Articles of Faith," upon which Professor Schlesinger has already
expounded his views.[1] I am glad to be able to agree with him in many
important points, but as to others I should like to express some
hesitation, and to ask consideration for some views which do not coincide
with his. At the outset, I am entirely at one with him as to that
unifying conception of nature as a whole which we designate in a single
word as Monism. By this we unambiguously express our conviction that
there lives "one spirit in all things," and that the whole cognisable
world is constituted, and has been developed, in accordance with one
common fundamental law. We emphasise by it, in particular, the essential
unity of inorganic and organic nature, the latter having been evolved
from the former only at a relatively late period.[2] We cannot draw a
sharp line of distinction between these two great divisions of nature,
any more than we can recognise an absolute distinction between the animal
and the vegetable kingdom, or between the lower animals and man.
Similarly, we regard the whole of human knowledge as a structural unity;
in this sphere we refuse to accept the distinction usually drawn between
the natural and the spiritual. The latter is only a part of the former
(or _vice versa_); both are one. Our monistic view of the world belongs,
therefore, to that group of philosophical systems which from other points
of view have been designated also as mechanical or as pantheistic.
However differently expressed in the philosophical systems of an
Empedocles or a Lucretius, a Spinoza or a Giordano Bruno, a Lamarck or a
David Strauss, the fundamental thought common to them all is ever that of
the oneness of the cosmos, of the indissoluble connection between energy
and matter, between mind and embodiment--or, as we may also say, between
God and the world--to which Goethe, Germany's greatest poet and thinker,
has given poetical expression in his _Faust_ and in the wonderful series
of poems entitled _Gott und Welt_.