Rudolf Schmid

“ While some see in Darwinism the flambeau which now lights mankind to entirely new paths of truth, and also to spiritual and moral perfection, others see in it only an unproved hypothesis, threatening to become the torch which might change the noblest and greatest acquirements of the culture of past centuries into a heap of ashes; while some date from it a new period of culture, others see in it a deep descent of the present from the scientific, religious, and moral height which mankind has ascended. ”

“ It is certainly no evidence of an especially intensive piety, if we build the conviction that God is the Creator of man, among other things, on the obscurity in which for us the origin of mankind is wrapped. For from this obscurity no other conclusion can be drawn than increased proofs of the limitation of our knowledge; that piety which traces those phenomena whose natural causes we know, just as decidedly to the causality of God, is much more—we shall not say, intensive, but correctly guided—than that piety which traces back those whose natural causes are hidden to us. ”

“ Do we not derive all our reasoning, logic, our views, and in fact everything, at first from our human nature, and do we not in our most abstract reasoning always operate simply with the laws, as they inhere in our human nature? Is there even a single scientific description conceivable without its being full of anthropomorphisms? Even the works of Darwin which, according to the opinion of these opponents of anthropomorphism, destroy anthropomorphism and teleology, are the most striking proof in favor of it. ”

“ Moreover, if we take into consideration the fact that we can not at all imagine either the origin or the first development of a higher animal or a human organism without the protecting integument and the nourishing help of a mother's womb, we may venture to say that each and every attempt to render the origin of the first individuals of the higher species conceivable, leads of necessity to the descent theory. We have either to reject, once for all, such an attempt, as an unscientific playing with impossibilities, or to accept the idea of descent. ”

“ From still another side, the knowledge of the world, even in a scientific way, leads us to the acknowledgment of a divine providence which controls with absolute freedom every process in every place and in every moment of the world's course. We see continually, in the midst of nature, and in its causal course conformable to law, something supernatural, transcendental, and metaphysical, acting decisively upon the course of nature; and that is the free activity of man. ”

“ In defining our problem, therefore, we find ourselves under the influence of a scientific law of development. The simple problem which we started from has developed into a trinity of problems and attempts at solution. The simple question of the origin of species led us into the dilemma of a generatio æquivoca, or a descent; the hypothesis of a descent led to the dilemma of a heterogenetic conception, or an evolution; and the hypothesis of an evolution rendered necessary the attempt at explaining this evolution, and showed Darwin's method of explaining it by his selection theory. ”

“ For the quintessence of that which constitutes the basis of the Christian religion—namely, the leading back of mankind to communion with God by means of salvation—is not only a philosopheme, a theoretical or mystic doctrine, but a fact: it comes into the world as a series of divine facts; it is interwoven by innumerable threads into creation and the course of nature and history; and, as to this whole aspect of its appearance in the world of phenomena, it falls under the cognition of the exact sciences. ”

“ On that account, we need not at all fear that by such an attempt and its eventual success we might get into the shallows of superficiality, to which nothing seems any longer to be hidden, only because it has no presentiment of the depths which are to be sounded. There will always remain enough of the mysterious and the uninvestigated, and each new step forward will only lead to new views, to new secrets, to new wonders.
But does not a development, like that which we here for the moment assume hypothetically, efface and destroy the specific value of man and mankind from still another side? ”

“ Inorganic matter no longer produces organisms; the lower species of plants or animals no longer develop higher ones; the animal no longer becomes man; and yet there were periods, lying widely apart, in which, according to that theory, such things took place. What else set free those active causes, at the right time and in the right place? What else closed again at the precise place and moment the valves of the proceeding development, and brought to rest again the inciting force of the rising development?—what else but the highest end-appointing intelligence and omnipotence? ”

“ If we finally come down to historic times, and to the present, in order to try to draw conclusions from the comparisons of the remotest times of which we have historic knowledge, with the present, as to prehistoric times, we likewise find on the one side vestiges of the lowest barbarism in the past and present; but on the other side we find that the oldest written monuments afford a glance into a perfection of intellectual reflection and into a nobility of moral and religious views which permits us to draw the highest conclusions as to the intellectual worth of earliest mankind. ”

“ It can be clearly seen how firmly a view of the world which makes war against religion and the idea of God its special life-task, is connected with all those destructive elements which lie in human nature, and especially in the social circumstances of the present, and which have their only and final ethical limit in the consciousness of God which, as a power never wholly to be effaced, lies in the depth of the soul of even those who wander farthest from a moral and spiritual life. ”

“ It cannot be doubtful that religious minds which are not accustomed to scientific reasoning, have such a conception; whether theologians also favor it, we do not know, although it is possible. Certainly those scientists who intend to attack the faith in a living Creator and Lord of the world, take it as the wholly natural, even as the only possible, conception of a Creator and his creation; and of course it is to them a great and cheap pleasure to become victorious knights in such a puppet-show view of the conception of creation. ”

