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I
Goethe has given glorious expression, in his book upon
Winkelmann, to the feeling which a man has when he contemplates
his position within the world: “When the healthy nature
of man works as a whole, when he feels himself in the world as
in a great, beautiful, worthy, and valuable whole, when
harmonious contentment yields him pure, free rapture, then
would the universe, could it but feel itself, burst forth into
rejoicing at having attained its goal, and admire the summit of
its own becoming and being.”
From out of this feeling there arises the most important
question that man can ask himself: how is his own becoming and
being linked with that of the whole world? Schiller, in a
letter to Goethe of 23rd August, 1794, admirably characterises
the road by which Goethe sought to come to a knowledge of human
nature. “From the simple organism you ascend step by step
to the more complex, in order finally to build up the most
complex of all, man, genetically from the materials of
the entire structure of nature.” Now this road of
Goethe's is also that which natural science has been following
for the last forty years, in order to solve “the question
of questions for humanity.” Huxley sees the problem to be
the determination of the position which “man occupies in
nature, and his relation to the totality of things.” It
is the great merit of Charles Darwin to have created a new
scientific basis for reflection upon this question. The facts
which he brought forward in 1859 in his work,
The Origin of Species,
and the principles which he there developed, gave
to natural research the possibility of showing, in its own way,
how well founded was Goethe's conviction that Nature,
“after a thousand animal types, forms a being that
contains them all — man.”
To-day we look back upon forty years of scientific development,
which stand under the influence of Charles Darwin's line of
thought. Rightly could Ernst Haeckel say in his book,
On our Present Knowledge of Man's Origin,
which reproduces an address delivered by him at the Fourth
International Congress of
Zoologists in Cambridge on 26th August, 1898: “Forty
years of Darwinism! What a huge progress in our knowledge of
Nature! And what a revolution in our weightiest views, not only
in the more closely affected departments, but also in that of
anthropology, and equally in all the so-called psychological
sciences.”
Goethe, from his profound insight into Nature, foresaw to its
full extent this revolution and its significance for the
progress of man's intellectual culture. We see this
particularly clearly from a conversation which he had with
Soret on 2nd August, 1830. At that time the news of the
beginning of the Revolution of July reached Weimar and caused
general excitement. When Soret visited Goethe, he was received
with the words: “Now, what do you think of this great
event? The volcano has burst into eruption; all is in flames,
and it is no longer a conference behind closed doors!”
Soret naturally could only believe that Goethe was speaking of
the July Revolution, and replied that under the known
conditions nothing else could be expected than that it would
end with the expulsion of the Royal family. But Goethe had
something quite different in his mind. “1 am not talking
of those people at all; I am concerned with quite other things.
I am speaking of the conflict, so momentous for science,
between Cuvier and Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire that has come to a
public outbreak in the Academy.” The conflict
concerned the question whether each species in which
organic nature finds expression possesses a distinct
architectural plan of its own, or whether there is one plan
common to them all. Goethe had already settled this question
for himself forty years earlier. His eager study of the plant
and animal worlds had made him an opponent of the Linnæan
view, that we “count as many species as different forms
were created in the beginning (in principio).”
Anyone holding such an opinion can only strive to discover what
are the plans upon which the separate species are organised. He
will seek above all carefully to distinguish these separate
forms.
Goethe followed another road. “That which Linnaeus strove
forcibly to hold apart was bound, according to the innermost
need of my being, to strive after reunion.” Thus there
grew up in him the view which, in 1796, in the Lectures upon
the three first chapters of
A General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy,
he summed up in the sentence:
“This, then, we have gained, that we can unhesitatingly
maintain that all complete organic natures — among which
we see fishes, amphibia, birds, mammals, and, as the head of
the last, man — have all been shaped according
to one original type, which only inclines more or less to
this side or the other in its constant parts, and yet daily
develops and transforms itself by reproduction.” The
basic type, to which all the manifold plant-forms may be traced
back, had already been described by Goethe in 1790 in his
Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants.
This way of regarding things, by which Goethe endeavoured to recognise
the laws of living nature, is exactly similar to that which he
demands for the inorganic world in his essay, written in 1793,
Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject:
“Nothing happens in Nature which is not in some
connection with the whole, and if experiences only
appear to us as isolated, if we can only regard
experiments as isolated facts, that does not imply that
they actually are isolated; it is only the question: How
shall we find the connection of these phenomena, these
occurrences?” Species also appear to us only in
isolation. Goethe seeks for their connection. Hence it clearly
appears that Goethe's effort was directed to apply the same
mode of explanation to the study of living beings as has led to
the goal in that of inorganic nature.
[See note on Goethe and Kant, below.]
Goethe and Kant. I have characterised the contrast
that exists between Goethe's and Kant's world-conceptions, in
the Introductions to my edition of
Goethe's Scientific Writings
(in Kürschner,
Deutsche National-Litteratur) and in my book,
Goethe's Conception of the World
(p. 37 et seq.). It
shows itself also in the attitude of the two personalities
towards the explanation of organic nature. Goethe seeks for
this explanation along the road which modern science has also
trodden. Kant holds such an explanation to be impossible. Only
one who penetrates deeply into the nature of Goethe's view of
the world can acquire a correct judgment as to its position in
regard to the Kantian philosophy. Goethe's own testimony is not
conclusive, because he never devoted himself to a closer study
of Kant. “The portal (of the
Critique of Pure Reason)
it was that pleased me, into the labyrinth itself I
could not adventure: now it was my poetic gift that hindered
me, now my commonsense, and I nowhere found myself any the
better.” Single passages in Kant's
Critique of Judgment
pleased him, because he so interpreted their
meaning that they agreed with his own view of the world. It is,
therefore, only too easily understood why his
conversations with followers of Kant appear somewhat peculiar.
“They certainly listened to me, but could give me no
answer, nor in any way help me on. More than once it happened
to me, that one or the other confessed with smiling admiration:
it may be something analogous to the Kantian mode of
conception, but a rather strange one.” Karl
Vorländer, in his essay
Goethe's Verhältnis zu Kant in seiner historischen Entwickelung
(Kantstudien, i., ii.),
has judged this relationship according to the actual words of
Goethe's own testimony, and has reproached me with the fact
that my conception thereof is “in contradiction with the
clear testimony of Goethe himself,” and, at the very
least, “strongly one-sided.” I would have left this
objection unanswered, because I saw from the explanations of
Herr Karl Vorländer that they proceed from a man who finds
it quite impossible to understand a mode of thinking which is
strange to him; however, it still seemed to me needful not to
leave without answer a remark which he couples thereto. Herr
Vorländer belongs to those men who regard their own
opinion as absolutely right, and therefore as proceeding from
the highest possible insight, and who therefore stamp every
other view as a product of ignorance. Because I think otherwise
about Kant than he does, he gives me the sage advice to study
certain portions of Kant's works. Such a mode of criticising
other people's opinions cannot be too strongly repudiated. Who
gives anyone the right, not to criticise me for an opinion
differing from his own, but to schoolmaster me? I have
therefore told Herr Karl Vorländer my opinion as to his
school-mastering in the fourth volume of my edition of
Goethe's Scientific Writings.
