Darwinians who spoke thus, did not intend to injure the moral
principle, but only to purify and reform it; and therefore we shall have to
speak of them in the following section.

* * * * * {233}

CHAPTER V.

REFORM OF MORALITY THROUGH DARWINISM.

Sec. 1. _The Materialists and Monists. Darwin and the English Utilitarians.
Gustav Jaeger._

Among those who ascribe to Darwinism a morally reforming influence, we have
to mention in the first place the _materialists_. It is true that even
before the appearance of Darwinism they established their own moral
principle of naturalistic determinism and of the education of man only by
science and enlightenment, in opposition to a morality which rests on the
principle of the eternal value of the individual, of full moral
responsibility, of the holiness of the moral law, and of a divine author of
it; they stigmatized the ethical requirement of aiming at the eternal
welfare of the soul as a lower stage of morality in comparison with their
own, which carries in itself the reward of virtue; and they declared
Christianity and humanity, Christian morality and the morality of humanity,
two things irreconcilably opposed to one another. But in having taken
possession of Darwinism as their monopoly, they have made it the basis of
new attacks upon the present moral principle of Christendom; and therefore
we have here to mention them with their moral system.

Buechner, in his lecture on "Gottesbegriff und dessen {234} Bedeutung" ("The
Idea of God and its Importance"), replaces the moral principle (which in
his opinion is nothing innate but something acquired) by education,
learning, freedom and well-being; says that only atheism or philosophic
monism leads to freedom, reason, progress, acknowledgment of true
humanity--to humanism; that this humanism seeks the motives of its morality
not in the external relations to an extramundane God, but in itself and in
the welfare of mankind; and that infidels often, even as a rule, have
excelled by moral conduct, while Christianity has originated many more
crimes than it has hindered, and it would no longer be possible to
establish with real Christians a vital community as at present understood.
He declares the utterance of Madame de Stael, that "to comprehend
everything means to forgive everything," the truest word ever spoken; and
concludes his lecture with the remarks that the more man renounces his
faith and confide