Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/91

Rh and with a richer content. Thus vitalism, by the process of unification and intensification, culminates in anthropomorphic monotheism, while animism, through the coalescence of objects and forces at first believed to be separately animated, finally develops into pantheism. These two lines of thought, moreover, tend themselves to converge, or, at any rate, to become interchangeable, since monotheism, by deanthropomorphizing itself, approximates to pantheism, as is well seen in the Christian theologies and ethical religions of the world; while pantheism, by emphasizing the characters of intelligence and will, is sometimes hardly to be distinguished from those modern forms of monotheism which teach the doctrine of immanence. The intellectual outcome of the whole movement, embodying the modern attitude in Nature philosophy, is thus no longer anthropomorphism, but psychomorphism, since it reads into the universe, not the characters which distinguish human beings from the lower animals, but the highest manifestation of the characters recognized to be common to both, namely, psychic characters—the characters, in a word, of mind. For the deepest reaches of human thought, the process of man-likening has thus given way to the process of mind-likening. On the subjective side of mental inquiry we get psychomorphic monotheism, or what may be called theological pantheism; while on the objective side we reach scientific pantheism, or monism. It is true that the psychomorphism of scientific monism is reached by a process different from that which has culminated in the mind-likening of theological pantheism. Yet in both cases there is the same projection of intelligence into the external system as a means of comprehending it. And as the intelligence of atoms implies their vitality, we really return in scientific monism to the vitalistic attitude of the primitive observer of nature. The salient difference between the two views is this: that while early man subsumed under his concept of vitality only the rudest characters thereof, the terms in the mind of the monist connotes in all their richness the ideas associated with mind.

Enough has now been said to show the basis on which rests the whole superstructure of man's mental attitude toward the cosmos. Despite all uncertainties regarding the details of the process, we may be assured of its fundamental nature, and are thus compelled to recognize the dependence of the forms of man's mental attitude toward the universe upon his knowledge of himself. It is because his own actions have their source in a personal will that he refers external movements to will. He is conscious of his own acts, and the world around him can not be devoid of a like illumination. Does he himself plan? Nature must also be intelligent. And the highest qualities which he can discover in himself he reads unhesitatingly into the cosmos.