This Article first appeared in Ecotheology vol. 10, 2001.<

Just a hundred years ago, in 1899, the noted German biologist Ernst Haeckel published a book called The Riddle of the Universe¹. In it he reviewed what he believed to be the most significant scientific achievements of the nineteenth century and considered their impact on the relationship between science and religion. Amongst his other achievements it was Haeckel who, in an earlier work², introduced the term Ecology to describe the study of organisms in relation to where they live. To mark the centenary of the publication of Haeckel’s book it seems appropriate to take a look at the world through the eyes of the founder of scientific ecology and to compare this with the developments of the 20th century.

In spite of being a biologist, Haeckel believed that the key scientific development of the century was the firm establishment of the conservation laws for both matter and energy. These laws state that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed, they can only be transformed. He combined these into what he saw as a single Law of Substance. The logical consequences of this law provide the key to Haeckel’s metaphysics and theology. He believed that, if matter and energy are fundamentally conserved, then the universe must be totally self-contained and therefore all phenomena must be accorded naturalistic origins. Based on the prevalent reductionist reasoning of his time, Haeckel’s monistic view led him to conclude that the universe had to be eternal, any form of origin or beginning seemed to him to require an external, supernatural creator; an idea which he rejected. In addition, the Law of Substance implied that the universe must also be subject to ubiquitous, deterministic and mechanical causality with the further implication that genuine creativity is not possible. All there can be is change in the context of continuity, albeit in apparently progressive and evolutionary forms. Haeckel subscribed to the view held by T.H.Huxley³ that Darwinian natural selection implied that biological evolution was a completely deterministic process. 

With respect to the debate between science and religion, Haeckel claimed that, ‘one of the distinctive features of the expiring [19th] century is the increasing vehemence of the opposition between science and Christianity… In the same proportion in which the victorious progress of modern science has surpassed all the scientific achievements of earlier ages has the untenability been proved of those mystic views which would subdue reason under the yoke of an alleged revelation’. Haeckel’s main criticisms of religion in general and Christianity in particular were that it was seen to relate exclusively to humans and that it was far more concerned with the supernatural than with the natural. Given a self-contained, monistic cosmos there can be no supernatural, by definition. Even so, Haeckel was not a complete atheist. He drew a clear distinction between monism and materialism. He quotes Goethe, ‘matter cannot exist and be operative without spirit, nor spirit without matter’ and paraphrases Spinoza, ‘matter, or infinitely extended substance, and spirit, or sensitive and thinking substance, are the two fundamental attributes of the all-embracing divine essence of the world.’ Based on these ideas, Haeckel looked for a completely naturalistic religion involving a form of pantheism. In his search he looked at the qualities of truth, goodness and beauty. For Haeckel, ‘the goddess of truth dwells in the temple of nature, in the green woods, on the blue sea, and on the snowy summits of the hills – not in the gloom of the cloister … nor in the clouds of incense of the Christian churches’. But, ‘it is otherwise with the divine ideal of eternal goodness… The idea of the good … in our monistic religion coincides for the most part with the Christian idea of virtue’. With regard to beauty, Haeckel again emphasised its manifestations in nature and particularly in the world of living things. He implicitly acknowledged the role of the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century in the dawning of an appreciation of the beauties of wild nature, ‘the glories of the Alps and the crystal splendour of the glacier world … the majesty of the oceans and the lovely scenery of its coasts.

At first sight it is difficult reconcile Haeckel’s emphasis on rationality as sole source truth with his obvious leanings towards romanticism he advocates supremacy reason primarily opposition subservience any form super-natural revelation and to contemporary claims church in the conclusion of>The Riddle of the Universe he claims that ‘in a thoroughly logical mind, applying the highest principles with equal force in the entire field of the cosmos – in both organic and inorganic nature – the antithetical positions of theism and pantheism, vitalism and mechanism, approach until they touch each other’. Here he clearly seeks to transcend the dualism of reason versus Romanticism although he goes on to admit that ‘the number is always small of the thinkers who will boldly reject dualism and embrace pure monism’.>

The turn of the century, when Haeckel published his book, has to be seen as a dark period in the relations between science and religion. A.N.Wilson’s recent book God’s Funeral⁴ chronicles the vicissitudes of Western Christianity in the nineteenth century. The book takes its title from a poem by Thomas Hardy composed somewhere between 1908 and 1910 in which he writes:

And, tricked by our own early dream
 And need of solace, we grew self-deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we deem.
And what we had imagined we believed

Till, in Time’s stayless stealthy swing,
Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning.
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.⁵

There is little doubt that the ‘uncompromising rude reality’ of nineteenth century science played a significant part in God’s Funeral and even now, the best part of a hundred years later, we still live in the shadow of this period. For some, God’s Funeral meant just that; for Haeckel it implied the eclipse of theism, but clearly not the rejection of all forms of spirituality provided they were compatible with his monistic universe.  

