished, in the interest of science as well as of religion, that a theologian who writes a work which claims to be scientific and to advocate the Christian standpoint, had abstained from that coarse and disgusting contempt and derision of adversaries which we meet so often in his book, and which only causes friend and foe to take a position contrary to that which the author intended. Trümpelmann who, in an essay upon Darwinism, monistic philosophy, and Christianity (Jahrbücher für protestantische Theologie, 1876, I) gives a similar conception of the relation between Darwinism and religion, but defends his whole position with much more scientific acuteness and depth, has also not taken the tone which worthily treats an opposite opinion and its advocates.
REFORM OF RELIGION, OR AT LEAST OF THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION, THROUGH DARWINISM.
§ 1.Heinrich Lang, Friedrich Vischer, Gustav Jäger.
In passing on to those who in Darwinism do not see a negation but a reformation of religion, or at least of theology, we first meet Heinrich Lang, the late spiritual leader of the "Reformtheologie" in Switzerland. He treats of "Die Religion im Zeitalter Darwins" ("Religion in the Age of Darwin") in Holtzendorff's and Oncken's "Deutsche Zeit- und Streitfragen," Jahrg. II, Heft 31, Berlin, Lüderitz, 1873.
With a very correct estimate of the lasting value of religion as well as of natural science, and with a warm apology for the religious realm, he regulates the boundaries of each by asking religion not to hinder modern knowledge of the world and nature, and by asking knowledge of nature to leave the realm of religion untouched in its self-certainty.
But when he, evidently still dependent on the old rationalistic supernaturalistic conception of miracle and providence, claims to find that as the result of modern knowledge of the world and nature a special providence is no longer conceivable, and no other hearing of prayer is possible than a subjective psychological one; that the processes in the world, in their entire final causal connection of causes and effects, nowhere leave a place forthe freely acting hand of a divine Lord of the world, and that even a moral order of the world can only prove itself so far as guilt and punishment stand in a natural causal connection with one another: then his religiousness makes concessions to the modern view of the world which it is not at all obliged to make or justified in making, and forces upon religion a reform against the necessity and usefulness of which not only religious feeling and need, but also deeper and more consequent reflection on God and the world, just as strongly strives.
What remains to him as an independent realm for religion is nevertheless worthy of recognition. As faith of the human mind in a transcendental unity which manifests itself in the manifold and sensible, and carries through a moral order of the world—although one which, by the before-mentioned limitation of the natural connection of guilt and punishment, is very much reduced—religion gives to the mind warmth and worship; as confidence of the heart in an infinite possession in the anguish of the finite, it creates confidence in God, gratitude, devotion, energy, courage of life; as reverence for a holiness which stands unimpeachable above the fluctuating inclinations of our will, awakens the consciousness of guilt, and abolishes the guilt, it remains the basis of all moral action. Lang also sharply and correctly points out the insufficiency of Strauss's "The Old Faith and the New," as well as the conflict between his metaphysical naturalism which only leads to the struggle for existence, and his demand of self-submission to the universe, and of the moral and spiritual self-determination of man as of a being which goes beyond nature. Nevertheless we can not follow Lang in hisways of reform. First—his conception of God is amazingly meagre, and of more than a Spencerian unapproachableness. God is to him, according to his "Dogmatics," nothing but the eternal, in itself perfect cause of all being, exempted from all changes of the world's process. When he gives the name of father to this primeval cause, as he does in his sermons and elsewhere, without being able to admit relation of mutual love of person to person, he only makes it glaringly evident how little his abstract metaphysics can satisfy religious need. Second—that which is claimed to be gained by this modern view of the world (namely, extension of the supremacy of religion to everything, even to the affairs of daily life), is not at all new, but is the effect of long-existing sound religiousness, and is the essence of all sound religious doctrine; and we therefore can not see how a view of the world, which, for instance, denies divine providence, and limits the hearing of prayer to its psychological effects, shall have greater force to leaven the whole daily life religiously, than our Christian faith in the Father without whose will no sparrow falls to the ground, and who says to his children: "Call upon me in the day of trouble: I will deliver thee, and thou shalt glorify me." Third—exactly that which Lang declares a purification of religion (namely, the before-mentioned elimination of divine providence and of all that which is connected therewith), appears to us not at all as a reform, but as an immense impoverishment and desolation of religion, which is so far from being required by natural science, that it turns out to be but a concession to the most superficial metaphysicians who, of course, have become very popular.
