ON THE CREATION AND GOD. 45 



seems introduced more for ornament than for any serious 

 work that He has to do ; or at least, rather to conciliate 

 the mass of hostile theological prejudice certain to be 

 aroused by the other doctrines, than to satisfy any logical 

 demands in the system. He has nothing to do at the 

 beginning, save to endow " one or a few primordial 

 forms " with the lowest degree of elementary life, leaving 

 the rest of the work to natural selection and the ordeal 

 of battle ; and He has had nothing to do ever since (on 

 the earth at least) but to sit passively by and watch 

 laws which execute themselves without need of any 

 interference on His part. He is " a monarch that reigns 

 but does not govern," like the sovereigns under our par- 

 liamentary regime; and accordingly, in the evolutionary 

 monism of Haeckel, the passive, Personal, Supernatural 

 Creator is dethroned, and the real ruling and efficient 

 agency, Matter, eternal and governed by its own laws, is 

 placed on the vacant throne. There is no need to sup- 

 pose creative agency either at the beginning or since, 

 because " physico-chemical laws," which now regulate 

 the behaviour of matter and all the processes of life, 

 were quite competent to introduce life at first. 



But is God denied entirely in the system of Haeckel ? 

 Apparently not. Apparently it is only the Personal 

 Creator, if we are to judge from the following passage : 

 " The more developed man of the present day is capable 

 of, and justified in, conceiving that infinitely nobler and 

 sublimer idea of God, which alone is compatible with 

 the monistic conception of the universe, and which recog- 

 nizes God's Spirit and power in all phenomena without 

 exception. This monistic idea of God, which belongs to 

 the future, has already been expressed by Giordano 

 Bruno, in the following words : * A spirit exists in all 

 things, and no body is so small but contains a part of 



