Prof. Ernst Haeckel. 47 



tion, we find the wisdom and influence of the same great 

 men a source of real health and strength. They only give 

 us religion without the superstition of theology or the an- 

 archy of metaphysics. It seems clear that from them and 

 their spirit we must learn or go on from bad to worse. The 

 religion which is the social, integrative, co-operative, and 

 saving element of human nature can no longer be fed and 

 sustained by ghostly gods, spooky devils, categorical im- 

 peratives, or inscrutable unknowables. Voltaire (as quoted 

 on the title-page of his Biography by James Parton) asks 

 the j)ertinent question which he could not answer : 



" 'Tis a pity to spend half of our life in destroying enchanted castles. 

 Far better to establish truths than to examine lies — but where are 

 the truths?" 



Thanks to evolution, the truths have come and are coming 

 in their good time. Up to Voltaire's day the known world 

 had been little more than an enchanted, or rather ghost- 

 haunted, castle of existence. His German successor, Goethe, 

 used the true to realize the good and beautiful. He ac- 

 cejDted this life in the monistic spirit as the real fact, and 

 the whole world and God as one — The All. The concep- 

 tions of God from the Hebrew prophets down, when freed 

 from limitations and anthropomorphisms, end in this object- 

 ive conception of God as The All ; not as a ghost, spirit, or 

 spook, outside of the universe, but as reality itself, infinite 

 and eternal. We have thus the scientifically revised defi- 

 nition : God is the world, infinite, eternal, and unchange- 

 able in its being and in its laws, but ever varying in its cor- 

 relations. 



Goethe, by true and grand expressions of divine and cos- 

 mic emotion, raised aloft as the true revelation of God the 

 monistic concept which has been worked out by the modern 

 objective sciences still in their glorious career of progress. 



The next great fruitful religious development of our 

 time seems to come from the Latin race through the word 

 of Comte, that the true Christ is Humanity itself. 



" Between man and the world there lies, and there is need 

 of, humanity"; this can not be repeated too often. The 

 organic action of society is the foundation of all social and 

 individual progress. 



Only by this mediator and saviour. Humanity, is there 

 any real hope or salvation for the individual. Only by this 

 Son of Man and of God can we come unto the Father — the 



