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Updated: April 30, 2025
It is true that the opponents of evolution love to misrepresent the Monistic philosophy based on it as "Materialism," and confuse the philosophic tendency of this name with a wholly unconnected and despicable moral materialism. Strictly speaking, it would be just as proper to call our system Spiritualism as Materialism.
Yet in the works of these very philosophers who are inclined to a mechanical and "monistic" view of the world, we find that they directly avoid the question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination.
Neither body nor mind seems less essential to our existence than the other; not only do we feel this as regards our own existence, but we feel it also as pervading the whole world of life; everywhere we see body and mind working together towards results that must be ascribed equally to both; but they are two, not one; if, then, we are to have our monistic conception, it would seem as though one of these must yield to the other; which, therefore, is it to be?
Abridgments like this of other men's opinions are very unsatisfactory, they always work injustice; but in this case those of you who are familiar with the literature will see immediately what I have in mind; and to the others, if there be any here, it will suffice to say that what I am trying so pedantically to point out is only the fact that monistic idealists after Kant have invariably sought relief from the supposed contradictions of our world of sense by looking forward toward an ens rationis conceived as its integration or logical completion, while he looked backward toward non-rational dinge an sich conceived as its cause.
We conceive their diversity, however; and by that fact the whole lot of them form what is known in logic as 'a universe of discourse. To form a universe of discourse argues, as this example shows, no further kind of connexion. The importance attached by certain monistic writers to the fact that any chaos may become a universe by merely being named, is to me incomprehensible."
If the perception of the aesthetic significance of our monistic nature-religion, as well as of its ethical value, has hitherto so little pervaded the educated classes, this is due chiefly to the defects of our school training.
Such a fine expression of personal faith warms the heart of the hearer. But how much does it clear his philosophic head? Does the writer consistently favor the monistic, or the pluralistic, interpretation of the world's poem? Obviously here the writer faces forward into the particulars of experience, which he interprets in a pluralistic-melioristic way. But he believes himself to face backward.
The world and the all-thinker thus compenetrate and soak each other up without residuum. They are but two names for the same identical material, considered now from the subjective, and now from the objective point of view gedanke and gedachtes, as we would say if we were Germans. We philosophers naturally form part of the material, on the monistic scheme.
In the last analysis of the monistic philosophy, there is but one substance and one quality in the universe. In the widest view of that philosophy, gold and oxygen and mercury and diamonds are one substance, and, if you please, one quality. But such refinements of analysis as this are for the transcendental philosopher, and not for the scientist.
It is often made a reproach against our Monism that it altogether denies immortality; this, however, is erroneous. Rather do we hold it, in a strictly scientific sense, as an indispensable fundamental conception of our monistic philosophy of nature.
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