United States or Honduras ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
" The cosmogony of Chutsz was dualistic. All nature owed its existence to the Ri and Ki, the determining principle and the vital force of primordial aura that produces and modifies motion. Wang held that these two were inseparable. His teaching was therefore monistic.
Nevertheless there are possibly some radically monistic souls among you who are not content to leave the one and the many on a par.
He who builds a system of monistic naturalism upon his Darwinism, if he is logical, and not better than his system, comes into inevitable collision with concrete moral life; while he who limits his Darwinism to the realm of natural science, remains in concrete life in peace with morality.
The application of philosophical principles to the practical conditions of life, and in particular to social and political questions, can be made in the most various ways. Political "free-thinking," so called, has nothing whatever to do with the "freedom of thought" of our monistic natural religion.
To such a representation no objection can be made; rather do we recognise in it a bridge connecting the dim wonderland of religious poesy with the luminous realms of clear scientific knowledge. The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognises the divine spirit in all things.
Wells leaves any room for personal survival as is, indeed, only to be expected in accordance with their premises; for if the individual as such does not really exist, why should he persist? And from yet another monistic quarter we are oracularly assured that we shall "one day know that the end of our being is that it may be submerged without reserve in the infinite ocean of God."
This monistic confession has the greater claim to an unprejudiced consideration, in that it is shared, I am firmly convinced, by at least nine-tenths of the men of science now living; indeed, I believe, by all men of science in whom the following four conditions are realised: Sufficient acquaintance with the various departments of natural science, and in particular with the modern doctrine of evolution; Sufficient acuteness and clearness of judgment to draw, by induction and deduction, the necessary logical consequences that flow from such empirical knowledge; Sufficient moral courage to maintain the monistic knowledge, so gained, against the attacks of hostile dualistic and pluralistic systems; and Sufficient strength of mind to free himself, by sound, independent reasoning, from dominant religious prejudices, and especially from those irrational dogmas which have been firmly lodged in our minds from earliest youth as indisputable revelations.
The paragon of all monistic systems is the Vedanta philosophy of Hindostan, and the paragon of Vedantist missionaries was the late Swami Vivekananda who visited our shores some years ago. The method of Vedantism is the mystical method. You do not reason, but after going through a certain discipline YOU SEE, and having seen, you can report the truth.
He is left thin and abstract in his majesty, men preferring to carry on their personal transactions with the many less remote and abstract messengers and mediators whom the divine order provides. I shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which Fechner's speculations took was necessitated by logic. I believe it not to have been required.
The only telling criticism that can be directed against it is that which proceeds from the side of scientific monism. A thoroughgoing monist might reasonably contend that up to a certain point I have been arguing for a monistic view of the universe, in company with practically the whole scientific world, and have then given the case away by admitting a certain amount of individual freedom.
Word Of The Day