 In the two last verses of his poem Hardy suggests the possibility of a faint glimmer of hope:

Whereof, to lift the general night
A certain few who stood aloof had said,
‘See you upon the horizon that small light –
Swelling somewhat?’ Each mourner shook his head.

And they composed a crowd of whom
Some were right good, and many neigh the best…>

At the end of the twentieth century, with its enormous expansion of scientific activity it would be quite impossible to emulate Haeckel and review its achievements within the compass of a single volume, let alone in a short article. In the final chapter of his book, Haeckel claims that, ‘only one riddle of the universe now remains – the problem of substance. What is the real character of this mighty world-wonder?’ At the close of the twentieth century, in spite of all the developments of quantum theory and relativity theory, this riddle still remains. We know more about what substance is not but the real nature of the ‘stuff of the universe’ still eludes us. Max Planck claims that, ‘Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of Nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve’⁶.

Nevertheless, there are aspects of Haeckel’s beliefs that are worth considering in the light of the scientific developments of the twentieth century. His belief in a self-contained universe, the emphasis on evolutionary processes, the unity and continuity of nature and the synthesis of matter and spirit, all find echoes in the world views that have emerged in this century.>

We no longer believe in an eternal universe even though we now know that the time frame of evolutionary history occupies thousands of millions of years compared with the hundreds of millions assumed at the turn of the century. It is now generally accepted that the universe did have an origin in a singular event, known as the Big Bang, and the time that has elapsed since this event is somewhere around fifteen thousand million years⁷. 

With regard to deterministic causality, developments in the relatively new discipline of General Systems Theory⁸ have shown that most, if not all, complex systems, from atoms, to living organisms, to galaxies, exhibit inherent properties that are not reducible to those of the parts from which they are made. While retaining Haeckel’s concept of a totally self-contained universe, such a universe can exhibit essentially autonomous states of being. The ‘stuff of the universe’ contains the potential for everything, but its laws do not determine all the properties or behaviour of actual manifestations. If the emergent phenomena are not reducible and cannot be explained in terms of the properties of parts, then it follows that they are not predictable. Coupled with systems theory are relatively recent developments in studies of complexity which have emphasised the phenomena of uncertainty, unpredictability and the potential for chaotic behaviour in complex systems. At the same time these studies have high-lighted the creative potential of such systems. It now seems that the universe is in fact inherently creative and that creative processes are focussed on the boundary between chaos and order⁹.

As Keith Ward has pointed out, a creative, emergent universe has implications for religion, ‘the one huge change which no ancient scripture foresaw is the realisation that the universe is emergent; that new things come into existence, and that in the future, not in the past, lies the key to the nature of the whole process. This is a new perception, which must transform every religious tradition. The final truth no longer lies in the past, in some primeval revelation given to great seers and passed on to our degenerate age in some secret tradition... Final truth lies in the future, though it is dimly foreseen by sages who grasp something of the goal towards which all things move.’ This realisation means that a dialogue between science and religion is not only desirable, it is necessary. Basil Willey suggests that, ‘Ever since the Renaissance the Creation had been steadily gaining in prestige as “the art of God”… The emotion of the “numinous”, formerly associated with super-nature, had become attached to Nature itself; and by the end of the eighteenth century the divinity, the sacredness of nature was, to those affected by this tradition, almost a first datum of consciousness.’¹¹ Among those affected were many of the nineteenth-century Romantics who also saw the study and contemplation of nature as a means of emancipation from religious and political dogmas. In spite of Haeckel’s strict application of rationality with regard to the material world, his approach to matters spiritual had much in common with that of the Romantics and especially with Goethe. 

