by material conditions; under the second we
group such systems as give to life an independent creative power.

I

NATURALISTIC TENDENCY

1. Naturalism has usually taken three forms, an idyllic or poetic, a
philosophic, and a scientific, of which Rousseau, Feuerbach, and Haeckel
may be chosen as representatives.

(1) According to Rousseau, man is really a part of nature, {101} and only
as he conforms to her laws and finds his satisfaction in what she gives
can he be truly happy. Nature is the mother of us all, and only as we
allow her spirit to pervade and nourish our being do we really live. The
watchword, 'back to nature' may be said to have given the first impulse
to the later call of the 'simple life,' which has arisen as a protest
against the luxury, ostentation, and artificiality of modern times.

(2) The philosophical form of naturalism, as expounded by Feuerbach,
inveighs against an idealistic interpretation of life. The author of
_The Essence of Christianity_ started as a disciple of Hegel, but soon
reversed the Hegelian principle, and pronounced the spiritual world to be
a fiction of the mind. Man belongs essentially to the earth, and is
governed by his senses. Self-interest is his only motive, and egoism his
sole law of life. It was only what might be expected, that the ultimate
consequences of this philosophy of the senses should be drawn by a
disciple of Feuerbach, Max Stirner,[1] in whose work, _The Individual and
His Property_, the virtues of egoism are extolled, and contempt is poured
upon all disinterestedness and altruism.

(3) The latest form of naturalism is the scientific or monistic, as
represented by Haeckel. It may be described as scientific in so far as
its author professes to deduce the moral life from biological principles.
In the chapter[2] devoted to Ethics in his work, _The Riddle of the
Universe_, his pronouncements upon morality are not scientifically
derived, but simply dogmatically assumed. The underlying principle of
monism is that the universe is a unity in which no distinction exists
between the material and the spiritual. In this world as we know it
there reigns only one kind of law, the invariable law of nature. The
so-called spiritual life of man is not an independent realm having its
own rights and aims; it belongs wholly to nature. The moral world is a
province of the physical, and the key to all the departments of reality
is to be found in science {102} alon