THE GREEK ATTITUDE 



of immaterialistic monism in which unity of the in- 

 organic and organic worlds is sought by endowing 

 matter with sensation or life. As modern examples, 

 we may cite Spinoza, the classic type of pantheist, 

 who developed his doctrine on purely rationalistic 

 lines," and Berkeley, the idealist, who held that the 

 reality of matter lay in its perception by the mind; 

 for a thing which is not perceived cannot be known, 

 and that which is not known cannot exist. The second 

 mode of thought is materialistic monism. Laplace, 

 who is the author of the nebular hypothesis, accord- 

 ing to which if we should know, at any time, the po- 

 sitions and motions of all the atoms then we could 

 determine with mathematical precision the past and 

 future history of the universe, and Haeckel, the bi- 

 ologist, who wished to reduce all phenomena of life 

 to physical law, are well known examples. For dual- 

 ism, we may cite Plato and Aristotle to illustrate the 

 dualism of the philosopher who recognizes two sepa- 



2"Haeckel, in his fervour of advocacy of the monistic philosophy, 

 apparently identified all monism with the mechanistic view, and 

 overlooked entirely the fact that monism can be equally well at- 

 tained by submerging materialism in pantheism or vitalism, a belief 

 utterly abhorrent to him. In the following passage he does violence 

 to Spinoza and Bruno by linking them with Democritus. "These 

 first principles of the mechanical conception of the universe have 

 been taught by the great monistic philosophers of all ages. Even 

 Democritus of Abdera, the immortal founder of the atomic theory, 

 clearly expressed them about 500 years before Christ ; but grand 

 Spinoza, and the great Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno, did so 

 even more explicitly." History of Creation, Eng. trans., I, p. 22. 

 Haeckel Is only so far right in calling Spinoza a mechanist in that 

 he was an absolute monist and rigorously excluded teleology. 

 Emotionally he was a pantheist. But, you have precisely this same 

 conflation of intellectual mechanism and emotional pantheism in 

 the Stoics. There is simply no use in asking a monist to be con- 

 sistent, — to be consistent is not a part of his philosophy. 



C69I 



