THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION. 



595 



tion of God as immanent in the world of phenomena and mani- 

 fested in every throb of its mighty rhythmical life ; the deity 

 that Richard Hooker, prince of English churchmen, had in mind 

 when he wrote of Natural Law that " her seat is the bosom of 

 God and her voice the harmony of the world " with regard to 

 this conception the practical effect of the doctrine of evolution is 

 not to abolish but to strengthen and confirm it. For, into what- 

 ever province of Nature we carry our researches, the more deeply 

 we penetrate into its laws and methods of action, the more clearly 

 do we see that all provinces of Nature are parts of an organic whole 

 animated by a single principle of life that is infinite and eternal. 

 I have no doubt Prof. Haeckel would not only admit this, but 

 would scout any other view as inconsistent with the monism 

 which he professes. But he would say that this infinite and 

 eternal principle of life is not psychical, and therefore can not be 

 called in any sense " a personal God." In an ultimate analysis, I 

 suspect, Prof. Haeckel's ubiquitous monistic principle would turn 

 out to be neither more nor less than Dr. Biichner's mechanical force 

 (Kraft) . On the other hand, I have sought to show in my little 

 book The Idea of God that the Infinite and Eternal Power that 

 animates the universe must be psychical in its nature, that any 

 attempt to reduce it to mechanical force must end in absurd- 

 ity, and that the only kind of monism which will stand the test 

 of an ultimate analysis is monotheism. While in the chapter on 

 Anthropomorphic Theism, in my Cosmic Philosophy, I have taken 

 great pains to point out the difficulties in which (as finite thinkers) 

 we are involved when we try to conceive the Infinite and Eternal 

 Power as psychical in His nature, I have, in the chapter on Mat- 

 ter and Spirit, in that same book, taken equal pains to show that 

 we are logically compelled thus to conceive Him. 



One's attitude toward such problems is likely to be determined 

 by one's fundamental conception of psychical life. To a material- 

 ist the ultimate power is mechanical force, and psychical life is 

 nothing but the temporary and local result of fleeting collocations 

 of material elements in the shape of nervous systems. Into the 

 endless circuit of transformations of molecular motion, says the 

 materialist, there enter certain phases which we call feelings and 

 thoughts ; they are part of the circuit, they arise out of motions 

 of material molecules and disappear by being retransformed into 

 such motions ; hence, with the death of the organism in which 

 such motions have been temporarily gathered into a kind of unity, 

 all psychical activity and all personality are ipso facto abolished. 

 Such is the materialistic doctrine, and such, I presume, is what 

 Prof. Haeckel has in mind when he asserts that the belief in an 

 immortal soul is incompatible with the doctrine of evolution. The 

 theory commonly called that of the correlation of forces, and 