Thereupon, in the third volume of Kantstudien,
he has discussed my book,
Goethe's Conception of the World,
in a fashion which not only far surpasses in point of form what
he had previously said against me, but which is also full of
objective untruths. Thus he speaks of an “isolated
and embittered opposition “in which I find myself against
the whole of modern philosophy (naturally exclusive of
Nietzsche) and science. There at once one has three objective
untruths. Anyone who reads my writings — and whoever,
like Herr Vorländer, pronounces judgment upon me, should
at the least read them — will perceive that I do indeed
criticise technically particular views of modern science
and endeavour to deepen others philosophically; but that to
talk of an embittered opposition is simply absurd. In my
Philosophie der Freiheit
I have expressed my conviction
to the effect that in my views is given the philosophical
completion of the structure which “Darwin and Haeckel
have erected for Natural Science” (p. 186). That I am the
one who has sharply emphasised the fundamental deficiency
in the world of Nietzsche's ideas is indeed known to the
Frenchman Henri Lichtenberger, who observes in his book
La Philosophie de Nietzsche: “R. Steiner is the
author of
Truth and Science
and
The Philosophy of Freedom.
In the latter work he completes Nietzsche's theory
on an important point.” He emphasises the point which I
have shown that Nietzsche's Superman is not that which
he ought to be. The German philosopher, Karl Vorländer,
has either not read my writings, and none the less passes
judgment upon me; or else he has done so, and still writes the
above and other similar objective untruths. I leave it to the
judgment of the competent public to decide whether his
contribution, which was found worthy of acceptance in a serious
philosophical review, is a proof of his complete lack of
judgment or a dubious contribution to the morality of
German scholarship.
How
far he had run ahead of his time with such conceptions becomes
apparent when one reflects that at the same time when Goethe
published his Metamorphosis, Kant sought to prove
scientifically, in his
Critique of Judgment,
the impossibility of an explanation of the living according to the
same principles as hold for the lifeless. He maintained:
“It is quite certain that we cannot even adequately learn
to know, far less explain to ourselves, the organised beings
and their inner possibility according to purely
mechanical principles of nature; and, indeed, it is so
certain that we can boldly say it is senseless for man even to
conceive such a purpose, or to hope that sometime perhaps a
Newton may arise who will make comprehensible the production of
a blade of grass according to natural laws which no purpose has
ordered; rather one must simply and flatly deny any such
insight to man.” Haeckel repudiates this thought with the
words: “Now, however, this impossible Newton really
appeared seventy years later in Darwin, and, as a matter of
fact, solved the problem whose solution Kant had declared to be
absolutely unthinkable!”
That the revolution in scientific views brought about by
Darwinism must take place, Goethe knew full well, for it
corresponds with his own way of conceiving things. In the view
which Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire defended against Cuvier, that
all organic forms carry in them a “general plan modified
only here and there,” he recognised his own again.
Therefore he could say to Soret: “Now, however,
Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire is decidedly on our side, and with
him all his important disciples and followers in France. This
event is for me of quite extraordinary value, and I rejoice
rightly over the general victory gained at length by a cause to
which I have devoted my life, and which is most especially my
very own.” Of still greater value for Goethe's view of
Nature are, however, the discoveries of Darwin. Goethe's view
of Nature is related to Darwinism in a way similar to that in
which the insights of Copernicus and Kepler into the structure
and movements of the planetary system are related to the
discovery by Newton of the law of the universal
attraction of all heavenly bodies. This law reveals the
scientific causes, why the planets move in the manner which
Copernicus and Kepler had described. And Darwin found the
natural causes, why the common original type of all organic
beings, which Goethe assumed, makes its appearance in the
various species.
The
doubt as to the view that there underlies each distinct
organic species a special plan of organisation, unchangeable
for all time, took firm hold upon Darwin upon a journey which
he undertook to South America and Australia in the summer of
1831 as naturalist on the ship Beagle. As to how his
thought ripened, we get an idea in reaching such
communications from him as the following: “When,
during the voyage of the Beagle, I visited the Galapagos
Archipelago, which lies in the Pacific Ocean some five hundred
English miles from the South American coast, I saw myself
surrounded by peculiar kinds of birds, reptiles, and snakes,
which exist nowhere else in the world. Yet they almost all bore
upon them an American character. In the song of the mocking
thrush, in the sharp cry of the carrion hawk, in the great
chandelier-like Opuntico, I clearly perceived the
neighbourhood of America; and yet these islands were
separated from the mainland by so many miles, and differed
widely from it in their geological constitution and their
climate. Yet more surprising was the fact that most of the
inhabitants of each separate island of this small archipelago
were specifically different, although closely related to one
another. I often asked myself, then, how these peculiar animals
and men had originated. The simplest answer seemed to be that
the inhabitants of the different islands descend from one
another, and in the course of their descent had undergone
modifications, and that all the inhabitants of the archipelago
had descended from those of the nearest mainland, viz.,
America, from which naturally the colonisation would
proceed. But it long remained for me an unintelligible problem:
how the necessary degree of modification could have been
attained.”
As
to this “how,” it was the numerous breeding
experiments which he tried, after his return home, with
pigeons, fowls, dogs, rabbits, and garden plants that
enlightened Darwin. He saw from them in how high a degree there
lies in organic forms the possibility of continually
modifying themselves in the course of their reproduction. It is
possible, by creating artificial conditions, to obtain
from a given form after a few generations new kinds, which
differ much more from each other than do those in Nature, whose
difference is regarded as so great that one inclines to
ascribe to each a special underlying plan of organisation. As
is well known, the breeder utilises this variability of kinds
to bring about the development of such forms of
domesticated organisms as correspond with his
intentions. He endeavours to create the conditions which
guide the variation in a direction answering his purpose. If he
seeks to breed a kind of sheep with specially fine wool, he
seeks out among his flock those individuals which have the
finest wool. These he allows to breed. From among their
descendants he again selects for further breeding those which
have the finest wool. If this is carried on through a series of
generations, a species of sheep is obtained which differs
materially from its ancestors in the formation of its wool. The
same thing can be done with other characteristics of
living creatures. From these facts two things become obvious:
that organic forms have a tendency to vary, and that they pass
on the acquired modifications to their descendants. Owing to
this first property of living creatures, the breeder is able to
develop in his species certain characteristics that
answer his purposes; owing to the second, these new
characteristics are handed on from one generation to the
next.
The
thought now lies close at hand, that in Nature also, left to
itself, the forms continually vary. And the great power
of variation of domesticated organisms does not force us to
assume that this property of organic forms is confined within
certain limits. We may rather presuppose that in the lapse of
vast time-periods a certain form transforms itself into a
totally different one, which in its formation diverges
from the former to the utmost extent imaginable. The most
natural inference then, is this, that the organic species
have not arisen independently, each according to a special plan
of structure, alongside each other; but that in course of time
they have evolved the one from the other. This idea gains support
from the views at which Lyell arrived in the history of the earth's
development, and which he first published in 1830 in his
Principles of Geology.
The older geological views, according to which the formation
of the earth was supposed to have been accomplished in a series
of violent catastrophes, were thereby superseded. Through
this doctrine of catastrophes it was sought to explain the
results to which the investigation of the earth's solid crust
had led. The different strata of the earth's crust, and the
fossilised organic creatures contained in them, are of course
the vestiges of what once took place on the earth's
surface.
