Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/613

Rh of God as immanent in the world of phenomena and manifested in every throb of its mighty rhythmical life; the deity that Richard Hooker, prince of English churchmen, had in mind when he wrote of Natural Law that "her seat is the bosom of God and her voice the harmony of the world"—with regard to this conception the practical effect of the doctrine of evolution is not to abolish but to strengthen and confirm it. For, into whatever province of Nature we carry our researches, the more deeply we penetrate into its laws and methods of action, the more clearly do we see that all provinces of Nature are parts of an organic whole animated by a single principle of life that is infinite and eternal. I have no doubt Prof. Haeckel would not only admit this, but would scout any other view as inconsistent with the monism which he professes. But he would say that this infinite and eternal principle of life is not psychical, and therefore can not be called in any sense "a personal God." In an ultimate analysis, I suspect, Prof. Haeckel's ubiquitous monistic principle would turn out to be neither more nor less than Dr. Büchner's mechanical force (Kraft). On the other hand, I have sought to show—in my little book The Idea of God—that the Infinite and Eternal Power that animates the universe must be psychical in its nature, that any attempt to reduce it to mechanical force must end in absurdity, and that the only kind of monism which will stand the test of an ultimate analysis is monotheism. While in the chapter on Anthropomorphic Theism, in my Cosmic Philosophy, I have taken great pains to point out the difficulties in which (as finite thinkers) we are involved when we try to conceive the Infinite and Eternal Power as psychical in His nature, I have, in the chapter on Matter and Spirit, in that same book, taken equal pains to show that we are logically compelled thus to conceive Him.

One's attitude toward such problems is likely to be determined by one's fundamental conception of psychical life. To a materialist the ultimate power is mechanical force, and psychical life is nothing but the temporary and local result of fleeting collocations of material elements in the shape of nervous systems. Into the endless circuit of transformations of molecular motion, says the materialist, there enter certain phases which we call feelings and thoughts; they are part of the circuit, they arise out of motions of material molecules and disappear by being retransformed into such motions; hence, with the death of the organism in which such motions have been temporarily gathered into a kind of unity, all psychical activity and all personality are ipso facto abolished. Such is the materialistic doctrine, and such, I presume, is what Prof. Haeckel has in mind when he asserts that the belief in an immortal soul is incompatible with the doctrine of evolution. The theory commonly called that of the correlation of forces, and