Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 80:317 (Jan 1923)
Article: The Problem Of Monism
Author: Eduard Koenig

BSac 80:317 (Jan 1923) p. 10

The Problem Of Monism

Eduard Koenig

“Monism! A Monistic View of the World!” That these words are in our time the watchword for a great number of people is not necessary to be amply proved. Everybody knows that even a league has been formed which takes these words as a motto and manifests considerable activity. These facts would in themselves be a sufficient occasion for us to occupy ourselves with the question of Monism; however, another reason may be added. The exponents of Monism dogmatically assert that only their own view of the world satisfies the logical demand of the human mind. For thinking man feels in himself the inevitable impulse to advance to a uniform conception of the world. Thus everyone who thinks on the reason of Monism has his share in the endeavor of mankind to be perfectly satisfied in spirit. How could we avoid such various impulses to form an opinion on Monism? Therefore, I beg to offer in the following lines some contribution to an investigation of Monism.

This is rendered more difficult by the fact that nowadays three kinds of Monism strive for the applause of our contemporaries. We have, therefore, nothing less to do than examine these three Monistic points of view each by itself.

I

The first or chief Monistic position is what may be called Psycho-Monism. This has been defended especially by Dr. Max Verworn (Professor of Physiology at Bonn). He did so in his essay, “Naturwissenschaft und Weltanschauung.” His chief proposition is, “There is in reality no contrast between the physical world and psyche, for

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the whole physical world forms only the contents of human psyche.” This kind of Monism, therefore, considers the imaginations of the soul as the only uniform realm of all realities or, rather, of all phenomena.

In considering this first kind of Monism our attention must be turned to the fact that a natural philosopher is so much addicted to Kant’s theory of cognition as to represent the states of the soul as the only world of reality. This fact alone is of great historical interest. For in the last centuries it was a significant fact known to the attentive student of intellectual movements that the theory of cognition following Kant’s philosophy, according to which all of man’s knowledge consists only of his own conceptions, made but little conquest among natural philosophers. Thus, for instance, the celebrated physicist, Helmholtz, declared, “In the beginning of my career I was a more convinced adherent of Kant’s philosophy than I am now.”1 On the contrary, in the Psycho-Monism of Verworn a medical man stands quite on the basis of...