The
followers of the doctrine of violent transformations believed
that the development of the earth had been accomplished
in successive periods, definitely distinguished from one
another. At the end of such a period there occurred a
catastrophe. Everything living was destroyed, and its remains
preserved in an earth-stratum. On the top of what had
been destroyed there arose a completely new world, which must
be created afresh. In the place of this doctrine of
catastrophes, Lyell set up the view that the crust of the earth
has been gradually moulded in the course of very long periods
of time, by the same processes which still in our time are
going on every day on the earth's surface. It has been the
action of the rivers carrying mud away from one spot and
depositing it on another; the work of the glaciers, which grind
away rocks and stones, forward blocks of stone, and analogous
processes, which, in their steady, slow working have given to
the earth's surface its present configuration. This view
necessarily draws after it the further conclusion that the
present-day forms of plants and animals also have gradually
developed themselves out of those whose remains are
preserved for us in fossils. Now, it results from the processes
of artificial breeding that one form can really transform
itself into another. There remains only the question, by what
means are those conditions for this transformation, which the
breeder brings about by artificial means, created in Nature
itself?
In
artificial breeding human intelligence chooses the conditions
so that the new forms coming into existence answer to the
purposes which the breeder is following out. Now, the
organic forms living in Nature are in general purposefully
adapted to the conditions under which they live. A mere glance
into Nature will teach one the truth of this fact. Plant and
animal species are so constructed that they can maintain and
reproduce themselves in the conditions under which they
live.
It
is just this purposeful arrangement which has given rise to the
supposition that organic forms cannot be explained in the same
way as the facts of inorganic Nature. Kant observes in his
Critique of Judgment:
“The analogy of the forms, in so far as they seem to be produced
in accordance with a common basic plan, despite all differences,
strengthens the presumption of a real relationship
between them in their generation from a common mother through
an approach, step by step, of one animal species to another.
... Here, therefore, it is open to the archaeologist of Nature
to cause to arise that great family of creatures (for one would
be forced to conceive them thus if the thoroughgoing connected
relationship spoken of is to hold good) from the traces left
over of her older revolutions, according to all their known and
supposed mechanisms. But he must equally for that purpose
ascribe to this common mother an organisation purposely fitted
to all these creatures, for otherwise the purposive form of the
products of the plant and animal kingdoms is unthinkable as to
its possibility.”
If
we would explain organic forms after the same manner in which
natural science deals with inorganic phenomena, we must
demonstrate that the particular arrangement of the
organisms — devoid of a purposeful object — comes
into being by reason of what is practically natural
necessity, even as one elastic ball after having been struck by
another is fulfilling a law as it rolls along. This
requirement has its fulfilment in Darwin's teachings
regarding natural selection. Even in Nature organic forms must,
in accordance with their capacity for assimilating
modifications which have been brought about by artificial
breeding, become transformed. Should there be nothing
available for directly bringing about the change, so that none
but the forms aimed at should come into existence, there will
be, regardless of choice, useless, or less useful, forms called
into being. Now, Nature is extremely wasteful in the bringing
forth of her germs. So many germs are, indeed, produced
upon our earth, that were they all to attain to development we
should soon be able to fill several worlds with them.
This great number of germs is confronted with but a
comparatively small amount of food and space, the result of
this being a universal struggle for existence among organic
beings. Only the fit survive and fructify; the unfit have to go
under. The fittest, however, will be those who have adapted
themselves in the best possible way to the surrounding
conditions of life. The absolutely unintentional, and yet
— from natural causes — necessary, struggle for
existence brings in its train the same results as are
attained by the intelligence of the breeder with his cultivated
organisms: he creates purposeful (useful)
organic forms. This, broadly sketched, is the meaning of
Darwin's theory of natural selection in the struggle for
existence; or, otherwise, the “selective theory.”
By this theory, that which Kant held to be impossible is
reached: the thinking out in all its possibilities of a
predetermined form in the animal and vegetable kingdom, without
assuming the Universal Mother to be dowered with an organism
directly productive of all these creatures.
As
Newton by pointing out the general attraction of the heavenly
bodies showed why they moved in the set courses determined by
Copernicus and Kepler, so did it now become possible to explain
with the help of the theory of selection how in Nature the
evolution of the living thing takes place, the course of which
Goethe, in his
Metamorphosis of Plants,
has observed:
“We can, however, say this, namely, that proceeding from
a relationship that is hardly distinguishable between animal
and plant, creatures do little by little evolve, carrying on
their development in opposite directions — the plant
finally reaching its maturity in the form of the tree, and the
animal finding its culminating glory in man's freedom and
activity.”
Goethe has said of his ancestors: “I shall not rest until
I have found a pregnant point from which many deductions may be
made; or, rather, one that will forcibly bestow upon me the
overflow of its own abundance.” The theory of selection
became for Ernst Haeckel the point from which he was able to
deduce a conception of the universe entirely in
accordance with natural science.
At
the beginning of the last century Jean Lamarck also maintained
the view that, at a certain moment in the earth's development,
a most simple organic something developed itself, by
spontaneous generation, out of the mechanical, physical, and
chemical processes. These simplest organisms then produced more
perfect ones, and these again others more highly organised,
right up to man. “One might therefore quite rightly name
this part of the theory of evolution, which asserts the common
origin of all plant and animal species from the simplest common
root-forms, in honour of its most deserving founder,
Lamarckianism” (Haeckel,
Natural History of Creation).
Haeckel has given in grandiose style an explanation of
Lamarckianism by means of Darwinism.
The
key to this explanation Haeckel found by seeking out the
evidences in the individual development of the higher organisms
— in their ontogeny — showing that they really
originated from lower forms of life. When one follows out the
form-development of one of the higher organisms from the
earliest germ up to its fully developed condition, the
different stages are found to present configurations
corresponding to the forms of lower organisms.
[Fundamental Biogenetic Law.
Haeckel has proved in a
series of works the general validity and far-reaching
significance of the fundamental biogenetic law. The most
important explanations and proofs will be found in his
Biology of the Corals
(1872) and in his
Studies in the Gastrula Theory
(1873–84). Since then other zoologists
have extended and confirmed this doctrine. In his latest work,
Die Welträtsel
(1899), Haeckel is able to say of it (p. 72):
“Although this doctrine was at the outset
almost generally rejected, and for some ten years fiercely
combated by numerous authorities, yet, at the present time (for
about fifteen years past), it has been accepted by all
well-informed specialists in the subject.”]
At the outset of
his individual existence man and every other animal is a
simple cell. This cell divides itself, and from it arises a
germinal vesicle consisting of many cells. From that develops
the so-called “cup-germ,” the two-layered gastrula,
which has the shape of a cup- or jug-like body. Now, the lower
plant-animals (sponges, polyps, and so on) remain throughout
their entire existence on a level of development which is
equivalent to this cup-germ. Haeckel remarks thereupon:
“This fact is of extraordinary importance. For we see
that man, and generally every vertebrate, runs rapidly, in
passing, through a two-leaved stage of formation, which in
these lowest plant-animals is maintained throughout life”
(Anthropogenesis).
Such a parallelism between the
developmental stages of the higher organisms and the developed
lower forms may be followed out through the entire evolutionary
history. Haeckel clothes this fact in the words: “The
brief ontogenesis or development of the individual is a
rapid and abbreviated repetition, a condensed
recapitulation of the prolonged phylogenesis or development of
the species.” This sentence gives expression to the
so-called fundamental biogenetic law. Why then do the higher
organisms in the course of their development come to forms
which resemble lower ones? The natural explanation is that the
former have developed themselves out of the latter; that
therefore every organism in its individual development shows us
one after another the forms which have clung to it as heirlooms
from its lower ancestors.