The discipline of Ecology has expanded and acquired a significance that Haeckel could not have dreamed of. In his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, Haeckel wrote, ‘By ecology we mean the body of knowledge concerning the economy of nature, the total relations of the animal to both its inorganic and organic environment; including its friendly and inimical relations with those animals and plants with which it comes into contact. In a word, all the complex relationships referred to as the struggle for existence’. For Haeckel the prime objective of ecology was to throw light on evolutionary processes and to contribute towards the goal of drawing the evolutionary tree of life¹². As it has developed as a scientific discipline, ecology is now concerned with the dynamics of populations and communities, with significant applications relating to conservation and the management of living natural resources. Ecological studies have shown that living things are not simply actors on an environmental stage, as Haeckel viewed them, they also work to create the environments in which they live. Ecology originally focussed on individual species; it has grown to embrace the entire biosphere and has demonstrated that evolutionary continuity is complemented by an existential continuity reflected in the interdependence of living systems. One of the very first ecologists, John Muir, realised this when he said, ‘When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.’¹³ The concept was developed in the early part of this century by the Russian geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, who, according to Lynn Margulis, was ‘the first person in history to come to grips with the real implications of the fact that the Earth is a self-contained sphere.’¹⁴

In recent years, ecology has expanded beyond the confines of a particular scientific discipline. There is now an apparently ever growing set of Eco-disciplines including theology, philosophy, psychology, feminism, ethics and economics. These developments led Eugene Odum to add the sub-title A Bridge Between Science and Society to the latest edition of his classic textbook on ecology¹⁵. He claims that ecology can provide a bridge from a narrow concern for human existence to seeing this as derived from and set within the wider frame of the web of life on earth as described by the sciences. If we can recover something of the Romantic vision of the sacredness of nature, coupled with the study of nature as a means to liberation, so also can ecology contribute towards building the bridge from a very human centred religion to one that acknowledges the spirituality of the whole created order. This is not to claim that ecology is unique among the sciences in this pursuit¹⁶ but it is suggested that ecology speaks to us with particular relevance to the human condition in relation to how we live on the earth.

^{From an ecological perspective it is not possible to regard humanity as in any way separate from nature. Haeckel coined the term ‘anthropism’ to describe ‘that powerful and world-wide group of erroneous opinions which opposes the human organism to the whole of the rest of nature, and represents it to be the preordained end of organic creation, an entity essentially distinct from it, a godlike being’. It is only in our minds that we create this divide. We now understand that mind is an emergent phenomenon and part of the continuum of nature. We now realise that the human species is totally embedded in the natural ecology of the earth. Humans are just one of somewhere between 10 and 30 million species of living things that currently inhabit the earth. As a species we participate in the web of life on the same terms as other creatures. We emerged through the same evolutionary processes as other creatures and are intimately involved in the history of the earth, which is part of the history of the solar system, which is part of the history of the cosmos. From this perspective, the only thing that marks humans out as in any way special is that, as far as we know, we are the only creatures that possess a sufficient degree of self-reflective consciousness to be aware of all this. The realisation of the continuity of nature, as stressed by Haeckel and reinforced by scientific developments in the twentieth century clearly has implications for theology and religion. The almost total focus on humanity in traditional Christianity can no longer be maintained. Lynn White’s criticism that ‘Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen’17, has to be addressed.}

^{There is an ecological version of Haeckel’s Law of Substance which, as presented by Odum, says ‘matter circulates, energy dissipates’. The same idea is expressed in more emotive terms by John Muir, ‘Plants, animals and stars are all kept in place, bridled along appointed ways, with one another, and through the midst of one another – killing and being killed, eating and being eaten, in harmonious proportions and quantities.’18 In the same vein, Brian Swimme, based on a disturbing experience in the Brazilian rainforest, writes, ‘I who have been so terrified of becoming food for the forest come to see a simple truth - that all existence concerns eating and being eaten, and that this applies on more than the simplistic, literal level.’19 Ecology is centred on the cycles of life and death and how these are manifest and maintained in a prodigious diversity of forms virtually everywhere on the face of the earth. As Goethe stated, ‘Life is her [nature’s] most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life.’20 Ursula Goodenough provides a very clear account of the evolutionary significance of death; as she points out, ‘our sentient brains are uniquely capable of experiencing deep regret and sorrow and fear at the prospect of our own death, yet it is the invention of death … that made possible the existence of our brains.’21}>

