Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/672

652 That all the doctrines above mentioned are necessarily included in monism may perhaps be doubted. Monism would still flourish were all these theories disproved. For human philosophies have wonderful recuperative power. Their basis is in the structure of the brain itself, and external phenomena are only accessory to them.

If monism is purely a philosophic conception, it can have no necessary axioms or corollaries, except such as are involved in its definition. These could not be scientific in their character, because they could in no way come into relation with the realities of human life. If, however, monism be a generalization resting in part on human experience, then it must be tested by the methods of science. Until it is so tested, however plausible it may be, it has no workable value. There is no gain in giving it belief, or in calling it truth. Still less should we stultify ourselves by pinning our faith to its postulates as to the matters yet to be decided by experiment, and to be settled by human experience only. Haeckel says, for example: "The inheritance of characters acquired during the life of the individual is an indispensable axiom of the monistic doctrine of evolution. . . . Those who with Weismann and Galton deny this entirely exclude thereby the possibility of any formative influence of the outer world upon organic form." Here we may ask. Who knows that there is any such formative influence? What do we know of this or any other subject beyond what in our investigations we find to be true? When was monism a subject of special revelation, and with what credentials does it come, that one of the greatest controversies in modern science should be settled by the simple word? "Roma locuta est; causa finita est" is a dictum no longer heeded by science.

The great bulk of the arguments in favor of the heredity of acquired characters, as well as most of those in favor of the opposed dogma, the unchanged continuity of the germ-plasm, are based on some supposed logical necessity of philosophy. All such arguments are valueless in the light of fact. Desmarest's suggestion to the contending advocates of Neptunism and Plutonism was, "Go and see." When they had seen the action of water and the action of heat, the contest was over, for argument and contention had vanished in the face of fact. To believe without foundation is to discredit knowledge. Such "Confessions of Faith" on Haeckel's part lead one to doubt whether in his zeal for belief he has even known what it is to know. In fact, if we may trust his critics, much of Haeckel's scientific work is vitiated by this mixture of "believe" and "make-believe." The same confusion is shown in this remarkable passage which President White quotes from John Henry Newman: "Scripture says that