III. The World as Illusion

The thought life of some influential naturalists, such as Thomas Henry Huxley, moved entirely in the direction of such religiously inclined spirits. Huxley believed in a complete agnosticism with regard to the essence of the world. He declared that a monism, which is in general agreement with Darwin's results, is applicable only to external nature. Huxley was one of the first to defend the Darwinian conceptions, but he is at the same time one of the most outspoken representatives of those thinkers who believed in the limitation of that mode of conception. A similar view is also held by the physicist Johaan Tyndall (1820–93) who considered the world process to be an energy that is completely inaccessible to the human intellect. According to him, it is precisely the assumption that everything in the world comes into existence through a natural evolution that makes it impossible to accept the thought that matter, which is, after all, the carrier of the whole evolution, should be no more than what our intellect can comprehend of it.