Friedrich Vischer is also to be ranked in this group. In the sixth part of his "Kritische Gänge" ("Critical Walks"), he speaks of Strauss' "The Old Faith and the New," and takes his determined position in reference to the religious question, quite essentially differing from Strauss. In regard to the aversion to miracles, he stands on the same ground with Strauss and Lang; in protesting against Strauss' elimination of the idea of design, and especially in demanding a moral order of the world, he is still more energetic than Lang. He particularly does not, like Lang, limit the moral order of the world to the simple empiric causal connection between human action and its consequences. But on the other hand, by his opposition to the idea of a personality of God, he again deviates more than Lang from the true meaning of Christian religiousness. On page 219 he says: "How, in spite of the infinite crossings of human action, is inner conformity to the end in view in general so established through that which we call chance, or rather by means of these crossings, that we can speak of a moral order of the world? Men, individuals as well as communities, follow their aims. Hereby there always results something quite different from that which they intended and wished. Sublime laws govern above us, between us, full of mystery in the midst of life; one of them in reference to guilt, punishment of guilt, is called nemesis. Faith in that meaning of the word, which we regard as a low one [he means the faith which has its dogmas beyond which the man of the most recent culture has passed, not knowing that he also carries around with him his dogmas, his "new faith"] is in need of a person who founds, carries out, and executesthese laws. But the faith of the monists has no such need. Why not? That needs more sufficient demonstration."
Certainly it needs more sufficient demonstration. But this demonstration will never be possible, so long as we acknowledge the government of a moral order of the world. For this leads of necessity to faith in a living God, and this faith demands from our conception less pretensions than the faith in a kind of system of spiritual machinery by which chance and the wished-for are woven together, without this system proceeding from a highly spiritual and ethical intelligence. It nevertheless must be acknowledged that Vischer, from the standpoint ofethicalneed, vindicates the position and truth of religion, as he also beautifully and correctly defines its position in reference to morality, in saying that morality makes the demand, religion gives the strength to meet it.
From another side, Gustav Jäger makes a compromise between Darwinism and religion in his five lectures on "Die Darwinsche Theorie und ihre Stellung zu Moral und Religion" ("The Darwinian Theory and its Position in Reference to Morality and Religion"), Stuttgart, J. Hoffmann, 1869.
He makes still more valid concessions to religion and Christianity than Lang and Vischer; directly opposes materialistic monism; leaves to faith in a personal God, in the divinity of Christ, in individual immortality, in the answer to prayer beyond the psychological effect, in miracles, in short, to the full contents of Christian religiousness, their weight and truth; and in that respect we would have to rank him in the following group, if hedid not by his manner of proving these concessions exclude himself from it, and rank himself in that group of which we treat in the present section.
According to his opinion, Darwinism gives to religion, if not new contents (although these contents are entirely subject to revision according to Darwinism), still a wholly new foundation, and, indeed, a foundation of subjective religiousness, as well as of the objective contents of religion, only from the standpoint of its practical usefulness in the struggle for existence. The faith in a personal God, in immortality, in redemption by the God-Man Jesus Christ, in the hearing of prayer, in help in danger even to the extent of miracles, strengthens man, gives to him a superiority to those who do not have that faith and who do not have the habit of prayer, and therefore is so far the best weapon in the struggle for existence; and herein lies the truth of religion, especially of the Christian religion, as the most successful weapon in the struggle for existence which takes place through the whole creation, from the lowest organisms up to the highest spiritual life of mankind.
We willingly admit that Christianity has certainly proved itself by far the strongest and most successful means of education to mankind, and that, if we must once express this experience in the Darwinian mode of speaking, we can express it as above. But with the attempt to make thetruthof religion and the truth of its contents, even if only subjective, dependent only and solely upon the proof of itsusefulness, nobody, either friend or foe, will be satisfied. The adversaries of religion and Christianity, perhaps with the exception of Büchner, will admit that Christianity has for sometime been a quite useful weapon to mankind in the struggle for existence; but they will say that they are just about to replace it by a still more useful weapon; and the advocates of religion and Christianity likewise can not agree upon a mere grounding of their religion upon need which puts upon them every day the possibility of changing it for something still more useful. Both friend and foe will join in the conviction that objective truth is always the best guarantee for subjective success; and thus both will pass beyond the purely utilitarian apologetics or polemics to the questions as to the objective reality of the contents of Christian religiousness.
