Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/669

Rh or observation. Religion implies a reverent attitude toward the universe and its forces, a kindly feeling toward one's fellow mortals and immortals. "Pure religion and undefiled" has never formulated a "creed," has never claimed for itself orthodoxy. It has no stated ritual and no recognized cult of priests. Much that passes conventionally as religious belief among men has no such quality or value. It is simple the débris of our grandfathers' science. While religion and belief become entangled in the human mind, so as not to be easily separable, the one is not necessarily a product of the other. In the higher sense no man can follow or inherit the religion of another. His religion, if he has any, is his own. Only forms can be transferred, realities never; for realities in life are the product of individual thought and action.

As the third of these efforts to discredit science I have placed Prof. Haeckel's recent address. The Confession of Faith of a Man of Science. This remarkable work is an eloquent plea for the acceptance of the philosophic doctrine of monism as the fundamental basis of science. This doctrine once adopted, we have the basis for large deductions, which forestall the slow conclusions of science; for monism brings the necessity for the belief in certain scientific hypotheses resting as yet on no foundations in human experience, incapable as yet of scientific verification, but which are a necessary part of the monistic creed. The primal conception of monism is, first, "that there lives one spirit in all things, and that the whole cognizable world is constituted and has been developed in accordance with one common fundamental law." This involves the essential oneness of all things, matter and force, object and spirit. Nature and God. This philosophical conception of monism and pantheism can not be made intelligible to us, because it can be stated in no terms of human experience. But it has certain necessary derivatives, according to Haeckel, and these are intelligible, because their subject-matter is available for scientific experiment.

First among these postulates, called by Haeckel "Articles of Faith," comes "the essential unity of organic and inorganic Nature, the former having been evolved from the latter only at a relatively recent period." This involves the "spontaneous generation" of life from inorganic matter. It also resolves "the vital force," or the force which appears in connection with protoplasmic structures, into properties shown by certain carbon compounds under certain conditions. Life is thus, in a sense, an emanation of carbon, "the true maker of life," according to Haeckel "being the tetraedral carbon molecule."

This "Article of Faith" implies also the unity of the chemical elements, each of which is a product of the evolution of the primal unit of matter. Force and matter are likewise one, because