Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/144

140 of Monism" are the avowed creed of an already large and undoubtedly rapidly growing fraction of the German people. They have besides been "substantially adopted by the Universal Free-thought Congresses of Europe and North America, at Rome and St. Louis, 1904," and are making their way over all the civilized world.

These "theses," as succinctly formulated by Haeckel, number thirty, of which "twenty have to do with theoretical and ten with practical monism." The latter ten are "intended merely to elicit general suggestions according to their subjective interpretations; but the former twenty, namely, "the objectively accepted and established truths of modern science" are considered by Haeckel to be a firm foundation for the monistic conception of the world. These theses affirm (1) that the monistic world conception has its foundation exclusively in scientifically established truths which (2) have been arrived at "partly by sense-observations in the external world and partly by conscious ratiocination in our internal mentality." They deny (3 and 4) that important and profound apperceptions can be gained through supernatural revelation or through a priori reasoning independently of experience. They recognize (5, 6, 7 and 8) the dynamic unity of the cosmos, and its government by unchangeable natural laws, denying the dualistic world conception of a material and a spiritual world. Biology is really but a branch of physics, as living matter is subject to the same natural laws that govern dead or inorganic bodies. There is (9) no special or peculiar vital force "directing and controlling the physical and chemical processes within organisms." The whole cosmos is the result of a great monogenetic process of evolution which results in or is an unbroken succession of transformations and variations. This holds for both inorganic and organic nature. "Part of this universal process of evolution is directly accessible to our apperception, while its beginning and its ultimate goal are unknown to us." The world thus (10) was not created by a personal Creator.

The science of organic descent (11) is firmly established, and shows that "all organisms existing to-day on our planet are the transformed descendants of an extensive series of extinct organisms and have in the course of long periods of many millions of years in duration descended from them by evolution." This descent is an established fact whether its causes be explained by means of selection, mutation or any other theory of variation. Organic life (12) began on the earth after the latter had cooled from its molten liquidity into a sphere solidly encrusted with a superficial temperature below the boiling point of water. Life then originated naturally out of inorganic materials "by catalysis from colloidal carbohydrogen combinations." This first life was of the nature of "structureless plasma globules represented in our time by the Chromaceæ (Cyanophyceæ)." By the "grand process of biological