body and soul, man has in reality only distinguished between his brain and himself.  Man is a purely physical being.  All so-called spiritual phenomena are functions of the brain, special cases of the operation of the universal forces of nature.  Thought and volition are sensation, sensation is motion.  The moving forces in the moral world are the same as those in the physical world; in the latter they are called attraction and repulsion, in the former, love and hate; that which the moralist terms self-love is the same instinct of self-preservation which is familiar in physics as the force of inertia.

As man has doubled himself, so also he has doubled nature.  Evil gave the first impulse to the formation of the idea of God, pain and ignorance have been the parents of superstition; our sufferings were ascribed to unknown powers, of which we were in fear, but which, at the same time, we hoped to propitiate by prayer and sacrifice.  The wise turned with their worship and reverence toward a more worthy object, to the great All; and, in fact, if we seek to give the word God a tenable meaning, it signifies active nature.  The error lay in the dualistic view, in the distinction between nature and itself, i.e. its activity, and in the belief that the explanation of motion required a separate immaterial Mover.  This assumption is, in the first place, false, for since the All is the complex of all that exists there can be nothing outside it; motion follows from the existence of the universe as necessarily as its other properties; the world does not receive it from without, but imparts it to itself by its own power.  In the second place the assumption is useless; it explains nothing, but confuses the problems of natural science to the point of insolubility.  In the third place it is self-contradictory, for after theology has removed the Deity as far away from man as possible, by means of the negative metaphysical predicates, it finds itself necessitated to bring the two together again through the moral attributes—­which are neither compatible with one another nor with the meta-physical—­and crowns the absurdity by the assurance that we can please God by believing that which is incomprehensible.  Finally, the assumption is dangerous; it draws men away from the present, disturbs their peace and enjoyment, stirs up hatred, and thus makes happiness and morality impossible.  If, then, utility is the criterion of truth, theism—­even in the mild form of deism—­is proven erroneous by its disastrous consequences.  All error is bane.

Matter and motion are alike eternal.  Nature is an active, self-moving, living whole, an endless chain of causes and effects.  All is in unceasing motion, all is cause (nothing is dead, nothing rests), all is effect (there is no spontaneous motion, none directed to an end).  Order and disorder are not in nature, but only in our understanding; they are abstract ideas to denote that which is conformable to our nature and that which is contrary to it.  The end of the All is itself alone, is life, activity; the universal goal of particular beings, like that of the universe, is the conservation of being.