122 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



the flight beyond the "flammantia moenia mundi" in the infinities of 

 time and space with which these master-minds are ultimately concerned.^ 

 The larger kinship of spirit between the author of the De Rerum 

 Natura and the author of the Weltrathsel is stamped upon their works 

 from the very beginning, for both men announce their firm belief that 

 the great and pressing evils of our political, social, and moral worlds 

 are to be met only by the development of clear views as to man, and 

 his relations to life and death and the universe.^ More striking is 

 the appearance so early in their books of the arraignment of reUgion 

 as responsible for many of the greatest evils. ^ Correspondingly early is 

 given the general solution for the problems, and our authors are thor- 

 oughly at one in the belief that if you can shed the light of nature 

 and nature's law into the human mind to replace the bhndness of 

 ignorance and the terror of superstition, you vdll have a better moral 

 fife as inevitably as the day follows the night. Through the expo- 

 sition of both men there run — forming, as it were, a master motive — 

 the words "law" and "reason." Neither could be more insistent 

 than the other upon a "doctrine of law and steadfast universal order 

 in nature" operating from the least conceivable particle of matter to 

 the utmost bounds of the universe and the highest development of the 

 hurnan mind. Just as applicable to the De Rerum Natura as to the 



' Lucretius will be considered as the representative of monistic or materialistic philosophy as developed 

 by the middle of the first century B. C, and no distinction will be made between his own contributions and 

 what he accepted from his predecessors, such as Democritus, Empedocles, and Epicurus. As representing 

 Haeckel's message on these subjects put in accessible form for the general reader, the Weltrathsel will be 

 followed throughout. For convenience quotations will be made from the English edition of the Weltrathsel 

 (Harper and Brothers, igoi), and the translation of Lucretius by Munro. (Deighton Bell & Co., 1891.) 



' WR., chap. I, et al.; De R. N., I, 107-109, 127-135, 146-148, et al. 



5 To imderstand the sternness, or even ferocity, of their attitude towards religion, one may compare these 

 passages: "Of all the wars which nations have waged against each other with fire and sword the religious wars 

 have been the bloodiest; of all the forms of discord that have shattered the happiness of famiUes and of indi- 

 viduals, those that arise from reUgious differences are still the most painful. Think of the millions who have 

 lost their lives in Christian persecutions, in the religious conflicts of Islam and of the Reformation, by the 

 Inquisition, and under the charge of witchcraft. " — WR., p. 303, cf. 318-319. "This is what I fear herein, lest 

 haply you should fancy that you are entering on unholy grounds of reason and treading the path of sin; whereas 

 on the contrary often and often that very religion has given birth to sinful and unholy deeds. " Then he 

 instances the sacrifice of Iphigenia before the departure of the Greek fleet for the Troad. "Nor aught in such 

 a moment could it avail the luckless girl that she had first bestowed the name of father upon the king. For 

 lifted up in the hands of men she was carried shivering to the altars, not after due performance of the cus- 

 tomary rites to be escorted by the clear-ringing bridal song, but in the very season of marriage, stainless maid 

 mid the stain of blood, to fall a sad victim by the sacrificing stroke of a father, that thus a happy and pros- 

 perous departure might be granted to the fleet. So great the evils to which reUgion could prompt. " — De R. 

 N., I, 80-101. 



