THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE SOUL

THE IDEAS OF IMMORTALITY AND GOD

EXPLANATION OF PLATE III

EMBRYOS OF THREE MAMMALS AT THREE CORRESPONDING STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT

PLATE III.

EMBRYOS OF THREE MAMMALS
(At three corresponding stages of development).

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CHAPTER III

THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE SOUL

THE IDEAS OF IMMORTALITY AND GOD

Though it was my original intention to deliver only two lectures, I have been moved by several reasons to add a supplementary one. In the first place, I notice with regret that I have been compelled by pressure of time to leave untouched in my earlier lectures, or to treat very inadequately, several important points in my theme; there is, in particular, the very important question of the nature of the soul. In the second place, I have been convinced by the many contradictory press-notices during the last few days that many of my incomplete observations have been misunderstood or misinterpreted. And, thirdly, it seemed advisable to give a brief and clear summary of the whole subject in this farewell lecture, to take a short survey of the past, present, and future of the theory of evolution, and especially its relation to the three great questions of personal immortality, the freedom of the will, and the personality of God.

I must claim the reader's patience and indulgence even to a greater extent than in the previous chapters, as the subject is one of the most difficult and obscure that the human mind approaches. I have dealt at length in my recent works, The Riddle of the Universe and The Wonders of Life, with the controversial questions of biology that I treat cursorily here. But I would like to put before you now, in a general survey, the powerful arguments that modern science employs against the prevailing superstition in regard to evolution, and to show that the Monistic system throws a clear light on the great questions of God and the world, the soul and life.

In the previous chapters I have tried to give a general idea of the present state of the theory of evolution and its victorious struggle with the older legend of creation. We have seen that even the most advanced organism, man, was not brought into being by a creative act, but gradually developed from a long series of mammal ancestors. We also saw that the most man-like mammals, the anthropoid apes, have substantially the same structure as man, and that the evolution of the latter from the former can now be regarded as a fully established hypothesis, or, rather, an historical fact. But in this study we had in view mainly the structure of the body and its various organs. We touched very briefly on the evolution of the human mind, or the immaterial soul that dwells in the body for a time, according to a venerable tradition. To-day we turn chiefly to the development of the soul, and consider whether man's mental development is controlled by the same natural laws as that of his body, and whether it also is inseparably bound up with that of the rest of the mammals.

At the very threshold of this difficult province we encounter the curious fact that there are two radically distinct tendencies in psychology at our universities to-day. On one side we have the metaphysical and professional psychologists. They still cling to the older view that man's soul is a special entity, a unique independent individuality, which dwells for a time only in the mortal frame, leaving it and living on as an immortal spirit after death. This dualistic theory is connected with the doctrine of most religions, and owes its high authority to the fact that it is associated with the most important ethical, social, and practical interests. Plato gave prominence to the idea of the immortality of the soul in philosophy long ago. Descartes at a later date gave emphasis to it by ascribing a true soul to man alone and refusing it to the animals.

This metaphysical psychology, which ruled alone for a considerable period, began to be opposed in the eighteenth, and still more in the nineteenth, century by comparative psychology. An impartial comparison of the psychic processes in the higher and lower animals proved that there were numerous transitions and gradations. A long series of intermediate stages connects the psychic life of the higher animals with that of man on the one side, and that of the lower animals on the other. There was no such thing as a sharp dividing line, as Descartes supposed.

But the greatest blow was dealt at the predominant metaphysical conception of the life of the soul thirty years ago by the new methods of psychophysics. By means of a series of able experiments the physiologists, Theodor Fechner and Ernst Heinrich Weber of Leipsic, showed that an important part of the mental activity can be measured and expressed in mathematical formulÆ just as well as other physiological processes, such as muscular contractions. Thus the laws of physics control a part of the life of the soul just as absolutely as they do the phenomena of inorganic nature. It is true that psychophysics has only partially realised the very high expectations that were entertained in regard to its Monistic significance; but the fact remains that a part of the mental life is just as unconditionally ruled by physical laws as any other natural phenomena.

