Monism as Connecting Religion and Science | Page 4

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.
Conjoined with this, for the most part, is the anthropocentric idea, the
conviction that man is the central point of the universe, the last and
highest final cause of creation, and that the rest of nature was created
merely for the purpose of serving man. In the Middle Ages there was
associated at the same time with this last conception the geocentric idea,
according to which the earth as the abode of man was taken for the
fixed middle point of the universe, round which sun, moon, and stars
revolve. As Copernicus (1543) gave the death-blow to the geocentric
dogma, so did Darwin (1859) to the anthropocentric one closely
associated with it.[6] A broad historical and critical comparison of
religious and philosophical systems, as a whole, leads as a main result
to the conclusion that every great advance in the direction of
profounder knowledge has meant a breaking away from the traditional
dualism (or pluralism) and an approach to monism. Ever more clearly
are we compelled by reflection to recognise that God is not to be placed
over against the material world as an external being, but must be placed
as a "divine power" or "moving spirit" within the cosmos itself. Ever
clearer does it become that all the wonderful phenomena of nature
around us, organic as well as inorganic, are only various products of
one and the same original force, various combinations of one and the
same primitive matter. Ever more irresistibly is it borne in upon us that
even the human soul is but an insignificant part of the all-embracing
"world-soul"; just as the human body is only a small individual fraction
of the great organised physical world.
The great general principles of theoretical physics and chemistry are
now in a position to afford to this unifying conception of nature an
exact, to a certain extent, indeed, a mathematical confirmation. In
establishing the law of the "conservation of energy," Robert Mayer and
Helmholtz showed that the energy of the universe is a constant
unchangeable magnitude; if any energy whatever seems to vanish or to
come anew into play, this is only due to the transformation of one form
of energy into another. In the same way Lavoisier's law of the

"conservation of matter" shows us that the material of the cosmos is a
constant unchangeable magnitude; if any body seems to vanish (as, for
example, by burning), or to come anew into being (as, for example, by
crystallisation), this also is simply due to change of form or of
combination. Both these great laws--in physics, the fundamental law of
the conservation of energy, and in chemistry, of the conservation of
matter--may be brought under one philosophical conception as the law
of the conservation of substance; for, according to our monistic
conception, energy and matter are inseparable, being only different
inalienable manifestations of one single universal being-substance.[7]
In a certain sense we can regard the conception of "animated atoms" as
essentially partaking of the nature of this pure monism--a very ancient
idea which more than two thousand years ago Empedocles enunciated
in his doctrine of "hate and love of the elements." Modern physics and
chemistry have indeed in the main accepted the atomic hypothesis first
enunciated by Democritus, in so far as they regard all bodies as built up
of atoms, and reduce all changes to movements of these
minutest-discrete particles. All these changes, however, in organic as
well as in inorganic nature, become truly intelligible to us only if we
conceive these atoms not as dead masses, but as living elementary
particles endowed with the power of attraction and repulsion.
"Pleasure" and "pain," and "love" and "hate," as predicates of atoms are
only other expressions for this power of attraction and repulsion.
Although, however, monism is on the one hand for us an indispensable
and fundamental conception in science, and although, on the other hand,
it strives to carry back all phenomena, without exception, to the
mechanism of the atom, we must nevertheless still admit that as yet we
are by no means in a position to form any satisfactory conception of the
exact nature of these atoms, and their relation to the general
space-filling, universal ether. Chemistry long ago succeeded in
reducing all the various natural substances to combinations of a
relatively small number of elements; and the most recent advances of
that science have now made it in the highest degree probable that these
elements or the (as yet) irreducible primitive materials are themselves
in turn only different combinations of a varying number of atoms of
one single original element. But in