If you will study carefully the attitude of the human mind,—the explanations and theories which mankind have to offer with reference to existence,—you will find that there are only three distinct positions or systems of thought. Two of these positions are direct opposites, each reversing the premises of the other, while the third, in one form or another, accepts the position of both and attempts to reconcile them.
One may say that matter is all-in-all, there is no Spirit or God, no supersensible, unseen Intelligence or Mind sustaining and controlling the universe, all is physical and of the material senses. To inquire into a Cause or Creator is an illusion, a seeking for something which does not exist. All things are indeed One, but that One is mechanical and physical wholly, not Mind or mental. This materialistic monism found in ancient days its chief exponents in Heraclitus and Protagoras; and later under the application made of it by Epicurus and his followers it developed into the doctrine "Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." "I know not what good means if you deny me the pleasures of the senses." In modern times it is the position taken with such great vigor by Auguste Comte. It is the atheist's position,—materialism pure and simple. It is rationalism, it never gets beyond the human reason. Thus it yields no ethics and no theology.
One cannot hold this position and at the same time believe in religion or any form of prayer; all this it views as mere fiction and illusion. The desire for God,—communion with a Divine consciousness,—or the desire for immortality can here likewise be regarded only as a diseased subjective state to which there is no corresponding reality. So also there is no inherent difference between good and evil, except as mankind may be prejudiced in favor of what is pleasurable, and so, out of what it chooses to call expediency, declare against what is painful, issuing in what it denominates utilitarian ethics. Hence there is no problem of Being to be worked out, for there is no continuity of spiritual existence, but only an unvarying monotonous succession of physical phenomena, and with the study, the mere observation of the external manifestation and sequences of these, we must be content. Happy the man, according to this view, who has so mastered himself as to feel no inclination to inquire into causes, and so escapes metaphysics—the knowledge of God.