Thus physiological psychology was raised by psychophysics to the rank of a physical and, in principle, exact science. But it had already obtained solid foundations in other provinces of biology. Comparative psychology had traced connectedly the long gradation from man to the higher animals, from these to the lower, and so on down to the very lowest. At the lowest stage it found those remarkable beings, invisible with the naked eye, that were discovered in stagnant water everywhere after the invention of the microscope (in the second half of the seventeenth century) and called "infusoria." They were first accurately described and classified by Gottfried Ehrenberg, the famous Berlin microscopist. In 1838 he published a large and beautiful work, illustrating on 64 folio pages the whole realm of microscopic life; and this is still the base of all studies of the protists. Ehrenberg was a very ardent and imaginative observer, and succeeded in communicating his zeal for the study of microscopic organisms to his pupils. I still recall with pleasure the stimulating excursions that I made fifty years ago (in the summer of 1854) with my teacher, Ehrenberg, and a few other pupils—including my student-friend, Ferdinand von Richthofen, the famous geographer—to the Zoological Gardens at Berlin. Equipped with fine nets and small glasses, we fished in the ponds of the Zoological Gardens and in the Spree, and caught thousands of invisible micro-organisms, which then richly rewarded our curiosity by the beautiful forms and mysterious movements they disclosed under the microscope.

The way in which Ehrenberg explained to us the structure and the vital movements of his infusoria was very curious. Misled by the comparison of the real infusoria with the microscopic but highly organised rotifers, he had formed the idea that all animals are alike advanced in organisation, and had indicated this erroneous theory in the very title of his work: The Infusoria as Perfect Organisms: a Glance at the Deeper Life of Organic Nature. He thought he could detect in the simplest infusoria the same distinct organs as in the higher animals—stomach, heart, ovaries, kidneys, muscles, and nerves—and he interpreted their psychic life on the same peculiar principle of equally advanced organisation.

Ehrenberg's theory of life was entirely wrong, and was radically destroyed in the hour of its birth (1838) by the cell-theory which was then formulated, and to which he never became reconciled. Once Matthias Schleiden had shown the composition of all the plants, tissues, and organs from microscopic cells, the last structural elements of the living organism, and Theodor Schwann had done the same for the animal body, the theory attained such an importance that KÖlliker and Leydig based on it the modern science of tissues, or histology, and Virchow constructed his cellular pathology by applying it to diseased human beings. These are the most important advances of theoretical medicine. But it was still a long time before the difficult question of the relation of these microscopic beings to the cell was answered. Carl Theodor von Siebold had already maintained (in 1845) that the real infusoria and the closely related rhizopods were unicellular organisms, and had distinguished these protozoa from the rest of the animals. At the same time, Carl Naegeli had described the lowest algÆ as "unicellular plants." But this important conception was not generally admitted until some time afterwards, especially after I brought all the unicellular organisms under the head of "protists" (1872), and defined their psychic functions as the "cell-soul."

I was led to make a very close study of these unicellular protists and their primitive cell-soul through my research on the radiolaria, a very remarkable class of microscopic organisms that float in the sea. I was engaged most of my time for more than thirty of the best years of my life (1856-87) in studying them in every aspect, and if I came eventually to adopt a strictly Monistic attitude on all the great questions of biology, I owe it for the most part to my innumerable observations and uninterrupted reflections on the wonderful vital movements that are disclosed by these smallest and frailest, and at the same time most beautiful and varied, of living things.

I had undertaken the study of the radiolaria as a kind of souvenir of my great master, Johannes MÜller. He had loved to study these animals (of which only a few species were discovered for the first time in the year of my birth, 1834) in the last years of his life, and had in 1855 set up the special group of the rhizopods (protozoa). His last work, which appeared shortly after his death (1858), and contained a description of 50 species of radiolaria, went with me to the Mediterranean when I made my first long voyage in the summer of 1859. I was so fortunate as to discover about 150 new species of radiolaria at Messina, and based on these my first monograph of this very instructive class of protists (1862). I had no suspicion at that time that fifteen years afterwards the deep-sea finds of the famous Challenger expedition would bring to light an incalculable wealth of these remarkable animals. In my second monograph on them (1887), I was able to describe more than 4,000 different species of radiolaria, and illustrate most of them on 140 plates. I have given a selection of the prettiest forms on ten plates of my Art-forms in Nature.

