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Updated: June 9, 2025
Darwin is not a Monist, for in admitting creation, he admits a dualism as between God and the world. Neither is he a Materialist, inasmuch as he assumes a supernatural origin for the infinitesimal modicum of life and intelligence in the primordial animalcule, from which without divine purpose or agency, all living things in the whole history of our earth have descended.
The Stoic was nominally a pantheist, but he seems to have oscillated between a spiritual and a materialist explanation of the universal being. The monist system that prepared the soil for monophysitism and constantly fostered its growth was Neo-Platonism.
For the monist, all is on one level of being. He may by constant effort keep that level high. But gravity will act. We are more prone to degrade God to our level, than to rise to His. The same truth can be put in abstracto. Unless the relation between God and the world be preserved as a true relation, the higher term will sooner or later fall to the level of the lower, and be lost in it.
If to believe this is to be a monist, then science is monistic; it accepts the transformation or metamorphosis of the lower into the higher from the bottom of creation to the top, and without any break of the causal sequence. There has been no miracle, except in the sense that all life is a miracle.
But this is not to admit that we are justified in explaining specific concrete psychological phenomena, with which we are dealing, in philosophical terms. We must explain them in terms of the phenomena themselves. As a monist and pan-psychist, for example, I may believe that conscious processes can be reduced to, or be identified with the ultimate nature of matter, the thing-in-itself.
More than ever before he felt the burden and the mystery of organic life. To consider, furthermore, that all those who have lived and died are still sentient! What a staggering, monstrous conception! Nor is this all. According to the monist conception there is no line at which we can say here the animal stops and the soul of man begins, so that ants and apes are claimants for immortality.
Thus mind is purely subjective, the brain is only mediately objective. It is because the mental and the material are so intimately related that the monist believes them to be connected as are the lungs and respiration, the hand and grasping, or the eye and the reception of visual impressions from without.
All that I need for common use is a simple rule based on a few fundamental thoughts to give me a course upon the wayward ocean, and though it be full of error as the Almagest, yet it shall surpass the thumb-rules of Philistia. It must be a doctrine which allows imagination her right and durable career, and therefore not be monist.
In their doubt of miracles there was a faith in a fixed and godless fate; a deep and sincere faith in the incurable routine of the cosmos. The doubts of the agnostic were only the dogmas of the monist. Of the fact and evidence of the supernatural I will speak afterwards.
Whether he be a realist or an idealist, a dualist or a monist, he should, as chemist or physicist, treat the same sort of facts in the same sort of a way. His path appears to be laid out for him, and he can do work the value of which is undisputed by traveling quietly along it, and without stopping to consider consciously what kind of a path it is.
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