Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/517

 the threshold of verifiable knowledge the same ideas of causation, order, continuity, and development which dominate in the realm of inductive science, we find it impossible ever to lose the conception of being, or to reduce it to that of non-being, or to eliminate from it the idea of energy on the one hand and intelligence on the other. If our thought ever obtains a resting-place without violating the laws of thought, it must be in the ultimate idea of One Self-existing Reality, the primal fountain whence all multiform and dependent beings have their source.

That causative action should ever arise from nothing, that chaos should ever beget a cosmos, that the motion-of-objects should ever transform itself into the sense-of-motion and this into the consciousness-of-motion,—are propositions that set at naught every canon of scientific thinking. The doctrine of evolution, which has been applied so successfully to the morphology and descent of organisms, seems to apply equally to the morphology and descent of mind; for organic and psychic changes, neurosis and psychosis, run pari passu wherever we can trace them. The philosophy based upon merely mechanical conceptions regarded the cause of the world as a Deus ex machina, standing outside the finite order of events and acting in some inconceivable way upon a primeval chaos; which, by external touches, has been transformed into a cosmos. The philosophy based upon biological conceptions derives all life from pre-existent life, all thought from pre-existent thought, and finds no chaos because it reaches no limit to the sweep and operation of law. The former represented the Creative Power as outside of the world, wholly sundered from it, and transcendent only. The latter represents the Creative Power as in the world, immanent in man as well as transcendent over him, a Power "in whom we live and move and have our being," and "who is not far from every one of us," for we "are also his offspring."

Does Monism extinguish God and the Soul?

Two questions of the deepest interest this monistic doctrine may be required to answer: (1) Can we suppose in harmony