I have not space here to go into the forms and vital movements of the radiolaria, of the general import of which my friend, Wilhelm BÖlsche, has given a very attractive account in his various popular works. I must restrict myself to pointing out the general phenomena that bear upon our particular subject, the question of the mind. The pretty flinty skeletons of the radiolaria, which enclose and protect the soft unicellular body, are remarkable, not only for their extraordinary gracefulness and beauty, but also for the geometrical regularity and relative constancy of their forms. The 4,000 species of radiolaria are just as constant as the 4,000 known species of ants; and, as the Darwinian Jesuit, Father Wasmann, has convinced himself that the latter have all descended by transformation from a common stem-form, I have concluded on the same principles that the 4,000 species of radiolaria have developed from a primitive form in virtue of adaptation and heredity. This primitive form, the stem-radiolarian (Actissa) is a simple round cell, the soft living protoplasmic body of which is divided into two different parts, an inner central capsule (in the middle of which is the solid round nucleus) and an outer gelatinous envelope (calymma). From the outer surface of the latter, hundreds and thousands of fine plasmic threads radiate; these are mobile and sensitive processes of the living internal substance, the plasm (or protoplasm). These delicate microscopic threads, or pseudopodia, are the curious organs that effect the sensations (of touch), the locomotion (by pushing), and the orderly construction of the flinty house; at the same time, they maintain the nourishment of the unicellular body, by seizing infusoria, diatoms, and other protists, and drawing them within the plasmic body, where they are digested and assimilated. The radiolaria generally reproduce by the formation of spores. The nucleus within the protoplasmic globule divides into two small nuclei, each of which surrounds itself with a quantity of plasm, and forms a new cell.

What is this plasm? What is this mysterious "living substance" that we find everywhere as the material foundation of the "wonders of life"? Plasm, or protoplasm, is, as Huxley rightly said thirty years ago, "the physical basis of organic life"; to speak more precisely, it is a chemical compound of carbon that alone accomplishes the various processes of life. In its simplest form the living cell is merely a soft globule of plasm, containing a firmer nucleus. The inner nuclear matter (called caryoplasm) differs somewhat in chemical composition from the outer cellular matter (or cytoplasm); but both substances are composed of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulphur; both belong to the remarkable group of the albuminates, the nitrogenous carbonates that are distinguished for the extraordinary size of their molecules and the unstable arrangement of the numerous atoms (more than a thousand) that compose them.

There are, however, still simpler organisms in which the nucleus and the body of the cell have not yet been differentiated. These are the monera, the whole living body of which is merely a homogeneous particle of plasm (the chromacea and bacteria). The well-known bacteria which now play so important a part as the causes of most dangerous infectious diseases, and the agents of putrefaction, fermentation, etc., show very clearly that organic life is only a chemical and physical process, and not the outcome of a mysterious "vital force."

We see this still more clearly in our radiolaria, and at the same time they show us unmistakably that even the psychic activity is such a physico-chemical process. All the different functions of their cell-soul, the sense-perception of stimuli, the movement of their plasm, their nutrition, growth, and reproduction, are determined by the particular chemical composition of each of the 4,000 species; and they have all descended, in virtue of adaptation and heredity, from the common stem-form of the naked, round parent-radiolarian (Actissa).

We may instance, as a peculiarly interesting fact in the psychic life of the unicellular radiolaria, the extraordinary power of memory in them. The relative constancy with which the 4,000 species transmit the orderly and often very complex form of their protective flinty structure from generation to generation can only be explained by admitting in the builders, the invisible plasma-molecules of the pseudopodia, a fine "plastic sense of distance," and a tenacious recollection of the architectural power of their fathers. The fine, formless plasma-threads are always building afresh the same delicate flinty shells with an artistic trellis-work, and with protective radiating needles and supports always at the same points of their surface. The physiologist, Ewald Hering (of Leipsic), had spoken in 1870 of memory as "a general function of organised matter." I myself had tried to explain the molecular features of heredity by the memory of the plasma-molecules, in my essay on "The Perigenesis of the Plastidules" (1875). Recently one of the ablest of my pupils, Professor Richard Semon (of Munich, 1904), made a profound study of "Mneme as the principle of constancy in the changes of organic phenomena," and reduced the mechanical process of reproduction to a purely physiological base.

