THE STABILITY OF TRUTH. 649 



or observation. Religion implies a reverent attitude toward tlie 

 universe and its forces, a kindly feeling toward one's fellow mor- 

 tals 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 debris of our grandfathers' sci- 

 ence. 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 reali- 

 ties 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 ac- 

 ceptance of the philosophic doctrine of monism as the fundamen- 

 tal basis of science. This doctrine once adopted, we have the basis 

 for large deductions, which forestall the slow conclusions of sci- 

 ence; 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 de- 

 veloped in accordance with one common fundamental law." This 

 involves the essential oneness of all things, matter and force, ob- 

 ject 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 gen- 

 eration " of life from inorganic matter. It also resolves " the vital 

 force," or the force which appears in connection with protoplas- 

 mic structures, into properties shown by certain carbon com- 

 pounds 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 pri- 

 mal unit of matter. Force and matter are likewise one, because 