The
simplest organism that once upon a time formed itself on earth,
transforms itself in the course of reproduction into new forms.
Of these, the best adapted in the struggle for existence
survive, and transmit their peculiarities to their descendants.
All the formations and qualities which an organism
exhibits at the present time have arisen in the lapse of
enormous time-periods by adaptation and inheritance. Heredity
and adaptation are thus the causes of the world of organic
forms.
Thus, by investigating the relationship of individual
developmental history (ontogeny) to the history of the race
(phylogeny), Haeckel has given the scientific explanation of
the manifold organic forms.
[See note on Haeckel's latest book, below.]
As a natural philosopher he has satisfied the
human demand for knowledge, which Schiller had derived from
observation of Goethe's mind; he ascended from the simple
organisations step by step to the more complicated, to finally
build up genetically the most complex of all, man, from the
materials of the whole structure of Nature. He has set forth
his view in several grandly designed works — in his
General Morphology
(1866), in his
Natural History of Creation
(1868), in his
Anthropogenesis
(1874)
— in which he “undertook the first and hitherto the
only attempt to establish critically in detail the
zoological family-tree of man, and to discuss at length the
entire animal ancestry of our race.” To these works there
has been further added in recent years his three-volumed
Systematic Phylogeny.
Haeckel's latest book. In his recently published book,
Die Welträtsel, Gemeinverständliche Studien
über Monistische Philosophie
(Bonn, Emil Strauss, 1899),
Haeckel has given without reserve the” further
development, proof, and completion of the
convictions” which throughout a full generation he
has represented. To anyone who has absorbed the scientific
knowledge of our time, this work must appear as one of the most
important manifestos of the end of the nineteenth century. It
contains in ripened form a complete analytical discussion of
the relations of modern science with philosophical thinking
from the mind of the most original, far-sighted investigator of
our time.
It
is characteristic of Haeckel's deeply philosophical nature
that, after the appearance of Darwin's
Origin of Species,
he at once recognised the full significance for
man's entire conception of the Universe, of the principles
therein established; and it speaks much for his philosophical
enthusiasm that he boldly and tirelessly combated all the
prejudices which arose against the acceptance of the new truth
by the creed of modern thought. The necessity that all modern
scientific thinking should reckon with Darwinism was
expounded by Haeckel at the fiftieth meeting of German
scientists and doctors on the 22nd September, 1877, in his
address,
The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole.
He delivered a widely-embracing
Confession of Faith of a Man of Science
on the 9th October, 1892, in Altenburg at the seventy-fifth anniversary of
the Society for Natural Science of the Osterland. (This address
was printed under the title,
Monism as a link between Religion and Science,
Bonn, 1892.) What has been yielded by
the remodelled doctrine of evolution and our present scientific
knowledge towards the answering of the “question of
questions,” he has recently expounded in its broad lines
in the address mentioned above,
On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man.
Herein Haeckel handles afresh the
conclusion, which follows as a matter of course from Darwinism
for every logical thinker, that man has developed out of
the lower vertebrates, and further, more immediately from true
apes.
It
has been, however, this necessary conclusion which has
summoned to battle all the old prejudices of theologians,
philosophers, and all who are under their spell. Doubtless,
people would have accepted the emergence of the single animal
and plant forms from one another if only this assumption had
not carried with it at once the recognition of the animal
descent of man. “It remains,” as Haeckel emphasised
in his
Natural History of Creation,
“an instructive fact that this recognition — after the
appearance of the first Darwinian work — was in no sense
general, that on the contrary numerous critics of the first
Darwinian book (and among them very famous names)
declared themselves in complete agreement with Darwinism,
but entirely rejected its application to man.” With a
certain appearance of justice, people relied in so doing on
Darwin's book itself, in which no word is said of this
application. Because he drew this conclusion unreservedly,
Haeckel was reproached with being “more Darwinian than
Darwin.” True, that held good only till the year 1871, in
which appeared Darwin's work,
The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection,
in which Darwin himself maintained that
inference with great boldness and clearness.
It
was rightly recognised that with this conclusion must fall a
conception belonging to the most treasured among the collection
of older human prejudices: the conception that the “soul
of man” is a special being all to itself, having quite
another, a different, “higher origin” from all
other things in Nature. The doctrine of descent must
naturally lead to the view that man's soul-activities are
only a special form of those physiological functions which are
found in his vertebrate ancestors, and that these activities
have evolved themselves with the same necessity from the mental
activities of the animals, as the brain of man, which is the
material condition of his intellect, has evolved out of
the vertebrate brain.
It
was not only the men with old conceptions of faith
nurtured in the various ecclesiastical religions who
rebelled against the new confession, but also all those who had
indeed apparently freed themselves from these conceptions
of faith, but whose minds nevertheless still thought in
the sense of these conceptions. In what follows the proof
will be given that to this latter class of minds belong a
series of philosophers and scientific scholars of high standing
who have combated Haeckel, and who still remain opponents of
the views he advocated. To these ally themselves also those who
are entirely lacking in the power of drawing the necessary
logical conclusions from a series of facts lying before them. I
wish here to describe the objections which Haeckel had to
combat.
A
bright light is thrown upon the relationship of man to
the higher vertebrates, by the truth which Huxley, in 1863,
expressed in his volume on
Man's Place in Nature, and other Anthropological Essays:
“Thus whatever system
of organs be studied, the comparison of their modifications in
the ape series leads to one and the same result — that
the structural differences which separate man from the gorilla
and the chimpanzee are not so great as those which separate the
gorilla from the lower apes” (see
Man and the Lower Animals,
p. 144). With the help of this fact it is possible
to establish man's animal line of ancestry in the sense of the
Darwinian doctrine of descent. Man has common ancestors
with the apes in some species of apes that have died out. By a
corresponding utilisation of the knowledge which
comparative anatomy and physiology, individual
developmental history, and palaeontology supply, Haeckel
has followed the animal ancestors of man lying still more
remotely in the past, through the semi-apes, the marsupials,
the earliest fishes, right up to the very earliest animals
consisting only of a single cell. He is fully entitled to ask:
“Are the phenomena of the individual development of man
in any way less wonderful than the palaeontological development
from lower organisms? Why should not man have evolved in the
course of enormous periods of time from unicellular original
forms, since every individual runs through this same
development from the cell to the fully developed
organism?”
But
it is also by no means easy for the human mind to construct for
itself conceptions in accordance with Nature as regards the
unfoldment of the single organism from the germ up to the
developed condition. We can see this from the ideas which a
scientist like Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777) and a
philosopher like Leibnitz (1646-1716) formed about this
development. Haller maintained the view that the germ of an
organism already contains in miniature, but fully and
completely formed in advance, all the parts which make
their appearance during its development. Thus, development is
taken to be not the formation of something new in what is
already present, but the unfolding of something that was
already there but invisible to the eye because of its
minuteness. But if this view were correct, then in the first
germ of an animal or vegetable form all following generations
must be already contained like boxes one inside the other. And
Haller actually drew this conclusion. He assumed that in the
first human germ of our root-mother, Eve, the entire human race
was already present in miniature. And even Leibnitz also can
only imagine the development of men as an unfoldment of
what already exists: “So I should opine that the souls,
which some day will be human souls, were already there in germ,
like those of other species, that they existed in man's
ancestors up to Adam, therefore from the beginning of things,
always in the form of organised bodies.”
