United States or Cabo Verde ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
A thoroughgoing theistic monism must find in matter some aspect or other of the self-revelation of God. It may be hard pressed to discover just how the psychical is "stepped down" to the physical. When the final elements in matter have become electrons and the electron is conceived as a strain in a magnetic field and thus the
It will he worth while now to briefly consider these doctrines in their relation to modern thought, beginning with the first, which is Monism:
Orthodox theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing.
A Frenchman and an Englishman, Gobineau and Chamberlain, have given them the arguments with which to defend the superiority of their race. With the rubbish left over from Darwin and Spencer, their old Haeckel has built up his doctrine of 'Monism' which, applied to politics, scientifically consecrates Prussian pride and recognizes its right to rule the world by force."
When we see traces of this inquisitive tendency we find ourselves on the borderland of dualism where the transition is taking place into the realm of monism.
It expresses in the main a conviction, usually left unexplained, that everything “happens naturally,” that man is really descended from monkeys, and that life has “evolved from lower stages” of itself, that dualism is wrong, and that monism is the truth.
The one admits of only one substance, matter; the other of two, matter and mind. He prefers to call the former monism rather than materialism, because the latter term often includes the idea of moral materialism, i. e. the doctrine that sensual pleasure is the end of life; a doctrine, he says, much more frequently held by princely church-men than by men of science.
Could they be reconciled, the two elements in man's modern consciousness of existence would form a monism. But this consciousness is a dualism; its elements are absolutely opposed.
As to the origin of those qualities or their causes, and of these laws, this view leaves us entirely in the dark. Elimination of the Idea of Design in the World. Monism.
A certain abstract monism, a certain emotional response to the character of oneness, as if it were a feature of the world not coordinate with its manyness, but vastly more excellent and eminent, is so prevalent in educated circles that we might almost call it a part of philosophic common sense. Of COURSE the world is one, we say. How else could it be a world at all?
Word Of The Day