^{There is material here for theological reflection. At the centre of the Christian faith there is a life and a death coupled with a sacramental meal. Teilhard de Chardin filled his chalice with ‘all the sap which is to be pressed out this day from all the earth’s fruits.’22 John Muir filled his with the sap of his beloved Sequoia trees23. The farmer and poet, Wendell Berry writes that, ‘To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation. When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skilfully, reverently, it is a sacrament. When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration. In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.’24 These three writers clearly imply that we need to establish, in the words of Teilhard de Chardin, ‘a communion with God through earth,’25 and they also believe that this can be done from within the Christian tradition.}<

^{Scientific ecology can contribute to this process in a number of ways. Firstly, the discipline of ecology is also an excellent antidote for any tendency towards hubris. In my career as a field ecologist and in my progression of fields of study from a stream across the bottom of my boyhood garden, to Windermere, to the North Atlantic Ocean, I always realised that I was faced with systems that I would never fully understand. I was constantly groping in the dark, devising methods to answer questions in the knowledge that the results would probably contribute to the answers of quite different questions.}

^{Secondly, it is necessary to accept the universality and significance of evolutionary processes. Teilhard de Chardin answers his own question, ‘Is evolution a theory, a system or a hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true. Evolution is a light illuminating all facts, a curve that all lines must follow.’26 The key to the development of sound evolutionary theories was the proposal, first put forward by James Hutton in 1788 in the context of geology27, that the processes that can be observed and studied today are the same as those which have been at work throughout the history of the Earth. This makes it possible, through studies of contemporary phenomena coupled with the historical record of rock strata and the existence of fossil organisms, to infer at least something of the nature of that history. Thus, scientific ecology describes the stage on which terrestrial evolution takes place and it has contributed significantly to our knowledge of the workings of evolutionary processes. If evolutionary theory stresses the historical continuity of nature, scientific ecology has demonstrated the existential continuity of nature, at least as far as terrestrial systems are concerned. The vision of continuity in nature has been a remarkably consistent insight in the Christian mystical tradition. Hildegard von Bingen, for example, expressed it in the language of her time: ‘O Holy Spirit,/ You are the mighty way in which every/ thing that is in the heavens,/ on the earth, and under the earth,/ is penetrated with connectedness,/ is penetrated with relatedness.’28}

^{Thirdly, scientific ecology can contribute towards dealing with some of our misconceptions about the rest of the natural world. Chief among these is the judgmental view of a fallen world with nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. In the same poem Tennyson asks, ‘Are God and Nature then at strife,/ That Nature lends such evil dreams?/  So careful of the type she seems,/ So careless of the single life.’29 Predation, parasitism and plague, earthquake, fire, storm and flood are frequently regarded as natural evils. This perception raises the question of whether the universe as it is can be the creation of a loving God. Annie Dillard sees this as a failure of our imagination, ‘Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birthright, and in intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failure of all life. This is our heritage, the piebald landscape of time. We walk around; we see a shred of the infinite possible combinations of an infinite variety of forms. Anything can happen; any pattern of speckles may appear in a world ceaselessly bawling with newness... Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator's exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from that same free growth, that intricate scramble and twine up and down the conditions of time.’30 This may not be the language of science but it is the essential language of ecology. Humans have tried to carve out a niche in the natural world within which we can survive and we would like the rest of nature to conform to our view of how the world should be. We prefer nature to be tame, or at least tameable, but the rest of the natural world is wild and Annie Dillard is saying that this is the way it has to be in order to survive and be creative. Henry David Thoreau believed that, ‘in Wildness is the preservation of the World.’31}

^{Finally, and according to Haeckel, ‘The astonishment with which we gaze upon the starry heavens and the microscopic life in a drop of water, the awe with which we trace the marvellous working of energy in the motion of matter, the reverence with which we grasp the universal dominance of the law of substance throughout the universe – all these are part of our emotional life, falling under the heading of “natural religion”… The modern man needs no special church, no narrow, enclosed portion of space. For through the length and breadth of free nature, wherever he turns his gaze, to the whole universe or to any single part of it, he finds, indeed, the grim “struggle for life,” but by its side are ever “the good, the true and the beautiful”; his church is commensurate with the whole of glorious nature.’ Sallie McFague would not go as far as Haeckel but she does claim that ‘“Amazing revelations” come through the earth, not above it or in spite of it. An incarnational theology encourages us to dare to love nature – all the different bodies, both human and those of other lifeforms, on our earth – to find them valuable and wonderful in themselves, for themselves.’32 She also claims that ‘we cannot love what we do not know’. Scientific ecology is continually adding to our knowledge of the natural world and increasing our awareness of the marvel and the mystery by showing us how, on earth, everything fits together into a harmonious, ever changing, self-organising and self-creating system. McFague’s incarnational theology echoes those of de Chardin, Muir and Berry with their emphasis on the physical manifestations of nature and their inclusiveness of the whole of nature. In order to achieve a full awareness of what this means we have to cultivate an openness to the rest of nature as it is in its own right. It can be claimed that Ernst Haeckel, as well as founding the science of Ecology; in his critique of ‘anthropism’ and in advocating ‘natural religion’, he was well ahead of his time in providing pointers towards the development of a realistic theology of nature.} 