“ It is true, such advocates were never wanting. In pamphlets and journals, it has been often enough said that Darwinism cuts through the nerve of life, not only of religion, but also of morality.
It was demonstrated that in making man a mere product of nature, and degrading him to a being that is nothing else but a more highly developed animal, Darwinism takes from human personality its value, from the realms of morality its dignity, and from its demands their autonomy. ”

“ It is not an unworthy idea, but rather an elevating one, that man constitutes the last and highest member in the ancient and infinitely rich development of organic nature on our planet, being connected by the most intimate bonds of relationship with the other members, as the latter are connected among themselves with one another: not a pernicious parasite on the tree of natural life, but the true son of the blissful mother Nature. ”

“ Thus it has not only a single existence and mode of existence, but it does exactly the same thing that theism does: it seeks the final principles of the world. And it does not correctly represent theism: for theism also does not know of two existences to which the idea of existing is applicable in fully the same way—namely, the world and God—-but in seeking a cause for the existence of the world, it finds it in God; the world, according to its view, only exists by the fact that it exists in and through God. So theism in this sense also contests with monism for the right of the name. ”

“ But the grand turning-point at which the mythological mode of view gives way—in which mode of view he also reckons Christianity—is the giving up of the idea of the necessity of an atonement; for this whole idea is but anthropomorphism. It is when man has recognized the impossibility of a being, similar to man, as the final cause of all existences, and in reverential modesty has admitted his ignorance in reference to the nature of the origin of things, that he learns to understand how narrow a view he has of God when he thinks that he understands him. ”

“ But the idea of species is only the empty vessel which first becomes valuable by reason of its contents. Now, if we ask ethical naturalism the properties with which that idea of species is to be endowed, it certainly mentions properties, but those which are too rich; namely, it mentions the idea of all that is good in human life and the forms of human life, in concreto, the whole sum of all the conditions and acquisitions of the culture of mankind, art, nature, and science: the comprehensive idea of these acquisitions, the enjoyment of them, the work at them, is the highest good. ”

“ The religious and ethical interest itself not only gives, but even requires, this freedom of investigation. It requires it in consequence of that impulse of truth which religion has in common with every impulse of knowledge, and which in itself is an ethical impulse. In consequence of this impulse, religion must found its possession on nothing else than subjective and objective truth, and can look upon all the paths which lead through even the remotest realm of knowledge to the establishment of truth, only with sympathetic interest. ”

“ If we contemplate the common life, and the mutual relations between plants and animals (man included) , we shall find everywhere and at all times, the very opposite of that kindly and peaceful social life, which the goodness of the Creator ought to have prepared for his creatures—we shall rather find everywhere a pitiless, most embittered struggle of all against all. Nowhere in nature, no matter where we turn our eyes, does that idyllic peace, celebrated by the poets, exist; we find everywhere a struggle and a striving to annihilate neighbors and competitors. ”

“ Of course, piety as well as science makes distinctions among miracles. The former separates the mere products and processes of nature which, through what is explicable as well as what is inexplicable in their qualities and processes, point to an almighty and all-wise Creator, and thereby become miracles to the religious view of the world, from the historical events which, by their newness and uniqueness, and by their pointing toward divine ends, manifest God and his teleological government to man, and calls them miracles in a still more specific sense than science does. ”

“ We purposely call it a relation of our personality, and not merely a relation of man, because in the religious the ethical moment of self-determination which is included in the idea of personality, is an essential factor; and because we gladly make it conspicuous, partly in opposition to the one-sidedness of Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence, partly to prevent a contrary misunderstanding of our own view, as if we found the seat of religion in the activity of knowledge. ”

“ Under these suppositions, moral principles not only lose their objective and solid consistency in the mass of mankind, but they also become irrevocably subject to the arbitrariness of the single individual. An individual who either has not, or asserts that he has not, a determined moral instinct, or who allows it to be smothered by some other instinct which in a normal individual is subordinate, but in him stronger, is fully justified in his immoral action so long as he is successful with it. Every individual is entirely his own master and his own judge. ”

“ But an event in the history of salvation becomes a miracle from the fact that something extraordinary, something new, happens in it, which by its newness and its extraordinary character presents itself to man as the manifestation of certain divine ends in salvation, and can be explained at first sight, but only at first sight, from nothing else than from the service which it renders to the plan of redemption. ”

“ Amidst a generation which is so fond of reveling in the thought of an extension of all the limits of our knowledge, and is inclined to proclaim as true that which it wishes and hopes, investigators are not wholly wanting who very decidedly express their consciousness of these limits of our knowledge, and at the same time combine it with the most logical scientific reasoning and investigation. ”