From the cell-soul and its memory in the radiolaria and other unicellular protists, we pass directly to the similar phenomenon in the ovum, the unicellular starting-point of the individual life, from which the complex multicellular frame of all the histona, or tissue-forming animals and plants, is developed. Even the human organism is at first a simple nucleated globule of plasm, about 1 125 inch in diameter, barely visible to the naked eye as a tiny point. This stem-cell (cytula) is formed at the moment when the ovum is fertilised, or mingled with the small male spermatozoon. The ovum transmits to the child by heredity the personal traits of the mother, the sperm-cell those of the father; and this hereditary transmission extends to the finest characteristics of the soul as well as of the body. The modern research as to heredity, which occupies so much space now in biological literature, but was only started by Darwin in 1859, is directed immediately to the visible material processes of impregnation.

The very interesting and important phenomena of impregnation have only been known to us in detail for thirty years. It has been shown conclusively, after a number of delicate investigations, that the individual development of the embryo from the stem-cell or fertilised ovum is controlled by the same laws in all cases. The stem-cell divides and subdivides rapidly into a number of simple cells. From these a few simple organs, the germinal layers, are formed at first; later on the various organs, of which there is no trace in the early embryo, are built up out of these. The biogenetic law teaches us how, in this development, the original features of the ancestral history are reproduced or recapitulated in the embryonic processes; and these facts in turn can only be explained by the unconscious memory of the plasm, the "mneme of the living substance" in the germ-cells, and especially in their nuclei.

One important result of these modern discoveries was the prominence given to the fact that the personal soul has a beginning of existence, and that we can determine the precise moment in which this takes place; it is when the parent cells, the ovum and spermatozoon, coalesce. Hence what we call the soul of man or the animal has not pre-existed, but begins its career at the moment of impregnation; it is bound up with the chemical constitution of the plasm, which is the material vehicle of heredity in the nucleus of the maternal ovum and the paternal spermatozoon. One cannot see how a being that thus has a beginning of existence can afterwards prove to be "immortal."

Further, a candid examination of the simple cell-soul in the unicellular infusoria, and of the dawn of the individual soul in the unicellular germ of man and the higher animals, proves at once that psychic action does not necessarily postulate a fully formed nervous system, as was previously believed. There is no such system in many of the lower animals, or any of the plants, yet we find psychic activities, especially sensation, irritability, and reflex action everywhere. All living plasm has a psychic life, and in this sense the psyche is a partial function of organic life generally. But the higher psychic functions, particularly the phenomena of consciousness, only appear gradually in the higher animals, in which (in consequence of a division of labour among the organs) the nervous system has assumed these functions.

It is particularly interesting to glance at the central nervous system of the vertebrates, the great stem of which we regard ourselves as the crowning point. Here again the anatomical and embryological facts speak a clear and unambiguous language. In all vertebrates, from the lowest fishes up to man, the psychic organ makes its appearance in the embryo in the same form—a simple cylindrical tube on the dorsal side of the embryonic body, in the middle line. The anterior section of this "medullary tube" expands into a club-shaped vesicle, which is the beginning of the brain; the posterior and thinner section becomes the spinal cord. The cerebral vesicle divides, by transverse constrictions, into three, then four, and eventually five vesicles. The most important of these is the first, the cerebrum, the organ of the highest psychic functions. The more the intelligence develops in the higher vertebrates, the larger, more voluminous, and more specialised does the cerebrum become. In particular, the grey mantle or cortex of the cerebrum, its most important part, only attains in the higher mammals the degree of quantitative and qualitative development that qualifies it to be the "organ of mind" in the narrower sense. Through the famous discoveries of Paul Flechsig eleven years ago we were enabled to distinguish eight fields in the cortex, four of which serve as the internal centres of sense-perception, and the four that lie between these are the thought-centres (or association-centres) of the higher psychic faculties—the association of impressions, the formation of ideas and concepts, induction and deduction. This real organ of mind, the phronema, is not yet developed in the lower mammals. It is only gradually built up in the more advanced, exactly in proportion as their intelligence increases. It is only in the most intelligent forms of the placentals, the higher ungulates (horse, elephant), the carnivores (fox, dog), and especially the primates, that the phronema attains the high grade of development that leads us from the anthropoid apes direct to the savage, and from him to civilised man.