The
human understanding has a tendency to imagine to itself that
anything coming into existence was somehow already there, in
some form or other, before its manifestation. The entire
organism is supposed to be already hidden in the germ; the
distinct organic classes, orders, families, species, and kinds
are supposed to have existed as the thoughts of a creator
before they actually came into existence. Now, however,
the idea of evolution demands that we should conceive the
arising of something new, of something later, from out of
something already present, of something earlier. We are called
upon to understand that which has become, out of the becoming.
That we cannot do, if we regard all that has become as
something which has always been there.
How
great the prejudices are that the idea of evolution had to face
was clearly shown by the reception which Caspar Friedrich Wolff's
Theoria Generationis,
which appeared in 1759, met with among the men of science who
accepted Haller's views. It was demonstrated in this book
that in the human ovum not even a trace of the form of the
developed organism is present, but that its development
consists in a series of new formations. Wolff defended
the idea of a real evolution, an epigenesis, a becoming from
what is not present, as against the view of seeming evolution.
Haeckel says of Wolff's book that it “belongs, in spite
of its small size and awkward language, to the most
valuable writings in the whole field of biological literature.
...” Nevertheless, this remarkable book had at first no
success whatever. Although scientific studies, as a
result of the stimulus imparted by Linnaeus, flourished
mightily at that time, although botanists and zoologists were
soon counted no longer by dozens but by hundreds, yet no one
troubled himself about Wolff's
Theory of Generation.
The few, however, who had read it, held it to be
fundamentally wrong, and especially Haller. Although
Wolff proved by the most accurate observations the truth
of epigenesis, and disproved the current hypotheses of the
preformation doctrine, nevertheless the “exact”
physiologist Haller remained the most zealous follower of
the latter and rejected the correct teaching of Wolff with his
dictatorial edict: “There is no becoming”
(Nulla est epigenesis!).
With so much power did human thinking set
itself against a view, of which Haeckel (in his
Anthropogenesis)
remarks: “To-day we can hardly
any longer call this theory of epigenesis a theory,
because we have fully convinced ourselves of the
correctness of the fact, and can demonstrate it at any
moment with the help of the microscope.”
How
deep-rooted is the prejudice against the idea of evolution can
be seen at any moment by the objections which our philosophical
contemporaries make against it. Otto Liebmann, who, in his
Analysis of Reality
and his
Thoughts and Facts,
has subjected the fundamental
views of science to criticism, expresses himself in a
remarkable manner about the conception of evolution. In face of
the facts, he cannot deny the justice of the conception that
higher organisms proceed from lower. He therefore
endeavours to represent the range and importance of this
conception for the higher need of explanation as being as small
as possible. “Accepted, the theory of descent ... granted
that it be complete, that the great genealogical register of
Nature's organic beings lies open before us; and that, not as
an hypothesis, but as historically proven fact, what should we
then have? A gallery of ancestors, such as one finds also in
princely castles; only not as a fragment, but as a completed
whole.” This means that nothing of any consequence has
been accomplished towards the real explanation, when one
has shown how what appears later proceeds as a new formation
from what preceded.
Now
it is interesting to see how Liebmann's presuppositions lead
him yet again to the assumption that what arises on the road of
evolution was there already before its appearance. In the
recently published second part of his
Thoughts and Facts
he maintains: “It is true that for us, to whom the world
appears in the form of perception known as time, the seed is
there before the plant; begetting and conception come before
the animal that arises from them, and the development of the
embryo into a full-grown creature is a process of time and
drawn out in time to a certain length. In the timeless
world-being, on the contrary, which neither becomes nor passes
away, but is once and for all, maintaining itself
unchangeably amid the stream of happenings, and for which no
future, no past, but only an eternal present exists, this
before and after, this earlier and later, falls away entirely.
... That which unrolls itself for us in the course of time as
the slower or more rapidly passing succession of a series of
phases of development, is in the omnipresent, permanent
world-being a fixed law, neither coming into existence nor
passing away.”
The
connection of such philosophical conceptions with the
ideas of the various religious doctrines as to the creation may
be easily seen. That purposefully devised beings arise in
Nature, without there being some fundamental activity or
power which infuses that purposefulness into the beings in
question, is something that neither these religious
doctrines nor such philosophical thinkers as Liebmann
will admit. The view that accords with Nature follows out the
course of what happens, and sees beings arise which have the
quality of purposefulness, without this same purpose having
been a co-determinant in their production. The purposefulness
came about along with them; but the purpose did not co-operate
in their becoming.
[See note on Purposefulness and Purpose,
below.]
The religious mode of conception has
recourse to the Creator, who has created the creatures
purposefully according to his preconceived plan; Liebmann
turns to a timeless world-being, but he still makes that which
is purposeful be brought forth by the purpose. “The goal
or the purpose is here not later, and also not earlier than the
means; but the purpose helps it on in virtue of a timeless
necessity.”
(Thoughts and Facts,
pt. ii, p. 268.)
Liebmann is a good example of those philosophers who have
apparently freed themselves from the conceptions of faith, but
who still think altogether on the lines of such conceptions.
They profess that their thoughts are determined purely by
reasonable considerations, but none the less it is an innate
theological prejudice which gives the direction to their
thoughts.
Purposefulness and Purpose.
Those who would willingly
cling in faith to the existence of purposes in Nature, are
constantly emphasising the fact that Darwin's views do
not by any means exclude the idea of purpose, but rather make
full use thereof, inasmuch as they show how the linking of
causes and effects of necessity by themselves lead to the
arising of the purposeful. The important point, however, is not
whether or no one admits the existence of purposeful formations
in Nature, but whether one assumes or rejects the idea that the
purpose, the goal, co-operates as a cause in the
development of these formations. Anyone who makes this
assumption defends teleology, or the doctrine of purpose.
Whoever says, on the contrary, purpose is in no way whatever
operative in the production of the organic world; living
creatures come into existence according to necessary laws just
as do inorganic phenomena, and purposefulness is only there
because that which is not purposeful cannot maintain itself; it
is not the cause of what happens, but its consequence: he makes
confession of Darwinism. No heed is paid to this by
anyone who asserts, like Otto Liebmann, “Charles Darwin
is one of the greatest teleologists of the present day”
(Thoughts and Facts,
pt. i, p. 113). No, he is the
greatest anti-teleologist, because he would show to such minds
as Liebmann, if they understood him, that the purposeful can be
explained without assuming the action of operative purposes.
Reasoned reflection must therefore agree with Haeckel when he
says: “Either organisms have naturally
developed themselves, and in that case they must all
originate from the simplest common ancestral forms —
or that is not the case, the various species of
organisms have arisen independently of one another, and in that
case they can only have been created in a supernatural
manner, by a miracle. Natural evolution or supernatural
creation of species — we must choose between these two
possibilities, for there is no third!”
(Free Science and Free Teaching,
p. 9.) What has been proffered
by philosophers or scientists as such a third alternative
against the doctrine of natural evolution shows itself, on
closer examination, to be only a belief in creation which
more or less veils or denies its origin.
