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Updated: May 27, 2025
Some monists are in the habit of speaking of the one Being to which they refer phenomena of all sorts as the "Absolute." The word is a vague one, and means very different things in different philosophies. It has been somewhat broadly defined as "the ultimate principle of explanation of the universe."
Many other great philosophers took and take the other view: the Lucretian pagans, the Moslem fatalists, the modern monists and determinists, all roughly confine themselves to saying that God gave man a law. The mediaeval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter.
Yet after all, there is a class of Buddhist concepts which can be fitted, or very nearly fitted, into Western categories. The higher Buddhism is a kind of Monism; and it includes doctrines that accord, in the most surprising manner, with the scientific theories of the German and the English monists.
But it is peculiar that, although entirely dependent in his reasoning on that monistic view of the world, and that Darwinian view of nature, he defines his ethical developments and his reflections on the organizations of human life in a relative independence, which again separates him as moralist from these before-mentioned monists and materialists, and rather ranks him, as we have seen in Chap.
Here I take the bull by the horns, and in spite of the whole crew of rationalists and monists, of whatever brand they be, I ask WHY NOT? Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest, the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete. Why should we not take them at their face-value?
So much for the personal confession by which you have allowed me to introduce the subject. Let us now consider it more objectively. The fundamental difficulty I have found is the number of contradictions which idealistic monists seem to disregard.
Of course the Darwinians who spoke thus, did not intend to injure the moral principle, but only to purify and reform it; and therefore we shall have to speak of them in the following section. The Materialists and Monists. Darwin and the English Utilitarians. Gustav Jäger. Among those who ascribe to Darwinism a morally reforming influence, we have to mention in the first place the materialists.
Hereby there always results something quite different from that which they intended and wished. Sublime laws govern above us, between us, full of mystery in the midst of life; one of them in reference to guilt, punishment of guilt, is called nemesis. But the faith of the monists has no such need. Why not? That needs more sufficient demonstration." Certainly it needs more sufficient demonstration.
Whether we call ourselves monists or dualists, idealists or realists, Lockians or Kantians, must we not live and deal with the things about us in much the same way?
The monists themselves writhe like worms on the hook to escape pluralistic or at least dualistic language, but they cannot escape it.
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