OP KNOWLEDGE. 



315 



18. 

 The first 



Spencer must have acquired at least a superficial know- 

 ledge of some of the ideas current in Kantian and post- 

 Kantian speculation. But the search for a creed ended 

 with the latter in exactly that doctrine of the unknow- 

 ableness of the origin of things at which James Mill had 

 arrived sixty years earlier, and which received popular 

 expression when Huxley coined the term Agnosticism. 

 The circuit of thought which thus began and ended in 

 an agnostic attitude preceded historically the deeper and episode 

 more scholarly study of Continental Idealism, and has, ^°?°n' 

 through it, been pushed somewhat into the background. 



Besides this very prominent episode we have, in this 

 country, the original studies and speculations of James 

 Martineau, an independent thinker, of whom we shall 

 have to take notice in some of the subsequent chapters 

 of this History. 



The introduction of the term Monism ^ into recent 



^ The term Monism has cropped 

 up in recent philosophic literature 

 from different sides and with some- 

 what different significance. It is 

 opposed by some writers to the 

 various forms of dualism existent 

 in contemporary thought and, 

 more recently by others, to plural- 

 ism, which they consider to be the 

 necessary presupposition for a con- 

 sistent application of the principle 

 of Evolution. In Germany the 

 term has been usurped by Ernst 

 Haeckel for the materialistic creed 

 which is developed in his popular 

 writings. Some of his followers 

 have joined hands with an earlier 

 tendency of thought, represented 

 by the Society for Ethical Culture,, 

 which aims at giving to morality 

 a foundation independent of any 

 religious creed. This direction of 

 thought is represented by a special 



periodical founded in America, with 

 the title, ' The Monist.' It aims at 

 representing a unitary philosophi- 

 cal creed by no means identical 

 with the Positivism of Comte or 

 the Materialism of Haeckel, but 

 nevertheless influenced by both. 

 Quite recently there has been 

 held at Hamburg the " First Inter- 

 national Monist Congress," of 

 which Ernst Haeckel, the great 

 naturalist, Wilhelm Ostwald, the 

 celebrated chemist, Friedrich Jodl, 

 author of an important ' History 

 of Ethics,' and others, mostly 

 naturalists, seem to have been the 

 leading spirits. The term Monism 

 has thus become, as it were, the 

 Shibboleth of a sort of religion of 

 Free Thought, and cannot now, 

 any more than the term Positiv- 

 ism, be used in the wider sense 

 which its etymology suggests. 