PEACE BETWEEN RELIGION AND DARWINISM.
§ 1.Darwin, Wallace, R. Owen, Asa Gray, Mivart, McCosh, Anderson, K. E. v. Baer, Alex. Braun, Braubach, etc.
It still remains for us to take a glance at those who think religion and Darwinism, and Christianity and Darwinism, hold toward one another reciprocally amicable relations.
In the first place, we have to mention Darwin himself. In his earliest work, "Origin of Species," he repeatedly gives this opinion, as on page 421: "I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz 'as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.' A celebrated author and divine has written to me that he 'has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.'" On page 428, he speaks of the laws which God has impressed on matter; and at the end of his work, on page 429, he says: "There is grandeur in thisview of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one." In his "Descent of Man," he also protests against the reproach that his views are irreligious, and says: "The birth both of the species and of the individual are equally parts of that grand sequence of events which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance." In treating of the question as to the development of the moral instincts, he says: "If he [man] breaks through the fixed habits of his life, he will assuredly feel dissatisfaction. He must likewise avoid the reprobation ofthe oneGod or gods in whom,according to his knowledgeor superstition, he may believe." And furthermore he remarks: "The question whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the Universe, has been answered in the affirmative by some of the highest intellects that have ever existed."
It is true, all these expressions about religion are very general; but since in his works we do not find any utterance contrary to them and hostile to religion, we have a right to rank the celebrated originator of the whole agitation among those naturalists who are conscious of the limits of the realms of the natural and the religious, and are convinced of the possibility of a harmony between the two. For his casual utterances against a "creation" of single species always combine with the word creation the idea of that direct creation out of nothing, without intervening agencies, which is entirely correct for the idea of the first, origin of the universe, but which for the origin of the single formations within the universe is neither asked for by the religious view of the world, nor established by the HolyScriptures, nor by a cautiously reasoning theology, although it very often controls the conceptions of naturalists as well as of theologians. Now, while Darwin rejects the idea of a sudden appearance of a new species out of nothing—or, as he once expressed himself in his "Origin of Species," the idea "that at innumerable periods in the earth's history certain elemental atoms have been commanded suddenly to flash into living tissues,"—and he is no doubt right in rejecting it,—still at the same time he does not deny the dependence of the successive origin of a new species on a divine author. But in calling that process creation and this one not, he gives the appearance of an opposition to the religious idea of creation—an appearance of which the greater part of the guilt is borne by those theologians who define the idea of the creation, even of a single form, in a manner which is only proper for the idea of the first origin of the universe.
It is true, we could rank Darwin still more readily among the scientists who are at peace with all the claims of religion, did he not in his "Descent of Man," when enumerating the "excellent naturalists and philosophers" who with him reduce the pedigree of man to lower forms, mention names of men who in their works firmly unite Darwinism and monistic naturalism or even materialism, and expressly protest against a separation of their naturo-historical results and their philosophic points of view. We mean Büchner and Häckel. The latter's "Natural History of Creation," he especially praises: "If this work had appeared before my essay had been written, I should probably never have completed it. Almost all the conclusions at which I havearrived I find confirmed by this naturalist," etc. The entire silence in regard to the anti-Christian results which these two authors derive from their naturo-historical premises, makes Darwin's own position in reference to religion again very uncertain. It seems that Darwin in his theology is not only inclined to theism, but, following the traditions of his countrymen of the last century, to a quite cool and superficial deism, and that he permits himself to be too much impressed by the anti-teleological deductions of many of his followers, and to be induced to separate in his later publications the Creator and his work more widely than he has done in the beginning. For while in his "Origin of the Species," and in his "Descent of Man" he nowhere contests a teleological view of nature, and rejects the idea of single creations only under the erroneous supposition that the idea of the creation of the single also excludes the action of intervening agencies, we find, on the other hand, in "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" a passage which, though in a reserved way, seems to give just as much support to the adversaries of teleology as to its advocates, if, indeed, not more. He says (page 338): "The belief that blushing wasspeciallydesigned by the Creator is opposed to the general theory of evolution, which is now so largely accepted; but it forms no part of my duty here to argue on the general question. Those who believe in design will find it difficult to account for shyness being the most frequent and efficient of all the causes of blushing," etc. This inconsistency in his utterances has its origin in the fact that the strength of this naturalist does not seem to lie in logical philosophic thought.
