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But if the name "monism" is to designate a certain view of the world, it is for such a designation either too comprehensive and quite applicable to all views which have a right to the name of view of the world; or it is misleading, and not applicable to any.
Monism permits them, for however furious they may be, we can always justify ourselves in advance for indulging them by the thought that they WILL HAVE BEEN expressions of the absolute's perfect life. By escaping from your finite perceptions to the conception of the eternal whole, you can hallow any tendency whatever.
I mean, of course, the Holy Eucharist, commonly called the Mass. If matter is per se forever inert, unchangeable, indestructible, then we fall into the dilemma of a materialistic monism on the one hand, Manichaean dualism on the other.
It is exactly the standpoint of the popular naturalism we have already described, which here mingles unsuspectingly and without scruple Lamarckian and other principles with the Darwinian, which is enthusiastic on the one hand over the “purely mechanical” interpretation of nature, and on the other drags in directly psychical motives, unconscious consciousness, impulses, spontaneous self-differentiation of organisms, which nevertheless adheres to “monism” and possibly even professes to share Goethe’s conception of nature!
The representative figure amongst the Neo-Platonists is Plotinus. His comprehensive mind gathered up the main threads of Alexandrian thought, and wove them into the fabric of a vast speculative system. The system is as much a religion as a philosophy. It is the triumph of uncompromising monism. The last traces of dualism have been eradicated. God, for Plotinus, is true being and the only being.
Perhaps it is the taint of the monism of the latter half of the last century which still persists.
Śaṅkara's teaching is known as Advaita or absolute monism. Nothing exists except the one existence called Brahman or Paramâtman, the Highest Self. Brahman is not intelligent but is intelligence itself. This must not be misunderstood as a blasphemous assertion that man is equal to God.
Not even Virgil, with his metaphysic of individual merged into social will not even Virgil went outside it. In fact, it is a sort of monism of consciousness that inspires all pre-Miltonic epic. But in Milton, it has become a dualism.
Either it is that Rocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel with his materialistic monism, his ether-god and his jest at your God as a 'gaseous vertebrate'; or it is Spencer treating the world's history as a redistribution of matter and motion solely, and bowing religion politely out at the front door: she may indeed continue to exist, but she must never show her face inside the temple.
This movement is based on the ideas of Haeckel, who is looked up to as the master; but those ideas have been considerably changed under the influence of Ostwald, the new leader. While Haeckel is a biologist, Ostwalds brilliant work was done in chemistry and physics. The new Monism differs from the old, in the first place, in being much less dogmatic.
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