We have learned a good deal about the special significance of the various parts of the brain, as organs of specific functions, by the progress of the modern science of experimental physiology. Careful experiments by Goltz, Munk, Bernard, and many other physiologists, have shown that the normal consciousness, speech, and the internal sense-perceptions, are connected with definite areas of the cortex, and that these various parts of the soul are destroyed when the organic areas connected with them are injured. But in this respect Nature has unconsciously given us the most instructive experiments. Diseases in these various areas show how their functions are partially or totally extinguished when the cerebral cells that compose them (the neurona or ganglionic cells) are partially or entirely destroyed. Here again Virchow, who was the first to make a careful microscopic study of the finest changes in the diseased cells, and so explain the nature of the disease, did pioneer work. I still remember very well a spectacle of this kind (in the summer of 1855, at WÜrzburg), which made a deep impression on me. Virchow's sharp eye had detected a small suspicious spot in the cerebrum of a lunatic, though there seemed to be nothing remarkable about it on superficial examination. He handed it to me for microscopic examination, and I found that a large number of the ganglionic cells were affected, partly by fatty degeneration and partly by calcification. The luminous remarks that my great teacher made on these and similar finds in other cases of mental disorder, confirmed my conviction of the unity of the human organism and the inseparable connection of mind and body, which he himself at that time expressly shared. When he abandoned this Monistic conception of the psychic life for Dualism and Mysticism twenty years afterwards (especially after his Munich speech in 1877), we must attribute this partly to his psychological metamorphosis, and partly to the political motives of which I spoke in the last chapter.

We find another series of strong arguments in favour of our Monistic psychology in the individual development of the soul in the child and the young animal. We know that the new-born child has as yet no consciousness, no intelligence, no independent judgment and thought. We follow the gradual development of these higher faculties step by step in the first years of life, in strict proportion to the anatomical development of the cortex with which they are bound up. The inquiries into the child-soul which Wilhelm Preyer began in Jena twenty-five years ago, his careful "observations of the mental development of man in his early years," and the supplementary research of several more recent physiologists, have shown, from the ontogenetic side, that the soul is not a special immaterial entity, but the sum-total of a number of connected functions of the brain. When the brain dies, the soul comes to an end.

We have further proof in the stem-history of the soul, which we gather from the comparative psychology of the lower and higher mammals, and of savage and civilised races. Modern ethnography shows us in actual existence the various stages through which the mind rose to its present height. The most primitive races, such as the Veddahs of Ceylon, or the Australian natives, are very little above the mental life of the anthropoid apes. From the higher savages we pass by a complete gradation of stages to the most civilised races. But what a gulf there is, even here, between the genius of a Goethe, a Darwin, or a Lamarck, and an ordinary philisthine or third-rate official. All these facts point to one conclusion: the human soul has only reached its present height by a long period of gradual evolution; it differs in degree, not in kind, from the soul of the higher mammals; and thus it cannot in any case be immortal.

That a large number of educated people still cling to the dogma of personal immortality in spite of these luminous proofs, is owing to the great power of conservative tradition and the evil methods of instruction that stamp these untenable dogmas deep on the growing mind in early years. It is for that very reason that the Churches strive to keep the schools under their power at any cost; they can control and exploit the adults at will, if independent thought and judgment have been stifled in the earlier years.

This brings us to the interesting question: What is the position of the "ecclesiastical evolution" of the Jesuits (the "latest course of Darwinism"), as regards this great question of the soul? Man is, according to Wasmann, the image of God and a unique, immaterial being, differing from all other animals in the possession of an immortal soul, and therefore having a totally different origin from them. Man's immortal soul is, according to this Jesuit sophistry, "spiritual and sensitive," while the animal soul is sensitive only. God has implanted his own spirit in man, and associated it with an animal soul for the period of life. It is true that Wasmann believes even man's body to have been created directly by God; but, in view of the overwhelming proofs of our animal descent, he leaves open the possibility of a development from a series of other animals, in which case the Divine spirit would be breathed into him in the end. The Christian Fathers, who were much occupied with the introduction of the soul into the human embryo, tell us that the immortal soul enters the soulless embryo on the fortieth day after conception in the case of the boy, and on the eightieth day in the case of the girl. If Wasmann supposes that there was a similar introduction of the soul in the development of the race, he must postulate a moment in the history of the anthropoid apes when God sent his spirit into the hitherto unspiritual soul of the ape.

