THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 81 



and with a richer content. Thus vitalism, by the process of unifica- 

 tion and intensification, culminates in anthropomorphic monotheism, 

 while animism, through the coalescence of objects and forces at first 

 believed to be separately animated, finally develops into pantheism. 

 These two lines of thought, moreover, tend themselves to converge, 

 or, at any rate, to become interchangeable, since monotheism, by 

 deanthropomorphizing itself, approximates to pantheism, as is well 

 seen in the Christian theologies and ethical religions of the world; 

 while pantheism, by emphasizing the characters of intelligence and 

 will, is sometimes hardly to be distinguished from those modern 

 forms of monotheism which teach the doctrine of immanence. The 

 intellectual outcome of the whole movement, embodying the modern 

 attitude in Nature philosophy, is thus no longer anthropomorphism, 

 but psychomorphism, since it reads into the universe, not the char- 

 acters which distinguish human beings from the lower animals, but 

 the highest manifestation of the characters recognized to be common 

 to both, namely, psychic characters the characters, in a word, of 

 mind. For the deepest reaches of human thought, the process of 

 man-likening has thus given way to the process of mind-likening. 

 On the subjective side of mental inquiry we get psychomorphic mono- 

 theism, or what may be called theological pantheism; while on the 

 objective side we reach scientific pantheism, or monism. It is true 

 that the psychomorphism of scientific monism is reached by a process 

 different from that which has culminated in the mind-likening of 

 theological pantheism. Yet in both cases there is the same projection 

 of intelligence into the external system as a means of comprehending 

 it. And as the intelligence of atoms implies their vitality, we really 

 return in scientific monism to the vitalistic attitude of the primitive 

 observer of Nature. The salient difference between the two views is 

 this: that while early man subsumed under his concept of vitality 

 only the rudest characters thereof, the terms in the mind of the monist 

 connotes in all their richness the ideas associated with mind. 



Enough has now been said to show the basis on which rests the 

 whole superstructure of man's mental attitude toward the cosmos. 

 Despite all uncertainties regarding the details of the process, we may 

 be assured of its fundamental nature, and are thus compelled to 

 recognize the dependence of the forms of man's mental attitude to- 

 ward the universe upon his knowledge of himself. It is because his 

 own actions have their source in a personal wl^ that he refers ex- 

 ternal movements to will. He is conscious of his own acts, and the 

 world around him can not be devoid of a like illumination. Does 

 he himself plan? Nature must also be intelligent. And the high- 

 est qualities which he can discover in himself he reads unhesitatingly 

 into the cosmos. 



VOL. LV. 7 



