His
adversaries commonly stigmatize his theory as materialism, but this is a
mistake. Like Spinoza he recognizes matter and mind, body and thought,
as
[188] two inseparable sides of ultimate reality, which he calls God; in
fact, he identifies his philosophy with that of Spinoza. And he
logically proceeds to conceive material atoms as thinking. His idea of
the physical world is based on the old mechanical conception of matter,
which in recent years has been discredited. But Haeckel's Monism, [1] as
he called his doctrine, has lately been reshaped and in its new form
promises to exercise wide influence on thoughtful people in Germany. I
will return later to this Monistic movement.
It had been a fundamental principle of Comte that human actions and
human history are as strictly subject as nature is, to the law of
causation. Two psychological works appeared in England in 1855 (Bain's
Senses and Intellect and Spencer's Principles of Psychology), which
taught that our volitions are completely determined, being the
inevitable consequences of chains of causes and effects. But a far
deeper impression was produced two years later by the first volume of
Buckle's History of Civilization in England (a work of much less
permanent value), which attempted to apply this principle to history.
Men act in consequence of motives; their motives are the results of
preceding facts; so that "if we were acquainted with the whole of the
antecedents
[189] and with all the laws of their movements, we could with unerring
certainty predict the whole of their immediate results.
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