A. R. Wallace, the independent and contemporaneous co-originator of the Darwinian theory, still more evidently and more decidedly expresses himself favorably as to the position of this theory in reference to religion. In his "Natural Selection," he says on page 368: "It does not seem an improbable conclusion that all force may be will-force; and thus, that the whole universe is not merely dependent on, but actually is, the WILL of higher intelligences or of one Supreme Intelligence."
He pronounces the belief that God created the new species in "continual interference" with the regular process of things, a lower conception, "a limitation of the Creator's power" (page 280), hence something which he makes objection to directly in the interest of religion. Moreover, he sees, especially in those stages which caused the physical development of man, and which became the material basis of his spiritual productions, moments of development which cannot be explained by natural selection or by a coincidence of material circumstances, but only by the preformation of the body after a certain design and for a certain purpose.
Richard Owen, the celebrated anatomist, and palæontologist of England, who, after having for a long time resisted the Darwinian theories, lately accepted the idea of development and rejected that of selection, takes a similar position. In the last part of his "Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates," which was issued separately in 1863 under the title "Derivative Hypothesis of Life and Species," he sees in the causes which produced the new species only the servants of a predestinatingintelligent will—for instance, the horse predestinated and prepared for man; and on page 90 of vol. V. of "Transactions of the Zoölogical Society," he says, "that natural evolution, through secondary causes, by means of slow physical and organic operations through long ages, is not the less clearly recognizable as the act of all-adaptive Mind, because we have abandoned the old error of supposing it the result of a primary, direct and sudden act of creational construction.... The succession of species by continuously operating law is not necessarily a 'blind operation.' Such law, however designed in the properties and successions of natural objects, intimates, nevertheless, a preconceived progress. Organisms may be evolved in orderly succession, stage after stage, towards a foreseen goal, and the broad features of the course may still show the unmistakable impress of Divine volition."
Professor Huxley, of London, the zealous and oft-mentioned advocate of the descent of man from the ape, says—what is so energetically contested by his warmest friends in Germany, by Büchner, Häckel, O. Schmidt, and others—that the teleological and the mechanical mode of viewing nature by no means exclude one another. He does this, of course, without going into any details of the religious question.
Asa Gray, an eminent and highly esteemed American botanist, who is particularly respected by Darwin, and is supported also by Sir Charles Lyell in "The Antiquity of Man," says in his essay on "Natural Selection not Incompatible with Natural Theology, a Free Examination of Darwin's Treatise" (London, Trübner, 1861), on page 29: "Agreeing that plants and animalswere produced by Omnipotentfiatdoes not exclude the idea of natural order and what we call secondary causes. The record of thefiat—'Let the earth bring forth grass,' etc., 'the living creature,' etc.,—seems even to imply them, and leads to the conclusion that the different species were produced through natural agencies." And on page 38: "Darwin's hypothesis concerns theorderand not thecause, thehowand not thewhyof the phenomena, and so leaves the question of design just where it was before." And finally, in a passage which is adopted by Sir Charles Lyell (ib. page 505): "We may imagine that events and operations in general go on in virtue simply of forces communicated at the first, and without any subsequent interference, or we may hold that now and then, and only now and then, there is a direct interposition of the Deity; or, lastly, we may suppose that all the changes are carried on by the immediate orderly and constant, however infinitely diversified, action of the intelligent efficient Cause."