When we look at the matter impartially in the light of pure reason, the belief in immortality is wholly inconsistent with the facts of evolution and of physiology. The ontogenetic dogma of the older Church, that the soul is introduced into the soulless body at a particular moment of its embryonic development, is just as absurd as the phylogenetic dogma of the most modern Jesuits, that the Divine spirit was breathed into the frame of an anthropoid ape at a certain period (in the Tertiary period), and so converted it into an immortal soul. We may examine and test this belief as we will, we can find in it nothing but a piece of mystic superstition. It is maintained solely by the great power of tradition and the support of Conservative governments, the leaders of which have no personal belief in these "revelations," but cling to the practical conviction that throne and altar must support each other. They unfortunately overlook the circumstance that the throne is apt to become merely the footstool to the altar, and that the Church exploits the State for its own, not the State's, good.

We learn further, from the history of this dogma, that the belief in immortality did not find its way into science until a comparatively late date. It is not found in the great Monistic natural philosophers who, six centuries before the time of Christ, evinced a profound insight into the real nature of the world. It is not found in Democritus and Empedocles, in Seneca and Lucretius Carus. It is not found in the older Oriental religions, Buddhism, the ancient religion of the Chinese, or Confucianism; in fact, there is no question of individual persistence after death in the Pentateuch or the earlier books of the Old Testament (which were written before the Babylonian Exile). It was Plato and his pupil, Aristotle, that found a place for it in their dualistic metaphysics; and its agreement with the Christian and Mohammedan teaching secured for it a very widespread acceptance.

Another psychological dogma, the belief in man's free-will, is equally inconsistent with the truth of evolution. Modern physiology shows clearly that the will is never really free in man or in the animal, but determined by the organisation of the brain; this in turn is determined in its individual character by the laws of heredity and the influence of the environment. It is only because the apparent freedom of the will has such a great practical significance in the province of religion, morality, sociology, and law, that it still forms the subject of the most contradictory claims. Theoretically, determinism, or the doctrine of the necessary character of our volitions, was established long ago.

With the belief in the absolute freedom of the will and the personal immortality of the soul is associated, in the minds of many highly educated people, a third article of faith, the belief in a personal God. It is well known that this belief, often wrongly represented as an indispensable foundation of religion, assumes the most widely varied shapes. As a rule, however, it is an open or covert anthropomorphism. God is conceived as the "Supreme Being," but turns out, on closer examination, to be an idealised man. According to the Mosaic narrative, "God made man to his own image and likeness," but it is usually the reverse; "Man made God according to his own image and likeness." This idealised man becomes creator and architect and produces the world, forming the various species of plants and animals like a modeller, governing the world like a wise and all-powerful monarch, and, at the "Last Judgment," rewarding the good and punishing the wicked like a rigorous judge. The childish conceptions of this extramundane God, who is set over against the world as an independent being, the personal creator, maintainer, and ruler of all things, are quite incompatible with the advanced science of the nineteenth century, especially with its two greatest triumphs, the law of substance and the law of Monistic evolution.

Critical philosophy, moreover, long ago pronounced its doom. In the first place, the most famous critical thinker, Immanuel Kant, proved in his Critique of Pure Reason that absolute science affords no support to the three central dogmas of metaphysics, the personal God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will. It is true that he afterwards (in the course of his dualistic and dogmatic metamorphosis) taught that we must believe these three great mystic forces, and that they are indispensable postulates of practical reason; and that the latter must take precedence over pure reason. Modern German philosophy, which clamours for a "return to Kant," sees his chief distinction in this impossible reconciliation of polar contradictions. The Churches, and the ruling powers in alliance with them, accord a welcome to this diametrical contradiction, recognised by all candid readers of the KÖnigsberg philosopher, between the two reasons. They use the confusion that results for the purpose of putting the light of the creeds in the darkness of doubting reason, and imagine that they save religion in this way.