When we raise the question as to the origin of species in its
most important form, in that which concerns the origin of man,
there are only two answers possible. Either a
consciousness endowed with reason is not present prior to
its actual appearance in the world, but evolves as the
outcome of the nervous system concentrated in the brain; or
else an all-dominating world-reason exists before all other
beings, and so shapes matter that in man its own image comes
into being. Haeckel (in
Monism as the Link between Religion and Science,
p. 21) describes the becoming of the human
mind as follows: “As our human body has slowly and step
by step built itself up from a long series of vertebrate
ancestors, so the same thing holds good of our soul: as a
function of our brain it has developed itself step by step in
interaction with that organ. What we term for short the ‘human
soul’ is indeed only the sum-total of our feeling,
willing, and thinking — the sum-total of
physiological functions whose elementary organs consist
of the microscopic ganglionic cells of our brain. Comparative
anatomy and ontogeny show us how the marvellous structure
of the latter, of our human soul-organ, has built itself
upwards gradually in the course of millions of years out of the
brain-forms of the higher and lower vertebrates; while
comparative psychology shows us how, hand in hand
therewith, the very soul itself — as a function of the
brain — has evolved itself. The latter shows us also how
a lower form of soul activity is already present in the lowest
animals, in the unicellular protozoa, infusoria, and rhizopods.
Every scientist who, like myself, has observed through long
years the life-activity of these unicellular protista, is
positively convinced that they also possess a soul; this
‘cell-soul,’ too, consists of a sum of feelings,
representations, and volitions; the feeling, thinking, and
willing of our human soul is only different therefrom in
degree.”
The
totality of human soul-activities, which find their highest
expression in unitary self-consciousness,
corresponds to the complex structure of the human brain,
[Organs of Thought. Quite recently Paul Flechsig has
succeeded in proving that in one portion of the human organs of
thought, complicated structures are found which are not present
in other mammalia. These obviously are the organs of those
mental activities by which man is distinguished from the
animal.]
just as simple feeling and willing do to the
organisation of the protozoa. The progress of physiology, which
we owe to investigators like Goltz, Münk, Wernicke,
Edinger, Paul Flechsig, and others, enables us to-day to assign
particular soul-manifestations to definite parts of the brain
as their special functions. We recognise in four tracts of the
grey matter of the cortex the mediators of four kinds of
feeling: the sphere of bodily organic feeling in the
meso-cranum lobule, that of smell in the frontal lobule, that
of vision in the chief basal lobule, that of hearing in the
temple lobule. The thinking which connects and orders the
sensations has its apparatus between these four
“sense-foci.” Haeckel links the following remark to
the discussion of these latest physiological results:
“The four thought-foci, distinguished by peculiar and
highly complicated nerve-structure from the intervening
sense-foci, are the true
organs of thought,
the only real tools of our mental life”
(On our Present Knowledge as to the Origin of Man,
P-15).
Haeckel demands from the psychologists that they shall take
such results as these into account in their explanations about
the nature of the soul, and not build up a mere pseudo-science
composed of a fantastic metaphysic, of one-sided, so-called
inner observation of soul-events, uncritical comparison,
misunderstood perceptions, incomplete experiences,
speculative aberrations and religious dogmas. As against
the reproach that is cast by this view at the old-fashioned
psychology, we find in some philosophers and also in individual
scientists the assertion that there cannot in any case be
contained in the material processes of the brain that which we
class together as mind and spirit; for the material processes
in the areas of sense and thought are in no case
representations, feelings, and thoughts, but only material
phenomena. We cannot learn to know the real nature of thoughts
and feelings through external observation, but only
through inner experience, through purely mental
self-observation. Gustav Bunge, for instance, in his address
Vitalism and Mechanism,
p. 12, explains: “In
activity — therein lies the riddle of life. But we have
not acquired the conception of activity from observation
through the senses, but from self-observation, from the
observation of willing as it comes into our consciousness, as
it reveals itself to our inner sense.” Many thinkers see
the mark of a philosophical mind in the ability to rise to the
insight that it is a turning upside down of the right relation
of things, to endeavour to understand mental processes
from material ones.
Such objections point to a misunderstanding of the view of the
world which Haeckel represents. Anyone who has really
been saturated with the spirit of this view will never seek to
explore the laws of mental life by any other road than by inner
experience, by self-observation. The opponents of the
scientific mode of thought talk exactly as if its
supporters sought to discover the truths of logic,
ethics, aesthetics, and so forth, not by means of observing
mental phenomena as such, but from the results of
brain-anatomy. The caricature of the scientific
world-conception thus created by such opponents for themselves
is then termed materialism, and they are untiring in ever
repeating afresh that this view must be unproductive, because
it ignores the mental side of existence, or at least gives it a
lower place at the expense of the material. Otto Liebmann, whom
we may here cite once more, because his anti-scientific
conceptions are typical of the mode of thought of certain
philosophers and laymen, observes: “But granting,
however, that natural science had attained its goal, it would
then be in a position to show me accurately the
physico-organic reasons why I hold that the assertion
‘twice two are four’ is true and assert it, and the other
assertion ‘twice two are five’ is false and combat it, or why I
must, just at this moment, write these very lines on
paper the while I am entangled in the subjective belief that
this happens because I will to write them down on
account of their truth as assumed by me”
(Thoughts and Facts,
pt. ii, p. 294 et seq.). No scientific
thinker will ever be of opinion that bodily-organic reasons can
throw any light upon what, in the logical sense, is true or
false. Mental connections can only be recognised from the side
of the mental life. What is logically justified, must always be
decided by logic; what is artistically perfect, by the
aesthetic judgment. But it is an altogether different question
to inquire: How does logical thinking, or the aesthetic
judgment arise as a function of the brain? It is on this
question only that comparative physiology and brain-anatomy
have anything to say. And these show that the reasoning
consciousness does not exist in isolation for itself,
only utilising the human brain in order to express itself
through it, as the piano-player plays on the piano; but that
our mental powers are just as much functions of the
form-elements of our brain, as “every force is a function
of a material body” (Haeckel,
Anthropogenesis,
pt. ii„ p. 853).
The
essence of Monism consists in the assumption that all
occurrences in the world, from the simplest mechanical ones
upwards to the highest human intellectual creations, evolve
themselves naturally in the same sense, and that everything
which is called in for the explanation of appearances, must be
sought within that same world. Opposed to this view
stands Dualism, which regards the pure operation of
natural law as insufficient to explain appearances, and takes
refuge in a reasoning being ruling over the appearances from
above. Natural science, as has been shown, must reject this
dualism.
