The Doctrine of Evolution. 463 



These lines give no quarter to agnosticism. They are the essence 

 of monistic positivism. They say that the infinite world is but the 

 continuation of the knowable correlations of the finite, and that 

 there is no conceivable way out of that unending circle of " eternal 

 brazen laws " of cause and effect ; that there is no " thing in itself," or 

 outside itself, but that every transaction is a fact and a reality all the 

 way and forever ! Prof. Haeckel in his letter read here to-night says 

 that such is the verdict of evolution. 



Our agnostic friends seem unable or unwilling to have this great 

 4i mystery " of the nature of mind explained. They keep telling us 

 that if feeling is not a space-motion-force correlate it must be some 

 indescribable kind of power, entity, or spook. But the monist says : 

 No ; it is not such at all, but simply the fact-side of nervous changes 

 noted by the organism. The continued repetition of such notation is 

 a process, called awareness, feeling, consciousness, etc. This new fact 

 of awareness is simply the time correlation of the mechanical and 

 chemical force correlations, for facts are only measurable in and by 

 time, by which some of them are distinguished from others. This 

 fact of awareness of the changes in and about the nervous system is 

 simply feeling-time, for time at bottom is only feeling. That is the 

 fact made by one change contrasted with others, as before, after, or 

 together with them. The comparative easiness of repeated processes 

 gives rise to memory and forms, which are the foundations of intel- 

 lectual life, and finally reason and the whole data of psychology re- 

 sult. But all these facts of feeling are simply the event-side of the 

 nerve-changes, and no mystery unless we wish to make them so. If 

 we are simply scientists we may be positivists or monists, but not 

 materialists, or atheists, or agnostics, or spookists. If we bottom 

 on'the fact, as Goethe says in the opening of Faust (line 880), not on 

 the Word, or the Thought, or the Power, but the Fact, we shall have 

 a sure bottom to our mental and all other philosophy. 



We have banished the spook from every other of the sciences. Now 

 let us get it out of our own heads ; that is to say, out of the science of 

 modern psychology. 



This subjective time-process-correlation will sustain Religion, God, 

 The Christ, Immortality, and Ethics far better than the old illusions. 

 How, I have said in the Haeckel lecture, and need not repeat. But 

 also remember that Prof. Haeckel in his letter read to-night only re- 

 fers to the nothingness of the old spook forms of a " personal God and 

 immortality " as wholly incompatible with evolution. The modern 

 monistic scientific realities, which underlie and make true those fun- 

 damental words of all religion, he would doubtless assert and defend 

 as bravely as any one in proper time and place. 



