Text: The comprehensive view from the highest point of a monistic interpretation of nature: 1. The universe, or the cosmos, is eternal, inifinite, and illimitable. 2. Its substance, with its two attributes (matter and energy), fills infinite space, and is in eternal motion. 3. This motion runs on through infinite time as an unbroken development, with a periodic change from life to death, from evolution to devolution. 4. The innumerable bodies which are scattered about the space-filling ether all obey the same "law of substance"; while the rotating masses slowly move towards their destruction and dissolution in one part of space, others are springing into new life and development in other quarters of the universe. 5. Our sun is one of these unnumbered perishable bodies, and our earth is one of the countless transitory planets that encircle them. 6. Our earth has gone through a long process of cooling, before water, in liquid form (the first condition of organic life), could settle thereon. 7. The ensuing biogenetic process, the slow development and transformation of countless organic forms, must have taken many millions of years - considerably more than a hundred. 8. Among the different kinds of animals which arose in the later stages of the biogenetic process on earth the vertebrates have far outstripped all other competitors in the eveolutionary race. 9. The most important branch of the vertebrates, the mammals, were developed later (during the triassic period) from the lower amphibia and the reptilia. 10. The most perfect and most highly-developed branch of the class of mammalia is the order of primates, which first put in an appearance, by development from the lowest prochoriata, at the beginning of the Tertiary period - at least three million years ago. 11. The youngest and most perfect twig of the branch of primates is man, who sprang from a series of man-like apes towards the end of the Tertiary period. 12. Consequently, the so-called "history of the world" - that is, the brief period of a few thousand years, which measures the duration of civilization - is an evanescently short episode in the long course of organic evolution, just as this, in turn, is merely a small portion of the history of our planetary system; and as our mother-earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature.

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