Mivart, an English Catholic, most decidedly advocates a reconcilability of Darwinian views, and especially of the evolution theory, as he establishes it with the full contents of Christian orthodoxy, in his remarkable book "On the Genesis of Species" (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 2d. ed. 1871), in which we find a great many independent naturo-historical investigations. He assigns to the selection theory only a subordinate position, but on the other hand accepts anevolution, and, in close connection with R. Owen, explains it from inner and innate impulses of development of the organisms, which act now more slowly and gradually, now more by impulses; he places man as tohisphysicalpart entirely among the effects of the evolution principle, although, taking into consideration some utterances of Wallace, he thinks it possible, but not probable, that the creation and the preceding stage of his physical nature is also different from that of animals. But, on the other hand, in fully adopting the old scholastic creationism, he supposes a special creation of thesoul, a separation of body and soul, which in this form is very contestable, and might better have been replaced by a separation of natural and rational or of physico-psychical and pneumatical parts of his being. With such a view of nature, he finds the fullest harmony between the evolution theory and religion, reconciles the plausible antagonism of creation and development by dividing the idea of creation into a primary creation (creation of the beginning out of nothing) and into a secondary creation (creation through intervening agencies, although that which is produced through them is still a creation and a work of the Creator), and declares his conviction that what is acting according to law in nature also stands under the causation and government of God like the first beginning of the universe—a postulate of our primary views without which the whole universe and our existence in it would harden into a cold mechanism without consolation or ideality.
Finally, at the assembly of the Evangelical Alliance in New York (October, 1873), there were heard many voices of eminent advocates of a theistic and Christian view of the world, which maintained the full consistency of an evolution theory with religion and Christianity. McCosh, for instance, as referee in the philosophic section as to the relation of the evolution theory andreligion, said[10]: "I am not sure that religion is entitled to insist that every species of insects has been created by a specialfiatof God, with no secondary agent employed." And still more plainly and more courageously, President Anderson, of the University of Rochester, in his very remarkable address, speaks about the unnecessary and unworthy fear of many Christian men, when they see the appearance of hypotheses with which science operates. At the end of his address, he says: "The evidence for the existence of a personal Creator cannot be affected by any considerations drawn from the mode, relative rapidity, or the nature of the proximate antecedents and consequences in the creative process."
From German sources, we can note fewer utterances of a friendly or at least neutral position between Darwinism and religion. For this fact there are many reasons. One may be, that on the continent in general there is a smaller number of those who, without being specialists in both realms, unite active religious interest and reasoning with a thorough study of those naturo-historical questions, while in Great Britain physico-theological studies have been for generations traditional and the object of interest for the majority of educated men. A second reason, indeed, is that some of the warmest scientific advocates of Darwinism at once attacked also theism and Christianity; hence with all those who did not have time and incitement enough to study the questions for themselves, they necessarily created the opinion that Darwinism really attacks even the fundamentals ofreligion, and their whole tendency had but a repelling influence even on scientists of deeper spiritual and ethical disposition and need. Finally, in Germany as well as on the whole continent, the number of those who do not care for religious questions in general, and who therefore interest themselves in the scientific questions brought up by Darwin, but do not trouble themselves farther for their position in reference to religion and Christianity, is unfortunately larger than in Great Britain.
Nevertheless, such friendly voices are not entirely wanting in our country. The botanist Alex Braun says, in his beautiful and significant lecture on the importance of development in natural history, p. 48: "Some said that the descent theory denies creation, and it is true, the Darwinians themselves caused this opinion by contrasting creation and development as irreconcilable ideas. But this contrast does not actually exist, for as soon as we look upon creation as a divine effect, not merely belonging to the past, or appearing in single abrupt movements, but connected and universally present in time, we can seek and find it nowhere else but in the natural history of development itself.... Theologians themselves, according to the Mosaic documents, acknowledge ahistoryof creation; natural history, looked upon from its inner side, is nothing else but the farther carrying out of the history of creation."
Even K. E. von Baer, who expressly contests the idea of selection, thinks it only scientifically indefensible, but not anti-religious; an opinion also held by Wigand.
