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Updated: April 30, 2025
Only monistic dogmatism can say of any of its hypotheses, 'It is either that or nothing; take it or leave it just as it stands. The type of monism prevalent at Oxford has kept this steep and brittle attitude, partly through the proverbial academic preference for thin and elegant logical solutions, partly from a mistaken notion that the only solidly grounded basis for religion was along those lines.
When one once grasps the beauty and splendor of the monistic idea, how mean and small become all those little, fearsome "schemes of salvation," whereby men were to be separated and impassable gulfs fixed between them. Those who fix gulfs here and now are hotly intent on showing that God will fix gulfs hereafter; thus we see how man is continually creating God in his own image.
And how can we say that any part ought not to be when every part is essential? From the monistic view of reality, as set forth by Mr Bradley, there is no direct route to the distinction between good and evil.
On the other hand, "homotheism," the anthropomorphic representation of God, degrades this loftiest cosmic idea to that of a "gaseous vertebrate." Of the various systems of pantheism which for long have given expression more or less clearly to the monistic conception of God, the most perfect is certainly that of Spinoza.
Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our british and american universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised. I have an impression that ever since T.H. Green's time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at Oxford.
All modesty has vanished, monistic doctrines are presented as absolute truth, every divergent opinion is contemptuously branded as heretical; in short, the book reveals a Darwinian orthodoxy of the purest type, with all the signs of blind bigotry and odious intolerance which the author imagines he discovers in his Christian adversaries.
The body dissolves into its constituent elements and serves in its turn to build up other organisms: but as a human body it all turns to dust nor 'leaves a wrack behind'. Thus Darwinism was made the basis first for a materialistic, and then for a monistic, view of the world, and hence came to be rigorously opposed to every form of Theism.
Archdeacon Farrar, quoting Huxley, said, "I would rather be Darwin and be right than be Premier of England we have had and will have many Premiers, but the world will never have another Darwin." Nothing seems to me better adapted than this monistic perspective to give us the proper standard and the broad outlook which we need in the solution of the vast enigmas that surround us.
If we give to the monistic subspecies the name of philosophy of the absolute, we may give that of radical empiricism to its pluralistic rival, and it may be well to distinguish them occasionally later by these names. As a convenient way of entering into the study of their differences, I may refer to a recent article by Professor Jacks of Manchester College.
Only in degree, through a higher stage of cultivation, does the consciousness of man differ from that of the more perfect lower animals, and the same is true of all other activities of the human soul. By these and other results of comparative physiology our whole psychology is placed on a new and firm monistic basis.
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