Now, however, it is urged from the side of philosophy that the
means at the disposal of science are insufficient to establish
a world-conception. From its own standpoint science was
entirely right in explaining the whole world-process as a chain
of causes and effects, in the sense of a purely mechanical
conformity to law; but behind these laws, nevertheless, there
is hidden the real cause, the universal world-reason, which
only avails itself of mechanical means in order to realise
higher, purposeful relations. Thus, for instance, Arthur Drews,
who follows in the path of Eduard von Hartmann, observes:
“Human works of art, too, are produced in a
mechanical manner, that is when one looks only at the
outward succession of single moments, without reflecting on the
fact that after all there is hidden behind all this only the
artist's thought; nevertheless one would rightly take that man
for a fool who would perchance contend that the work was
produced purely mechanically ... that which presents itself as
the inevitable effect of a cause, on that lower standpoint
which contents itself with merely gazing at the effects and
thus contemplates the entire process as it were from
behind, that very same thing reveals itself, when seen from
the front, in every case as the intended goal of the means
employed”
(German Speculation since Kant,
vol. ii, p. 287 et seq.). And Eduard von Hartmann himself remarks
about the struggle for existence which renders it
possible to explain living creatures naturally: “The
struggle for existence, and therewith the whole of
natural selection, is only the servant of the Idea, who
is obliged to perform the lower services in its
realisation, namely, the rough hewing and fitting of the stones
that the master-builder has measured out and typically
determined in advance according to their place in the great
building. To proclaim this selection in the struggle for
existence as the essentially adequate principle of explanation
of the evolution of the organic kingdom, would be on a par with
a day-labourer, who had worked with others in preparing the
stones in the building of Cologne Cathedral, declaring
himself to be the architect of that work of art”
(Philosophy of the Unconscious,
10th ed., vol. iii, p. 403).
If
these conceptions were justified, it would be the task of
philosophy to seek the artist behind the work of art. In fact,
philosophers have tried the most various and diverse dualistic
explanations to account for Cosmic processes. They have
constructed in thought certain entities, supposed to hover
behind the phenomena as the spirit of the artist rules behind
the work of art.
No
scientific consideration would be able to rob man of the
conviction that perceptible phenomena are guided by beings
outside the world, if he could find within his own
consciousness anything that pointed to such beings. What could
anatomy and physiology accomplish with their declaration that
soul-activities are functions of the brain, if
observation of these activities yielded anything which
could be regarded as a higher ground for an explanation? If the
philosopher were able to show that a universal world-reason
manifests itself in human reason, then all scientific
results would be powerless to refute such knowledge.
Now, however, the dualistic world-conception is disproved by
nothing more effectively than by the consideration of the
human mind. When I want to explain an external occurrence
— for instance, the motion of an elastic ball which has
been struck by another, I cannot stop short at the mere
observation, but must seek the law which determines the
direction of motion and velocity of the one ball from the
direction and velocity of the other. Mere observation cannot
furnish me with such a law, but only the linking together in
thought of what happens. Man, therefore, draws from his mind
the means of explaining that which presents itself to him
through observation. He must pass beyond the mere observation,
if he wants to comprehend it. Observation and thought are the
two sources of our knowledge about things; and that holds good
for all things and happenings, except only for the thinking
consciousness itself. To that we cannot add by any explanation
anything that does not lie already in the observation itself.
It yields us the laws for all other things; it yields us at the
same time its own laws also. If we want to demonstrate the
correctness of a natural law, we accomplish this by
distinguishing, arranging observations and perceptions,
and drawing conclusions — that is, we form conceptions
and ideas about the experiences in question with the help of
thinking. As to the correctness of the thinking, thought itself
alone decides. It is thus thought which, in regard to all that
happens in the world, carries us beyond mere observation,
though it does not carry us beyond itself.
This fact is incompatible with the dualistic world-conception.
The point which the supporters of this conception so often
emphasise, namely, that the manifestations of the
thinking consciousness are accessible to us through the inner
sense of introspection, while we only comprehend physical and
chemical happenings when we bring into the appropriate
connections the facts of observation through logical,
mathematical combination, and so on; in other words,
through the results of the psychological domain: this fact
is the very thing which they should never admit. For let us
for once draw the right conclusion from the knowledge that
observation transforms itself into self-observation when
we ascend from the scientific into the psychological
domain.
If
a universal world-reason underlay the phenomena of nature, or
some other spiritual primordial being (for instance,
Schopenhauer's will or von Hartmann's unconscious
spirit), then it follows that the human thinking spirit
must also be created by this world-being. An agreement of the
conceptions and ideas which the mind of man forms from
phenomena, with the actual laws proper to these occurrences,
would only be possible if the ideal world-artist called forth
in the human soul the laws according to which he had
previously created the entire world. But then man could only
know his own mental activity through observation of the
root-being by whom he is shaped, and not through
self-observation. Indeed, there could be no self-observation,
but only observation of the intentions and purposes of
the primordial being. Mathematics and logic, for example, ought
not to be developed by means of man's investigating the inner,
proper nature of mental connections, but by his deducing these
psychological truths from the intentions and purposes of the
eternal world-reason. If human understanding were only the
reflection of an eternal mind, then it could never possibly
ascertain its own laws through self-observation, but must needs
explain them from out of the eternal reason. But whenever such
an explanation has been attempted, it is simply human reason
which has been transferred to the world outside. When the
mystic believes that he rises to the contemplation of God by
sinking down into his own inner being, in reality he merely
sees his own spirit, which he makes into God; and when Eduard
von Hartmann speaks of ideas which utilise the laws of Nature
as their hodmen-helpers in order to shape the building of the
world, these ideas are only his own, by means of which he
explains the world. Because observation of the
manifestations of mind is self-observation,
therefore it follows that it is man's own spirit which
expresses itself in the mind, and not any external reason.
The
monistic doctrine of evolution, however, is in complete
agreement with the fact of self-observation. If the human soul
has evolved itself slowly and step by step along with the
organs of the soul out of lower conditions, then it is
self-evident that we can explain its development from below
scientifically, though we can discover the inner nature of that
which emerges from the complex structure of the human brain
only from the contemplation of this very nature itself. Had
spirit been always present in a form resembling the human, and
had it at last created its likeness in man alone, then we ought
to be able to deduce the human spirit from the All-spirit; but
if man's spirit has arisen as a new formation in the
course of natural evolution, then we can understand its origin
by following out its line of ancestry; we learn to know the
stage at which it has at last arrived when we contemplate
that spirit itself.
A
philosophy that understands itself, and turns its attention to
an unprejudiced contemplation of the human spirit, thus
yields a further proof of the correctness of the monistic
world-conception. It is, however, quite incompatible with
a dualistic natural science. (The further development and
detailed proof of a monistic philosophy, the basic ideas
of which I can only indicate here, I have given in my
The Philosophy of Freedom,
Berlin, 1894, Verlag Emil Felber.)
For
one who understands aright the monistic world-conception, all
the objections urged against it from the side of ethics lose
all significance. Haeckel has repeatedly pointed out the
injustice of such objections, and also called attention to the
fact that the assertion that scientific monism must needs lead
to ethical materialism, either rests upon a complete
misunderstanding of the former, or else aims at nothing more
than casting suspicion upon it.
Naturally monism regards human conduct only as a part of the
general happenings of the world.
[Human and Animal Psychology.
The merit of having proved that there is no
real contrast between the soul of man and that of animals, but
that the mental activities of man are linked to those of
animals as a higher form thereof in a perfectly natural chain
of development, belongs to George Romanes, who, in a
comprehensive work,
Mental Evolution in Animals
(vol. i) and
Mental Evolution in Man and the Origin of Human Faculties
(vol. ii), has shown, “that the
psychological barrier between animal and man has been
surmounted.”]