Whilst we are engaged with the important subject of religion, we must refute the charge, often made, and renewed of recent years, that our Monistic philosophy and the theory of evolution that forms its chief foundation destroy religion. It is only opposed to those lower forms of religion that are based on superstition and ignorance, and would hold man's reason in bondage by empty formalism and belief in the miraculous, in order to control it for political purposes. This is chiefly the case with Romanism or Ultramontanism, that pitiful caricature of pure Christianity that still plays so important a part in the world. Luther would turn in his grave if he could see the predominance of the Roman Centre party in the German Empire to-day. We find the papacy, the deadly enemy of Protestant Germany, controlling its destiny, and the Reichstag submitting willingly to be led by the Jesuits. Not a voice do we hear raised in it against the three most dangerous and mischievous institutions of Romanism—the obligatory celibacy of the clergy, the confessional, and indulgences. Though these later institutions of the Roman Church have nothing to do with the original teaching of the Church and pure Christianity; though their immoral consequences, so prejudicial to the life of the family and the State, are known to all, they exist just as they did before the Reformation. Unfortunately, many German princes foster the ambition of the Roman clergy, making their "Canossa-journey" to Rome, and bending the knee to the great charlatan at the Vatican.

It is also very regrettable that the increasing tendency to external show and festive parade at what is called "the new court" does grave injury to real and inner religion. We have a striking instance of this external religion in the new cathedral at Berlin, which many would have us regard as "Catholic," not Protestant and Evangelical. I often met in India priests and pilgrims who believed they were pleasing their God by turning prayer-wheels, or setting up prayer-mills that were set in motion by the wind. One might utilise the modern invention of automatic machines for the same purposes, and set up praying automata in the new cathedral, or indulgence-machines that would give relief from lighter sins for one mark [shilling], and from graver sins for twenty marks. It would prove a great source of revenue to the Church, especially if similar machines were set up in the other churches that have lately been erected in Berlin at a cost of millions of marks. It would have been better to have spent the money on schools.

These observations on the more repellent characters of modern orthodoxy and piety may be taken as some reply to the sharp attacks to which I have been exposed for forty years, and which have lately been renewed with great violence. The spokesmen of Catholic and Evangelical beliefs, especially the Romanist Germania and the Lutheran Reichsbote, have vied with each other in deploring my lectures as "a desecration of this venerable hall," and in damning my theory of evolution—without, of course, making any attempt to repute its scientific truth. They have, in their Christian charity, thought fit to put sandwich-men at the doors of this room, to distribute scurrilous attacks on my person and my teaching to those who enter. They have made a generous use of the fanatical calumnies that the court chaplain, StÖcker, the theologian, Loofs, the philologist, Dennert, and other opponents of my Riddle of the Universe, have disseminated, and to which I make a brief reply at the end of that work. I pass by the many untruths of these zealous protagonists of theology. We men of science have a different conception of truth from that which prevails in ecclesiastical circles.[10]

As regards the relation of science to Christianity, I will only point out that it is quite irreconcilable with the mystic and supernatural Christian beliefs, but that it fully recognises the high ethical value of Christian morality. It is true that the highest commands of the Christian religion, especially those of sympathy and brotherly love, are not discoveries of its own; the golden rule was taught and practised centuries before the time of Christ. However, Christianity has the distinction of preaching and developing it with a fresh force. In its time it has had a beneficial influence on the development of civilisation, though in the Middle Ages the Roman Church became, with its Inquisition, its witch-drowning, its burning of heretics, and its religious wars, the bloodiest caricature of the gentle religion of love. Orthodox historical Christianity is not directly destroyed by modern science, but by its own learned and zealous theologians. The enlightened Protestantism that was so effectively advocated by Schleiermacher in Berlin eighty years ago, the later works of Feuerbach, the inquiries into the life of Jesus of David Strauss and Ernest Renan, the lectures recently delivered here by Delitzsch and Harnack, have left very little of what strict orthodoxy regards as the indispensable foundations of historical Christianity. Kalthoff, of Bremen, goes so far as to declare that all Christian traditions are myths, and that the development of Christianity is a necessary outcome of the civilisation of the time.