A similar friendly relation between Darwinism and religion is advocated by Braubach, in his publication,"Religion, Moral und Philosophie der Darwin'schen Artlehre nach ihrer Natur and ihrem Character als kleine Parallele menschlich-geistiger Entwicklung" ("Religion, Morality, and Philosophy of the Darwinian Doctrine of Species, as to its Nature and Character; a Small Parallel of Human Intellectual Development"), Neuwied, Hansen, 1869, a publication to which we pay special attention, since Darwin, in his "Descent of Man," twice paid it the honor of a quotation. It is true, the essay, through its peculiar dependence on an original and quite arbitrarily grouped scheme, gives the impression of something very singular, and is not very agreeably and easily read; but it shows such an energetic union of respect for science and its work and results, with adhesion to all the fundamentals of Christian truth, that it has to be mentioned as one of the rare voices which, even in regard to the realm of nature, pronounce the fullest harmony between religion and science. Braubach finds in the animal kingdom theelementsof all the spiritual life of mankind, even ofreligionandmorality; but everything is still wrapped in the lowest stage of sensuality. Nevertheless, he assigns to mankind, by its possession of the idea ofinfinity, something absolutely new, absolutely superior to the animal world, and sees the Darwinian ideas, even in the religious and moral possession of mankind, confirmed by the fact that they develop themselves on the way from the sensual stage to the rational exactly according to the principles of Darwin—namely, through transmission with individual variability in the struggle for existence, through selection of the fittest. With special earnestness, he pronounces the indissoluble unity of religion and morality,and says that religion, as it presents itself upon Darwinian grounds, is a moral religion.
We find here and there in periodicals many more voices which pronounce the conviction that, out of the present contest of minds, peace between religion and science will result.
PRELIMINARY VIEW.
We can treat much more briefly of this portion of our task than of the position of the Darwinians in reference to the religious question, for the reason that the contrasts in the ethical realm are far less sharply drawn than in the religious realm, although in principle they are not less widely apart. For while there are a great many men who think that it belongs to good society and to the indispensable characteristics of high modern education to show either cold indifference or direct hostility in reference to religion and to the whole religious question; while a great many of the much-read works ofbelle lettresnever tire of teaching the reading public that the religious question really no longer exists for the educated man, on the other hand, nobody, not even the extremest atheist and enemy of religion, wishes to renounce the reputation of having moral principles. Thus it happens that the positions taken by the Darwinians in reference to the ethical question are less varied than those taken by them in reference to the religious question. And we may also be brief for another reason,namely, that by reviewing the position of the Darwinians in reference to the religious question, we have essentially prepared the way for the principal questions which will have to be treated.
We shall group the utterances upon the relation of the Darwinian theories to morality as we did those in regard to the relation of Darwinism to religion; and shall first let the advocates of an irreconcilableness between the two speak, then those advocating a reformative influence of Darwinism upon morality, and finally those striving for neutrality and peace between the two. We shall have no occasion, except incidentally, to discriminate between the different fundamental principles and parts of ethics, but shall in the last part of our work treat of the question independently. In making subdivisions for them here, we should but cause infinite repetitions, unnecessarily complicate our review, and render it more difficult.
ANTAGONISM BETWEEN DARWINISM AND MORALITY.
§ 1.Objections to Darwinism from an Ethical Standpoint.
From what we said at the beginning of the preceding preliminary view, it is evident that we have to look for the advocates of an irreconcilableness between morality and Darwinism, not in the camp of the followers of the latter, but only in that of its adversaries. It is true, such advocates were never wanting. In pamphlets and journals, it has been often enough said that Darwinism cuts through the nerve of life, not only of religion, but also of morality.
It was demonstrated that in making man a mere product of nature, and degrading him to a being that is nothing else but a more highly developed animal, Darwinism takes from human personality its value, from the realms of morality its dignity, and from its demands their autonomy. In making the struggle for existence the principle of all development and, by extending it to the development and social relations of man, at the same time the human social principle, it puts in place of self-denial and love the principle of egoism and boorishness and the right of the stronger, gives full course to the unchaining of all animal passions, and coquettes with all the emotions which, flattering the animal part of man,aims at the subversion of all that exists and at the destruction of the ideal acquisitions of mankind. In tracing everything which constitutes the higher position and dignity of man back to his own work, and permitting it to be worked out of physical, spiritual, and ethical brutishness, in slow development and effort, closely related to the animal kingdom, it fosters and nourishes haughtiness in an intolerable way. And finally, in breaking off and denying the dependence of man upon God, and leading to mechanical determinism, it destroys the deepest and most effective motive to moral action—the tracing of the moral law to the authority of the divine Law-giver, and the consciousness of an individual moral responsibility.
