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." Thus history is
an unbroken chain of causes and effects. Chance is excluded; it is a
mere name for the defects of our knowledge. Mysterious and providential
interference is excluded. Buckle maintained God's existence, but
eliminated him from history; and his book dealt a resounding blow at the
theory that human actions are not submitted to the law of universal
causation.

The science of anthropology has in recent years aroused wide interest.
Inquiries into the condition of early man have shown (independently of
Darwinism) that there is nothing to be said for the view that he fell
from a higher to a lower state; the evidence points to a slow rise from
mere animality. The origin of religious beliefs has been investigated,
with results disquieting for orthodoxy. The researches of students of
anthropology and comparative religion--such as Tylor, Robertson Smith,
and Frazer--have gone to show that mysterious ideas and dogma and rites
which were held to be peculiar to the Christian revelation are derived
from the crude ideas of primitive religions. That the mystery of the
Eucharist comes from the common savage rite of eating a dead god,

[190] that the death and resurrection of a god in human form, which form
the central fact of Christianity, and t