2 LECTURES ON BIOLOGY 



questioning persistently because it wants to know, so savage 

 man asks after the Why of all things. Why does the sun rise 

 morning after morning ? Why does the sun set in the evening 

 behind the mountains in the distant horizon ? Why is there 

 sickness, why death ? Why is one year healthy and fruitful, 

 why does the next bring famine and epidemics ? 



But the greatest question of all that have agitated the mind 

 of man is that of his own place in Nature, of his origin, and 

 of the future of his soul after death. Unable to find a satisfying 

 answer to his yearning, he created gods in his own image, 

 regarding them as the cause of all that is, to whom the world 

 and he owed their existence, and into whose presence his soul 

 could fly when death had claimed him. 



As man is, so is his god ; the degree of man's knowledge 

 determines the perfection of his deity. The gods of the savage 

 and barbarous tribes, even those of the Greeks and Romans, are 

 endowed with every human passion and weakness, and it is not 

 until the Jewish-Christian period that we find a god who rises to 

 the purity of a perfect being. All that man has perceived to be 

 high and noble : mercifulness, love, righteousness, wisdom, truth, 

 and goodness, he attributes to his deity. ' First, man uncon- 

 sciously creates god in his image/ says Feuerbach in a brilliant 

 paraphrase, 'then this god consciously creates man in his image.' 



In this dark yearning after knowledge and truth, in this 

 eternal desire of the human mind to find an answer to the 

 innumerable questions with which he is confronted on all sides, 

 and a solution of the great riddle of his existence and life, we 

 find the origin of all religion. But there we find also the 

 beginning of science, for science, too, searches after a cause for 

 each phenomenon, and after the final cause of all phenomena. 

 Thus religion and science have the same aim though they 

 approach it by different roads : to find the cause of all causes. 



Why is it, we may ask, that in spite of like objects and 

 like aims there exists between them a growing abyss ? Why 

 do science and religion oppose each other in bitter strife ? As 

 both arise from the same desire, why do they not help each 

 other? Why did the Church in the dark Middle Ages put to 

 the stake or sword men who had found and proclaimed the 

 truth? To-day, when manners are milder, the stake and sword 



