154 WHAT IS LIFE ? 



This is the religion for which the liberal and enlight- 

 ened priests wish as earnestly as the enlightened lay- 

 men. For priest and layman, royalty and subject, rich 

 and poor, the intelligent and the idiot, the savant 



consider as the time ' religion of the Future,' will not, like all Church 

 religions, stand opposed to the rational knowledge of nature, but be 

 in perfect harmony with it. And whereas Church religions are 

 founded on deception and superstition, the religion of Nature will be 

 based upon truth and knowledge." ..." During the most flourish- 

 ing period of the Middle Ages, when Christianity asserted its 

 sovereignty over the whole world, the crudest ignorance, the most 

 offensive barbarity, and the deepest immorality prevailed everywhere. 

 Philosophy, the prince of all the sciences, which, five hundred years 

 before Christ, had in Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Democritus 

 sown the seeds for our modern theory of evolution, became, by the 

 dissemination of Roman Catholic dogmas, and the burning piles of the 

 Inquisition, the blind tool of ecclesiastical faith." ("The History 

 of Creation," Prof. Ernst Haeckel, 1892, vol. ii. p. 498.) 



" The highest function of the human mind is perfect knowledge, 

 fully developed consciousness, and the moral activity arising from it. 

 ' Know thyself ! ' was the cry of the philosophers of antiquity to their 

 fellow-men who were striving to ennoble themselves. * Know thy- 

 self ! ' is the cry of the Theory of Development, not merely to the indi- 

 vidual, but to all mankind. And whilst increased knowledge of self 

 becomes, in the case of every individual man, a strong force urging 

 to an increased attention to conduct, mankind as a whole will be 

 led to a higher path of moral perfection by the knowledge of its true 

 origin and its actual position in Nature. The simple religion of 

 Nature, which grows from a true knowledge of Her, and of Her 

 inexhaustible store of revelations, will in future ennoble and perfect 

 the development of mankind far beyond that degree which can pos- 

 sibly be attained under the influence of the multifarious religions of 

 the Churches of the various nations, religions resting on a blind belief 

 in the vague secrets and mythical revelations of a sacerdotal caste. A 

 firm foundation for this religion of Nature is formed by the monistic 

 conviction of the unity of all natural phenomena, the unity of mind 

 and body, of force and matter, of God and Universe." (Idem, 

 p. 497.) 



