Monism as Connecting Religion and Science | Page 3

remark holds true of the first beginnings of religion.[3]
It is indeed still not infrequently the custom to deny absolutely to the lower animals reason and religion. An unprejudiced comparison, however, convinces us that this is wrong. The slow and gradual process towards completeness which, in the course of thousands of years, civilised life has been working in the soul of man, has not passed away without leaving some trace on the soul of our highest domestic animals also (above all, of dogs and horses). Constant association with man, and the steady influence of his training, have gradually, and by heredity, developed in their brain higher associations of ideas and a more perfect judgment. Drill has become instinct, an undeniable example of "the transmission of acquired characters."[4]
Comparative psychology teaches us to recognise a very long series of successive steps in the development of soul in the animal kingdom. But it is only in the most highly developed vertebrates-birds and mammals--that we discern the first beginnings of reason, the first traces of religious and ethical conduct. In them we find not only the social virtues common to all the higher socially-living animals,--neighbourly love, friendship, fidelity, self-sacrifice, etc.,--but also consciousness, sense of duty, and conscience; in relation to man their lord, the same obedience, the same submissiveness, and the same craving for protection, which primitive man in his turn shows towards his "gods." But in him, as in them, there is yet wanting that higher degree of consciousness and of reason, which strives after a knowledge of the surrounding world, and which marks the first beginning of philosophy or "wisdom." This last is the much later attainment of civilised races; slowly and gradually has it been built up from lower religious conceptions.
At all stages of primitive religion and early philosophy, man is as yet far removed from monistic ideas. In searching out the causes of phenomena, and exercising his understanding thereon, he is in the first instance prone in every case to regard personal beings--in fact, anthropomorphic deities--as the agents at work. In thunder and lightning, in storm and earthquake, in the circling of sun and moon, in every striking meteorological and geological occurrence, he sees the direct activity of a personal god or spirit, who is usually thought of in a more or less anthropomorphic way. Gods are distinguished as good and bad, friendly and hostile, preserving and destroying, angels and devils.
This becomes true in a yet higher degree when the advancing pursuit of knowledge begins to take into consideration the more complicated phenomena of organic life also, the appearance and disappearance of plants and animals, the life and death of man. The constitution of organised life, so suggestive as it is of art and purpose, leads one at once to compare it with the deliberately designed works of man, and thus the vague conception of a personal god becomes transformed into that of a creator working according to plan. As we know, this conception of organic creation as the artistic work of an anthropomorphic god--of a divine mechanic--generally maintained its ground almost everywhere, down even to the middle of our own century, in spite of the fact that eminent thinkers had demonstrated its untenability more than two thousand years ago. The last noteworthy scientist to defend and apply this idea was Louis Agassiz (died 1873). His notable Essay on Classification, 1857, developed that theosophy with logical vigour, and thereby reduced it to an absurdity.[5]
All these older religious and teleological conceptions, as well as the philosophical systems (such as those of Plato and of the Church fathers) which sprang from them, are antimonistic; they stand in direct antithesis to our monistic philosophy of nature. Most of them are dualistic, regarding God and the world, creator and creature, spirit and matter, as two completely separated substances. We find this express dualism also in most of the purer church-religions, especially in the three most important forms of monotheism which the three most renowned prophets of the eastern Mediterranean--Moses, Christ, and Mohammed--founded. But soon, in a number of impure varieties of these three religions, and yet more in the lower forms of paganism, the place of this dualism is taken by a philosophical pluralism, and over against the good and world-sustaining deity (Osiris, Ormuzd, Vishnu), there is placed a wicked and destroying god (Typhon, Ahriman, Siva). Numerous demi-gods or saints, good and bad, sons and daughters of the gods, are associated with these two chief deities, and take part with them in the administration and government of the cosmos.
In all these dualistic and pluralistic systems the fundamental idea is that of anthropomorphism, or the humanising of God; man himself, as godlike (or directly descended from God), occupies a special position in the world, and is separated by a great gulf from the rest of nature.