 ^References

  <sup>Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, Tr. Joseph McCabe (New York: 2.  Prometheus Books, 1992).
3.  Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (Jena: 1866).
4.  T.H.Huxley, The Genealogy of Animals (http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE2/GeNan.html)
5.  A.N.Wilson, God’s Funeral (London: John Murray, 1999).
6.  Thomas Hardy, The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1974).
7.  John Barrow & Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: OUP, 1986), p. 123.
8.  Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996).
9.  See, for example, Lee Smolin. The Life of the Cosmos (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997)
10. Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order (Oxford: OUP, 1993)
11. Keith Ward, A Vision to Pursue  (London: SCM Press, 1991), pp. 148-149.
12. Basil Willey, On Wordsworth and the Locke Tradition. In M.H. Abrams (Ed.), English Romantic Poets (Oxford: OUP, 1975), p. 121.
13. Steven Rose. Lifelines (London, The Penguin Press, 1997), p. 184.
14. Terry Gifford (Ed.), John Muir, the Eight Wilderness Discovery Books (London: Baton Wicks, 1996), p. 248.
15. Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere, Tr. David Langmuir (New York: Copernicus, 1998), p. 15.
16. Eugene Odum, Ecology, a Bridge between Science and Society (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates, 1997).
17. See, for example, Christopher Southgate et al, God, Humanity and the Cosmos (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999).
18. Lynn White, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis (Science, 155: 1203-1207. March, 1967). Terry Gifford, op cit, pp. 874-875.
19. Brian Swimme, Fangs and Feasts (Interchange, Summer 1998).
20. Johann Wolfgang  von Goethe, Passages selected by T.H. Huxley for the inaugural number of 'Nature', quoted in Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature (London: Rider, 1991), p. 53.
21. Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (New York: OUP, 1998), p. 149.
22. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe (London: Collins, 1965), p. 19.
23. Terry Gifford (Ed.), John Muir, His Life and Letters and Other Writings (London: Baton Wicks, 1996), pp. 139-141.
24. Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), p. 281.
25. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in Time of War (London: Collins, 1968).
26. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, Fount, 1977), p. 241.
27. James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1: 209-305. 1788).
28. Gabriel Uhlein, Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Co. 1983) p. 41. 
29. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam (http://library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/rp/authors/tennyson.html).
30. Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1988), pp. 144-146.
31. Henry David Thoreau, Walking (http://www.glue.umd.edu/~pdouglas/walking.html).
32. Sallie McFague, Super, Natural Christians (Minneapolis: Fortress press, 1997) p. 31.</sup>

^{Ernst Haeckel
From The Riddle of the Universe, 1901.}

^{The personal anthropism of God has become so natural to the majority of believers that they experience no shock when they find God personified in human form in pictures and statues, and in the varied images of the poet, in which God takes human form - that is, is changed into a vertebrate. In some myths, even, God takes the form of other mammals (an ape, lion, bull, etc.), and more rarely of a bird (eagle, dove, or stork), or of some lower vertebrate (serpent, crocodile, dragon, etc.).}

In the higher and more abstract forms of religion this idea of bodily appearance is entirely abandoned, and God is adored as a ‘pure spirit’ without a body. ‘God is a spirit, and they who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.’ Nevertheless, the psychic activity of this ‘pure spirit’ remains just the same as that of the anthropomorphic God. In reality, even this immaterial spirit is not conceived to be incorporeal, but merely invisible, gaseous. We thus arrive at the paradoxical conception of God as a gaseous vertebrate!

