230 The Monist Philosophy [!909 



exactly reproduced in the lectures and laid down and proved. I have 

 a paper of that date which I wrote for Usedom who had given me 

 an article in a Berlin scientific journal of the day, on ' Design in 

 Creation,' of which he thought a great deal, and in this paper I give 

 boldly, but with sufficient clearness, my doctrine of pure materialism 

 which Haeckel claims to have been the first to propound in 1863." 



I find among my records of that year, 1861, a short paper show- 

 ing how rapidly my mind had worked, which is worth mentioning 

 here, for it contains as I think the germ of the Monist philosophy 

 elaborated some years later by Haeckel, and which is still the soundest 

 line of materialistic argument. The paper was written not for publi- 

 cation, but in private answer to an article which Usedom had given 

 me to read, taken from the " Zeit " newspaper, in reviewing Ulrici's 

 work, Gott und die Natur. The ground taken by the article had been 

 Paley's old one with the precisely same formula our Jesuit censors 

 had condemned at Stonyhurst, " Through the contemplation of created 

 things, by steps we may ascend to God." The writer in attacking 

 evolution, had referred his readers to the evidence of the Natur- 

 Forscher, the Naturalist, who in an infinite variety of living things 

 had found the evidence of a creative Mind. For every effect, he had 

 argued, there must be a cause, and that cause is God. Taking up 

 this point in my reply to the writer, I begin by asking, " What is the 

 God he, the Natur-Forscher, finds in Nature, an impersonal or a 

 personal God? If impersonal, why dignify the recognized forces, 

 whose existence none doubts, with so high a name? If personal, in- 

 cluding the idea of first causer and planner, why assume that Nature 

 is an effect when that was the very point to be proved ? " Why speak 

 of a Creation unless to postulate a Creator? If we find an order in 

 Nature, is it necessary to assume an Orderer? Why should blind 

 forces be necessarily a chaos ? Is not every " Law of Nature " the 

 statement only of a continuous fact? Might we not as well assume 

 a Disorderer, were no order there? Order is but the way of material 

 being. 



I went on from this to examine what the Natur-Forscher showed 

 us ; — with his telescope, a Universe apparently unbounded and so 

 infinitely great ; with his microscope, a world infinitely divisible, in- 

 finitely small ; — a Universe without bound in Time, therefore ap- 

 parently Eternal, eternal in the past as it shows no sign of beginning, 

 eternal in the future as it shows no sign of decay; nothing is added 

 to the material, nothing taken from it; it remains unchanged in sub- 

 stance, varying in form only. What must we reflect, I ask, upon such 

 news as this ? Here are the old attributes we assigned to God, " He 

 who is," the Eternal, the Infinite. Why then not the Self-Existent? 

 Neither in Time nor Space has any fact revealed an external power. 