It cannot be denied that many of the most zealous Darwinians gave too much cause for such a conception and representation of the ethical consequences of their system. In view of the fact that they applied the selection principle, with its most radical consequences, to the origin and development of mankind, and that they elevated the same to the ethical and social principle of mankind and did not permit the acceptance of any new and higher agencies in mankind except those already active in the animal and the organic world, and that they gladly treated this selection principle also in the social and ethical realm as a struggle for existence, it was simply an entirely logical conclusion that the advocates of the moral nobility of mankind reproached such a reproduced Darwinism with degrading the moral dignity of man and with replacing love by egoism. Besides, in view of the fact that they declared materialistic monism, even the most naked atheism, the only conclusion ofDarwinism, and extended their mechanistic explanation of the world to a determinism in the highest degree mechanistic, and, carried to its utmost limit, to a denial of human freedom, it was not to be wondered at that those who recognize in theism the basis of all life worthy of man, and in the freedom of man one of the most precious pearls in the crown of his human dignity and of his creation in the image of God, complained of Darwinism's taking from morality its strongest motive and from moral action its responsibility. And, finally, in view of the fact that those who thus express themselves in their works showed but rarely, or not at all, some of the noblest fruits of moral education, such as respectful treatment of adversaries, humbleness and tact, they could not themselves reasonably complain that there was ascribed to their doctrine an influence detrimental to moral education. All this we find abundantly confirmed in the publications of Büchner and Häckel, and in many articles of the "Ausland."
But the question is, whether those Darwinians who drew these conclusions were by their scientific investigations obliged to draw them, or whether they did not rather reach their religious and ethical view of the world by quite other ways, and whether they did not in a wholly arbitrary and irresponsible manner make extensive use of Darwinism in this anti-religious and ethically objectional direction—a fact which we shall try to prove in the last part of our investigation.
Of course the Darwinians who spoke thus, did not intend to injure the moral principle, but only to purify and reform it; and therefore we shall have to speak of them in the following section.
REFORM OF MORALITY THROUGH DARWINISM.
§ 1.The Materialists and Monists. Darwin and the English Utilitarians. Gustav Jäger.
Among those who ascribe to Darwinism a morally reforming influence, we have to mention in the first place thematerialists. It is true that even before the appearance of Darwinism they established their own moral principle of naturalistic determinism and of the education of man only by science and enlightenment, in opposition to a morality which rests on the principle of the eternal value of the individual, of full moral responsibility, of the holiness of the moral law, and of a divine author of it; they stigmatized the ethical requirement of aiming at the eternal welfare of the soul as a lower stage of morality in comparison with their own, which carries in itself the reward of virtue; and they declared Christianity and humanity, Christian morality and the morality of humanity, two things irreconcilably opposed to one another. But in having taken possession of Darwinism as their monopoly, they have made it the basis of new attacks upon the present moral principle of Christendom; and therefore we have here to mention them with their moral system.
Büchner, in his lecture on "Gottesbegriff und dessenBedeutung" ("The Idea of God and its Importance"), replaces the moral principle (which in his opinion is nothing innate but something acquired) by education, learning, freedom and well-being; says that only atheism or philosophic monism leads to freedom, reason, progress, acknowledgment of true humanity—to humanism; that this humanism seeks the motives of its morality not in the external relations to an extramundane God, but in itself and in the welfare of mankind; and that infidels often, even as a rule, have excelled by moral conduct, while Christianity has originated many more crimes than it has hindered, and it would no longer be possible to establish with real Christians a vital community as at present understood. He declares the utterance of Madame de Staël, that "to comprehend everything means to forgive everything," the truest word ever spoken; and concludes his lecture with the remarks that the more man renounces his faith and confides in his own power, his own reason, his own reflexion, the happier he will be and the more successful in his struggle for existence.
Strauss in "The Old Faith and the New," a publication which certainly has to be ranked here, for the reason that in it he founds on Darwinism his whole knowledge of the world, on the ground of which he wishes to arrange life, appears to be much more decent, and in the practical consequences much more conservative, than Büchner; but essentially stands upon quite the same ground. Häckel, Oskar Schmidt, and (as to his linguistic Darwinism) W. Bleek, group themselves around Strauss, partly with, partly without express reference to his deductions.
