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Updated: May 27, 2025
Nothing is stable under our hands. Of what avail to reduce the universe to one substance, as the monists do? We pry, we peer into that substance it fades like smoke. Forty years I have probed among the cells of the body the final mystery remains insoluble. Why?
Perhaps it would be true to say about much of the philosophical controversy in Europe, that many Jews tend to be Materialists, but all tend to be Monists, though the best in the sense of being Monotheists. The worst are in a much grosser sense materialists, and have motives very different from the dry idealism of men like Mr. Macdonald, which is probably sincere enough in its way.
Men will not live in the hopelessness which the monists would thrust upon them, they will not patiently wait while Pasteur and Koch and the other germ theorists labor to prolong the life of some other generation. They will always insist on having something to live for and to die for. I don't pretend to say what this faith will be, but it will be sufficing."
What Professor Taylor thinks they naturally must or should say is that any other sort of universe is logically impossible, and that a totality of things interrelated like the world of the monists is not an hypothesis that can be seriously thought out at all. Meanwhile no sensible pluralist ever flies or wants to fly to this dogmatic extreme.
Haeckel and other German monists assume such a condition for all substance. They are not agnostics, therefore, but gnostics; and their gnosticism very much resembles that of the higher Buddhism. According to Buddhism there is no reality save Buddha: all things else are but Karma.
This is the hypothesis of NOETIC PLURALISM, which monists consider so absurd. Since we are bound to treat it as respectfully as noetic monism, until the facts shall have tipped the beam, we find that our pragmatism, tho originally nothing but a method, has forced us to be friendly to the pluralistic view.
They find themselves in a really unknown world under really unknown gods; a world which is more mystical, or at least more mysterious. For in the Victorian age the agnostics were not really agnostics. They might be better described as reverent materialists; or at any rate monists.
For this reason, not only the anti-teleological monists meet the fate of Nihilism, whether they appear in the plebeian roughness of Büchner or in the aristocratic gentility of Strauss, but also such a brilliant advocate of teleology as Eduard von Hartmann does not know of any other final end to offer to the world and mankind than nothingness, because he did not wish to be driven from his perception of ends in the world to the only conclusion to which it leads namely: to the perception of an absolute intelligent and ethical personality that directs these ends.
A significant feature of Lahiri Mahasaya's life was his gift of KRIYA initiation to those of every faith. Not Hindus only, but Moslems and Christians were among his foremost disciples. Monists and dualists, those of all faiths or of no established faith, were impartially received and instructed by the universal guru. One of his highly advanced chelas was Abdul Gufoor Khan, a Mohammedan.
It may be called a religion, if we adopt Mr. MacTaggarts definition of religion as an emotion resting on a conviction of the harmony between ourselves and the universe at large. But it is much better not to use the word religion in connexion with it, and the Monists have no thought of finding a Monistic, as Comte founded a Positivist, church.
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