Life and Matter: A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe"Lodge, Oliver, Sir
Religion
Life and Matter: A Criticism of Professor Haeckel's "Riddle of the Universe"
Lodge, Oliver, Sir
Haeckel, Ernst, 1834-1919. Welträthsel; Life -- Origin; Monism; Philosophy and religion
The connection between soul and body, or more generally between
spiritual and material, has been illustrated by the connection between
the meaning of a sentence and the written or spoken word conveying that
meaning. The writing or the speaking may be regarded as an incarnation
of the meaning, a mode of stating or exhibiting its essence. As
delivered, the sentence must have time relations; it has a beginning,
middle, and end; it may be repeated, and the same general meaning may
be expressed in other words; but the intrinsic meaning of the sentence
itself need have no time relations, it may be true _always_, it may
exist as an eternal "now," though it may be perceived and expressed by
humanity with varying clearness from time to time.
The soul of a thing is its underlying permanent reality—that which
gives it its meaning and confers upon it its attributes. The body is an
instrument or mechanism for the manifestation or sensible presentation
of what else would be imperceptible. It is useless to ask whether a
soul is immortal—a soul is always immortal "where a soul can be
discerned": the question to ask concerning any given object is whether
it has a soul or meaning or personal underlying reality at all.
Those who think that reality is limited to its terrestrial
manifestation doubtless have a philosophy of their own, to which they
are entitled and to which at any rate they are welcome; but if they set
up to teach others that monism signifies a limitation of mind to the
potentialities of matter as at present known; if they teach a pantheism
which identifies God with nature in this narrow sense; if they hold
that mind and what they call matter are so intimately connected that no
_transcendence_ is possible; that, without the cerebral hemispheres,
consciousness and intelligence and emotion and love, and all the higher
attributes towards which humanity is slowly advancing, would cease to
be; that the term "soul" signifies "a sum of plasma-movements in the
ganglion cells"; and that the term "God" is limited to the operation of
a known evolutionary process, and can be represented as "the infinite
sum of all natural forces, the sum of all atomic forces and all ether
vibrations," to quote Professor Haeckel (_Confession of Faith_, p. 78);
then such philosophers must be content with an audience of uneducated
persons, or, if writing as men of science, must hold themselves liable
to be opposed by other men of science, who are able, at any rate in
their own judgment, to take a wider survey of existence, and to
perceive possibilities to which the said narrow and over-definite
philosophers were blind.
_Life and Guidance._
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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