Monism as Connecting Religion and Science: A Man of Science — John Shaqi
Monism as Connecting Religion and Science: A Man of ScienceHaeckel, Ernst
Religion
Monism as Connecting Religion and Science: A Man of Science
Haeckel, Ernst
Monism; Religion and science
The first task of a truly scientific psychology will therefore be, not,
as hitherto, idle speculation about an independent immaterial
soul-existence and its puzzling temporary connection with the animal
body, but rather the comparative investigation of the organs of the soul
and the experimental examination of their psychical functions. For
scientific psychology is a part of physiology, the doctrine of the
functions and the life-activities of organisms. The psychology and
psychiatry of the future, like the physiology and pathology of to-day,
must take the form of a cellular study, and in the first instance
investigate the soul-functions of the cells. Max Verworn, in his fine
_Psycho-physiological Protistastudies_, has lately shown us what
important disclosures such a cellular psychology can make, even in
dealing with the lowest grades of organic life, in the single-celled
Protista (especially Rhizopoda and Infusoria).
These same main divisions of soul-activity, which are to be met with in
the single-celled organism,--the phenomena of irritability, sensation,
and motion,--can be shown to exist in all multicellular organisms as
functions of the cells of which their bodies are composed. In the lowest
Metazoa, the invertebrate sponges and polyps, there are, just as in
plants, no special soul-organs developed, and all the cells of the body
participate more or less in the "soul-life." It is only in the higher
animals that the soul-life is found to be localised and connected with
special organs. As a consequence of division of labour, there have here
been developed various sense-organs as organs of specific sensibility,
muscles as organs of motion and volition, nerve-centres or ganglia as
central co-ordinating and regulating organs. In the most highly developed
families of the animal kingdom, these last come more and more into the
foreground as independent soul-organs. In correspondence with the
extraordinarily complicated structure of their central nervous system
(the brain with its wonderful complex of ganglion-cells and
nerve-fibres), the many-sided activity of such animals attains a
wonderful degree of development.
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