[Footnote 18: _Monistic Ethic_. All Ethic, the theoretical as well as the practical doctrine of morals, as a "science of law" (_Normwissenschaft_), stands in immediate connection with the view that is taken of the world (_Weltanschauung_), and consequently with religion. This position I regard as exceedingly important, and have recently upheld in a paper on "Ethik und Weltanschauung," in opposition to the "Society for Ethical Culture" lately founded in Berlin, which would teach and promote ethics without reference to any view of the world or to religion. (Compare the new weekly journal, _Die Zukunft_, edited by Maximilian Harden, Berlin, 1892, Nos. V.-VII.). Just as I take the monistic to be the only rational basis for all science, I claim the same also for ethics. On this subject compare especially the ethical writings of Herbert Spencer and those of B. von Carneri--_Sittlichkeit und Darwinismus_ (1871); _Entwickelung und Glückseligkeit_ (1886); and more particularly, the latest of all, _Der moderne Mensch_ (Bonn, 1891); further, Wilhelm Streeker, _Welt und Menschheit_ (Leipsic, 1892); Harald Höffding, _Die Grundlage der humanen Ethik_ (Bonn, 1880); and the recent large work of Wilhelm Wundt, _Ethik, eine Untersuchung der Thatsachen und Gesetze des sittlichen Lebens_ (Stuttgart, 2nd ed., 1892).] [Footnote 19: _Homotheism_. Under the term homotheism (or anthropomorphism) we include all the various forms of religious belief which ascribe to a personal God purely human characteristics. However variously these anthropomorphic ideas may have shaped themselves in dualistic and pluralistic religions, all in common retain the unworthy conception that God (_Theos_) and man (_homo_) are organised similarly and according to the same type (homotype). In the region of poetry such personifications are both pleasing and legitimate. In the region of science they are quite inadmissible; they are doubly objectionable now that we know that only in late Tertiary times was man developed from pithecoid mammals. Every religious dogma which represents God as a "spirit" in human form, degrades Him to a "gaseous vertebrate" (_General Morphology_, 1866; Chap, xxx., God in Nature). The expression "homotheism" is ambiguous and etymologically objectionable, but more practical than the cumbersome word "Anthropotheism."]