In view of this broadening tendency in theology and philosophy at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is an unfortunate anachronism that the Ministers of Public Instruction of Prussia and Bavaria sail in the wake of the Catholic Church, and seek to instil the spirit of the Jesuits in both lower and higher education. It is only a few weeks since the Prussian Minister of Worship made a dangerous attempt to suppress academic freedom, the palladium of mental life in Germany. This increasing reaction recalls the sad days of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when thousands of the finest citizens of Germany migrated to North America, in order to develop their mental powers in a free atmosphere. This selective process formed a blessing to the United States, but it was certainly very injurious to Germany. Large numbers of weak and servile characters and sycophants were thus favoured. The fossilised ideas of many of our leading jurists seem to take us back sometimes to the Cretaceous and Jurassic periods, while the palÆozoic rhetoric of our theologians and synods even goes back to the Permian and Carboniferous epochs.

However, we must not take too seriously the anxiety that this increasing political and clerical reaction causes us. We must remember the vast resources of civilisation that are seen to-day in our enormous international intercourse, and must have confidence in the helpful exchange of ideas between east and west that is being effected daily by our means of transit. Even in Germany the darkness that now prevails will at length give place to the dazzling light of the sun. Nothing, in my opinion, will contribute more to that end than the unconditional victory of the idea of evolution.

Beside the law of evolution, and closely connected with it, we have that great triumph of modern science, the law of substance—the law of the conservation of matter (Lavoisier, 1789), and of the conservation of energy (Robert Mayer, 1842). These two laws are irreconcilable with the three central dogmas of metaphysics, which so many educated people still regard as the most precious treasures of their spiritual life—the belief in a personal God, the personal immortality of the soul, and the liberty of the human will. But these great objects of belief, so intimately bound up with numbers of our treasured achievements and institutions, are not on that account driven out of the world. They merely cease to pose as truths in the realm of pure science. As imaginative creations, they retain a certain value in the world of poetry. Here they will not only, as they have done hitherto, furnish thousands of the finest and most lofty motives for every branch of art—sculpture, painting, or music—but they will still have a high ethical and social value in the education of the young and in the organisation of society. Just as we derive artistic and ethical inspiration from the legends of classical antiquity (such as the Hercules myth, the Odyssey and the Iliad) and the story of William Tell, so we will continue to do in regard to the stories of the Christian mythology. But we must do the same with the poetical conceptions of other religions, which have given the most varied forms to the transcendental ideas of God, freedom, and immortality.

Thus the noble warmth of art will remain, together with—not in opposition to, but in harmony with—the splendid light of science, one of the most precious possessions of the human mind. As Goethe said: "He who has science and art has religion; he who has not these two had better have religion." Our Monistic system, the "connecting link between religion and science," brings God and the world into unity in the sense that Goethe willed, the sense that Spinoza clearly expressed long ago and Giordano Bruno had sealed with his martyrdom. It has been said repeatedly of late that Goethe was an orthodox Christian. A few years ago a young orator quoted him in support of the wonderful dogmas of the Christian religion. We may point out that Goethe himself expressly said he was "a decided non-Christian." The "great heathen of Weimar" has given the clearest expression to his Pantheistic views in his noblest poems, Faust, Prometheus, and God and the World. How could so vigorous a thinker, in whose mind the evolution of organic life ran through millions of years, have shared the narrow belief of a Jewish prophet and enthusiast who sought to give up his life for humanity 1,900 years ago?

Our Monistic god, the all-embracing essence of the world, the Nature-god of Spinoza and Goethe, is identical with the eternal, all-inspiring energy, and is one, in eternal and infinite substance, with space-filling matter. It "lives and moves in all things," as the Gospel says. And as we see that the law of substance is universal, that the conservation of matter and of energy is inseparably connected, and that the ceaseless development of this substance follows the same "eternal iron laws," we find God in natural law itself. The will of God is at work in every falling drop of rain and every growing crystal, in the scent of the rose and the spirit of man.