Pantheism teaches that God and the world are one. The idea of God is identical with that of nature or substance. This pantheistic view is sharply opposed in principle to all possible forms of theism, although there have been many attempts made from both sides to bridge over the deep chasm that separates the two. There is always this fundamental contradiction between them, that in theism God is opposed to nature as an extramundane being, as creating and sustaining the world, and acting upon it from without, while in pantheism God, as an intra-mundane being, is everywhere identical with nature itself, and is operative within the world as ‘force’ or ‘energy’. The latter view alone is compatible with our supreme law - the law of substance. It follows necessarily that pantheism is the world-system of the modern scientist. There are, it is true, still a few men of science who context this, and think it possible to reconcile the old theistic theory of human nature with the pantheistic truth of the law of substance. All these efforts rest on confusion or sophistry - when they are honest.

As pantheism is a result of an advanced conception of nature in the civilized mind, it is naturally much younger than theism, the crudest forms of which are found in great variety in the uncivilized races of ten thousand years ago. We do, indeed, find the germs of pantheism in different religions at the very dawn of philosophy in the earliest civilized peoples (in India, Egypt, China, and Japan), several thousand years before the time of Christ; still, we do not meet a definite philosophical expression of it until the hylozoism of the Ionic philosophers, in the first half of the sixth century before Christ. All the great thinkers of this flourishing period of Hellenic thought are surpassed by the famous Anaximander, of Miletus, who conceived the essential unity of the infinite universe more profoundly and more clearly than his master, Thales, or his pupil, Anaximenes. Not only the great thought of the original unity of the cosmos and the development of all phenomena out of the all-pervading primitive matter found expression in Anaximander, but he even enunciated the bold idea of countless worlds in a periodic alternation of birth and death.

Many other great philosophers of classical antiquity, especially Democritus, Heraclitus, and Empedocles, had, in the same or an analogous sense, a profound conception of this unity of nature and God, of body and spirit, which has obtained its highest expression in the law of substance of our modern monism. The famous Roman poet and philosopher, Lucretius Carus, has presented it in a highly poetic form in his poem De Rerum Natura.

However, this true pantheistic monism was soon entirely displaced by the mystic dualism of Plato, and especially by the powerful influence which the idealistic philosophy obtained by its blending with Christian dogmas. When the papacy attained to its spiritual despotism over the world, pantheism was hopelessly crushed; Giordano Bruno, its most gifted defender, was burned alive by the ‘Vicar of Christ’ in the Campo dei Fiori at Rome on February 17, 1600.

It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that Pantheism was exhibited in its purest form by the great Baruch Spinoza; he gave for the totality of things a definition of substance in which God and the world are inseparably united. The clearness, confidence, and consistency of Spinoza’s monistic system are the more remarkable when we remember that this gifted thinker of two hundred and fifty years ago was without the support of all those sound empirical bases which have been obtained in the second half of the nineteenth century. The propagation of his views, especially in Germany, is due, above all, to the immortal works of our greatest poet and thinker - Wolfgang Goethe. His splendid God and the World, Prometheus, Faust, etc., embody the great thoughts of pantheism in the most perfect poetic creations.

Atheism affirms that there are no gods or goddesses, assuming that god means a personal, extramundane entity. This ‘godless world-system’ substantially agrees with the monism or pantheism of the modern scientist; it is only another expression for it, emphasizing its negative aspect, the non-existence of any supernatural deity. In this sense Schopenhauer justly remarks: Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism. The truth of pantheism lies in its destruction of the dualist antithesis of God and the world, in its recognition that the world exists in virtue of its own inherent forces.

The maxim of the pantheist, ‘God and the world are one,’ is merely a polite way of giving the Lord God his conge. During the whole of the Middle Ages, under the bloody despotism of the popes, atheism was persecuted with fire and sword as a most pernicious system. As the ‘godless’ man is plainly identified with the ‘wicked’ in the Gospel, and is threatened - simply on account of his want of faith - with the eternal fires of hell, it was very natural that every good Christian should be anxious to avoid the suspicion of atheism. Unfortunately, the idea still prevails very widely. The atheistic scientist who devotes his strength and his life to the search for the truth, is freely credited with all that is evil; the theistic church-goer, who thoughtlessly follows the empty ceremonies of Catholic worship, is at once assumed to be a good citizen, even if there be no meaning whatever in his faith and his morality be deplorable.

This error will only be destroyed when, in the twentieth century, the prevalent superstition gives place to rational knowledge and to a monistic conception of the unity of God and the world.