Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/602

586 united by a single step. The method which H. adopted is the more correct and convenient, yet its use alone, without the knowledge that it does not exclude the concurrent use of the latter as equally legitimate, has led to grave misconceptions of the system. For the method which H. did not adopt has the advantage of bringing out the fact that immediacy is as important and ultimate a factor in reality as Logic is, and one which is irreducible to it. The two terms are exactly on a level. The dialectic system, then, makes no attempt to eliminate the elements of immediacy in experience or to deduce existence from essence, but we learn from it that in the universe is realized the whole of reason and nothing but reason.

(1) Monism exists in opposition to whatsoever comes between nature and mind, between the world and God. Natur-philosophie embraces the entire body of human knowledge, and becomes really philosophy when it has brought together results which analysis has ascertained. (2) Mechanicalism: mechanical causes, in the sense of Kant, are assumed as the sole effective cause and are placed in opposition to teleological causes. (3) Psychism: all matter is ensouled. This is exemplified by chemical affinity, by the 'irritability' of lower organisms, by the feeling and will of man. (4) Theism: the only idea of God logically compatible with monism is that which views him as the sum-total of the forces of the universe, which is inseparable from the sum-total of the matter of the universe. (5) Materialism: all the phenomena of the world are founded upon material processes. Yet matter did not originally exist alone and then secondarily create force or mind. (6) Spiritualism: feeling is as fundamental a property of the atom as is attraction or repulsion. Every 'spirit' is inseparably united with some 'matter.' Yet force did not originally exist and then secondarily create matter. (7) The 'belief in immortality' is scientifically tenable only as a general proposition equivalent to the conservation of energy. The 'human soul' is simply a transient, developmentary phenomenon. (8) Cosmism: the principles of world-conception laid down may also be designated cosmism, to the extent that they proceed from the fundamental idea that the 'world-process,' as world-development, is, within certain limits, a knowable natural process. Cosmism is thus opposed to agnosticism.