Strauss arrives at a peculiar inconsequence, but one well worthy of notice, when, in place of the struggle for existence which, according to the conclusions of those who also reduce morality to Darwinism, is still thespiritus rectorof moral development in mankind, and yet cannot of itself possibly lead to the morally indispensable requirements and virtues of self-sacrifice and of mere subordination under the moral idea, he suddenly substitutes a going of man beyond mere nature, and herewith a moral principle, which can never be deduced from Darwinism alone, and which is directly opposed to monism and pankosmism, which is to be the basis of his ethics. The reader may compare the manner in which he metaphysically supports his moral principle when he says: "As nature cannot go higher, she would go inwards. Nature felt herself already in the animal, but shewished to know herself also.... In man, nature endeavored not merely to exalt, butto transcend herself." Ulrici, the philosopher, in his reply to Strauss, has pointed out in sharp terms this inconsequence, as well as the other, that from the ground of a blind necessity which does not know anything of a higher and a lower, the difference of higher and lower, good and bad, rational and irrational, cannot at all be maintained; and that the requirement of a progress cannot at all be made, and its idea not at all be given. In this very perceptible inconsistency, Strauss calls that morality which he requires, "the relation of man to the idea of his kind." To realize the latter in himself, is the summary of his duties toward himself; actually to recognize and promote the equality of the kind in all the others, is thesummary of his duties towards others. He opposes the internal satisfaction which originates therein, to the "rough" idea of a reward of virtue and piety, coming fromwithout, which, in order to connect both, is in need of a God. And he again reaches that inconsequence which from his metaphysical standpoint is entirely without motive, but as to itself only worthy to be recognized, when in another formula of his moral imperative he says: "Ever remember that thou art human, notmerely a natural production."
It is also this representation and realization of theidea of the kind, which those who combine with their Darwinism a negation of theism have mostly established before the appearance of the work of Strauss as the highest moral principle, and to which they are also led most naturally by Darwin's deduction of morality from the social instincts. Thus, Wilhelm Bleek, in the preface to his "Ursprung der Sprache" ("Origin of Language"), says (page XIII): "To aim at the inner and outer harmony of his genus in one or the other way, and to promote the correct relations of the different parts to one another in their reciprocal connections and in the greater parts of the whole organism (family, community, nation), are the highest visible designs of human existence, which must by themselves incite man to noble actions and to virtuous deeds. In the performance of this task lies the highest happiness which seems to be given to our species, a happiness accessible by everyone in his own way. Neither the fruit of eternal punishment nor the hope of an individual happiness, is really capable as a truly saving idea to elevate man to a higher existence; even if we take no account of the fact thateach of these two fundamental dogmas of the vulgar dogmatism makes but refined egoism the lever of its ethics."
Häckel alone, in his "Natural History of Creation," with his utterances as to Christianity, morality, and the history of the world, again sinks down to the level of the coarseness of Büchner, and even below it. On page 19, vol. I, he entirely contests the reality of the moral order of the world, and continues: "If we contemplate the common life, and the mutual relations between plants and animals (man included), we shall findeverywhereandat all times, the very opposite of that kindly and peaceful social life, which the goodness of the Creator ought to have prepared for his creatures—we shall rather findeverywherea pitiless, most embitteredstruggle of all against all. Nowhere in nature, no matter where we turn our eyes, does that idyllic peace, celebrated by the poets, exist; we find everywhere astruggleand astriving to annihilateneighbors and competitors.Passion and selfishness, conscious or unconscious, is everywhere the motive force of life.Man in this respect certainly forms no exception to the rest of the animal world." On page 237, vol. I, he professes the most extreme naturalistic determinism: "The will of the animal,as well as that of man, is never free. The widely spread dogma of the freedom of the will is, from a scientific point of view, altogether untenable." And on page 170, vol. I, he even says: "If, as we maintain, natural selection is the great active cause which has produced the whole wonderful variety of organic life on the earth, all the interesting phenomena ofhuman lifemust also be explicable from the same cause. For man is after allonly a most highly-developed vertebrate animal, and all aspects of human life have their parallels, or, more correctly, their lower stages of development, in the animal kingdom. Thewhole history of nations, or what is calleduniversal history, must therefore be explicable by means of natural selection,—must be a physico-chemical process, depending upon the interaction of adaptation and inheritance in the struggle for life. And this is actually the case." That in his ethical naturalism he sees a real reform of morality, he expressly declares on the page next to the last of his "Natural History of Creation": "Just as this new monistic philosophy first opens up to us a true understanding of the real universe, so its application to practical human life must open upa new road towards moral perfection." (Vol. II, p. 367.)