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Updated: May 22, 2025
On the one hand they stretch the mathematical-mechanical view as far as possible from below upwards, and even attempt to explain the activities of life and consciousness as the results of complex reflex mechanisms. And on the other hand they bring down will soul and instincts into the lowest stages of existence, and become quite animistic.
But to any one who has experience of the most characteristic element in religion, it will be obvious that there must be a vague but deep-rooted antipathy between religion and the mathematical-mechanical conception of things. Evidence of the truth of this is to be found in the instinctive perceptions and valuations which mark even the naïve expressions of the religious consciousness.
But naturalism becomes fundamentally different when it ceases to remain at the level of naïve or fancifully conceived ideas of “nature” and “natural occurrences,” when, instead of poetry or religious sentiments, it incorporates something else, namely, exact natural science and the idea of a mathematical-mechanical calculability in the whole system of nature. “Nature” and “happening naturally”, as used by the naïve intelligence, are half animistic ideas and modes of expression, which import into nature, or leave in it, life and soul, impulse, and a kind of will.
From Descartes to Leibnitz, Kant, and Fries, down to the historian of materialism itself, F. A. Lange, it has been an axiom of the idealistic philosophy, expressed now in dogmatic, now in critical form, that the mathematical-mechanical outlook and causal interpretation of things, not excluding a naturalistic psychology, is thoroughly justifiable as a method of arranging scientifically the phenomena accessible to us and of penetrating more deeply towards an understanding of these.
It is more specially sensitive to the strange and antagonistic tendency of naturalism shown even in that marvellous and terrifying mathematical-mechanical system of the great heavenly bodies, in this clock of the universe which, in obedience to clear and inviolable laws, carries on its soundless play from everlasting to everlasting, needing no pendulum and no pedestal, without any stoppage and without room for dependence on anything outside of itself, apparently entirely godless, but absolutely reason and God enough for itself.
The book—the “Système de la Nature”—“seemed to us so grey, so Cimmerian, so deathlike that it was with difficulty we could endure its presence.” And in a work with remarkable title and contents, “Die Farbenlehre,” Goethe has summed up his antagonism to the “Mathematicians,” and to their chief, Newton, the discoverer and founder of the new mathematical-mechanical view of nature.
It may, for instance, be possible that the mathematical-mechanical interpretation of things, even if it be sufficient within its own domain, does not take away from nature the characters which religion seeks and requires in it, namely, purpose, dependence and mystery.
Religion comes into contact with naturalism and demands to be reconciled with it, not merely at its periphery, but at its very core, namely, with its characteristic ideal of a mathematical-mechanical interpretation of the whole world.
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