It makes that conduct just as little
dependent upon a so-called higher moral world-order, as it
makes the happenings in Nature dependent upon a supernatural
order. “The mechanical or monistic philosophy maintains
that, everywhere in the phenomena of human life, as in those of
the rest of nature, fixed and unalterable laws rule, that
everywhere there exists a necessary causal
connection, a causal nexus of appearances, and that in
accordance therewith the entire world knowable to us
constitutes a uniform whole, a 'monon.' It maintains further
that all phenomena are produced by mechanical
causes, not by preconceived purposive causes. There is
no such thing as a ‘free will’ in the ordinary sense.
On the contrary, those very phenomena which we have
accustomed ourselves to view as the freest and most
independent, the manifestations of the human will, appear in
the light of the monistic world-conception as subordinated to
just as rigid laws as any other phenomenon of nature”
(Haeckel,
Anthropogenesis,
p. 851 et seq.). It is
the monistic philosophy which first shows the phenomenon of
free will in the right light. As a bit cut out of the general
happening of the world, the human will stands under the same
laws as all other natural things and processes. It is
conditioned according to natural law. But inasmuch as the
monistic view denies the presence of higher, purposeful causes
in the course of Nature, it at the same time also declares the
will independent of such a higher world-order.
The
natural course of evolution leads the processes of Nature
upwards to human self-consciousness. On that level it leaves
man to himself; henceforward he can draw the impulses of his
action from his own spirit. If a universal world-reason were
ruling, then man also could not draw his goals from within
himself, but only from this eternal reason. In the monistic
sense man's action is hereafter determined by causal moments;
in the ethical sense it is not determined, because Nature as a
whole is determined not ethically but in accordance with
natural law. The preliminary stages of ethical conduct
are already to be found among the lower organisms. “Even
though later the moral foundations have in man developed
themselves much more highly, nevertheless their most ancient,
prehistoric source lies, as Darwin has shown, in the social
instincts of the animals” (Haeckel,
Monism,
p. 29).
Man's moral conduct is a product of evolution. The moral
instinct of animals perfects itself, like everything else in
Nature, by inheritance and adaptation, until man sets before
himself moral purposes and goals from out of his own spirit.
Moral goals appear not as predetermined by a supernatural
world-order, but as a new formation within the natural process.
Regarded ethically, “that only has purpose which man has
first endowed therewith, for only through the realisation of an
idea does anything purposeful arise. But only in man does the
idea become effective in a realistic sense. To the question,
What is man's task in life? Monism can only answer, that which
he sets himself. My mission in the world is no (ethically)
predetermined one; on the contrary, it is, at every moment,
that which I elect for myself. I do not enter on life's journey
with a fixed, settled line of march” (cp. my
The Philosophy of Freedom,
p. 172 et seq.). Dualism
demands submission to ethical commands derived from somewhere
or other. Monism throws man wholly upon himself. Man
receives ethical standards from no external world-being, but
only from the depths of his own being. The capacity for
creating for oneself ethical purposes may be called moral
phantasy. Thereby man elevates the ethical instincts of his
lower ancestors into moral action, as through his artistic
phantasy he reflects on a higher level in his works of art the
forms and occurrences of Nature.
The
philosophical considerations which result from the fact of
self-observation thus constitute no refutation, but rather an
important complement of the means of proof in favour of the
monistic world-conception, derived from comparative anatomy and
physiology.
The
famous pathologist, Rudolf Virchow,
[See note on Virchow and Darwin, below.]
has taken up a quite peculiar position
towards the monistic world-conception. After Haeckel had
delivered his address on
The Present Theory of Evolution in Relation to Science as a Whole
at the fiftieth congress of
German scientists and doctors, in which he ably expounded the
significance of the monistic world-conception for our
intellectual culture and also for the whole system of public
instruction, Virchow came forward four days later as his
opponent with the speech:
The Freedom of Science in the Modern State.
At first it seemed as if Virchow wanted
monism excluded from the schools only, because, according to
his view, the new doctrine was only an hypothesis and did not
represent a fact established by definite proofs. It certainly
seems remarkable that a modern scientist wants to exclude the
doctrine of evolution from school-teaching on the ostensible
ground of lack of unassailable proofs while at the same time
speaking in favour of Church dogma. Does not Virchow even say
(on p. 29 of the speech mentioned): “Every attempt to
transform our problems into set formula, to
introduce our suppositions as the basis of instruction,
especially the attempt simply to dispossess the Church and
replace its dogmas without more ado by a ‘descent-religion;’
yes, gentlemen, this attempt must fail entirely, and in its
frustration this attempt will also bring with it the greatest
dangers for the whole position of science!” One must
needs, however, here raise the question — meaningless for
every reasonable thinker — Have we more certain proofs
for the Church's dogmas than for the
“descent-religion?” But it results from the whole
tone and style in which Virchow spoke that he was much less
concerned about warding off the dangers which monism might
cause to the teaching of the young than about his opposition on
principle to Haeckel's world-conception as a whole. This
he has proved by his whole subsequent attitude. He has seized
upon every opportunity that seemed to him suitable to
combat the natural history of evolution and to repeat his
favourite phrase, “It is quite certain that man does
not descend from the ape.” At the twenty-fifth
anniversary of the German Anthropological Society, on 24th
August, 1894, he even went so far as to clothe this dictum in
the somewhat tactless words: “On the road of speculation
people have come to the ape theory; one might just as well have
arrived at an elephant theory or a sheep theory.” Of
course, this utterance has not the smallest sense in view of
the results of comparative zoology. “No
zoologist,” remarks Haeckel, “would
consider it possible that man could have descended from
the elephant or the sheep. For precisely these two mammals
happen to belong to the most specialised branches of hoofed
animals, an order of mammalia which stands in no sort of direct
connection with that of the apes or primates (excepting their
common descent from an ancestral form common to the entire
class).” Hard as it may be towards a meritorious
scientist, one can only characterise such utterances as
Virchow's as empty verbalism.
Virchow and Darwin. On 3rd October, 1898, Virchow
delivered the second of the Huxley Lectures in the
Charing Cross Hospital Medical School, in London, wherein he
said: “I venture to assume that such a duty would not
have been assigned to me if those who did so had not known how
deep the feeling of veneration for Huxley is in my soul, if
they had not seen how I have recognised his achievements from
the first pioneer publications of the deceased master, and how
greatly I have valued the friendship which he bestowed upon me
personally.” Now, these pioneer publications of Huxley's
mean precisely the first great step towards the building up of
the theory of man's descent from the ape, which Virchow
combats, and about which, moreover, in his Huxley address,
The more recent Advances of Science, he has nothing more
to say than a few words, which are wholly meaningless in face
of the present position of this question: “One may
think as one chooses about the origin of man, the
conviction as to the fundamental coincidence of the human and
the animal organisation is at present generally accepted
...” etc.
In
combating the theory of descent, Virchow follows quite peculiar
tactics. He demands unassailable proofs for this theory. But as
soon as natural science discovers anything which is
capable of enriching the chain of proofs with a fresh link, he
seeks to weaken its probatory force in every way. The theory of
descent sees in the famous skulls of Neanderthal, Spy,
etc., isolated palaeontological remains of extinct races of
lower men, which form a transition-link between the ape-like
ancestor of man (Pithecanthropus) and the lower human races of
the present day. Virchow declares these skulls to be abnormal,
diseased formations, pathological productions. He even
developed this contention in the direction of maintaining that
all deviations from the fixed organic root-forms must be
regarded as pathological formations. If, then, by artificial
breeding we produce table-fruit from wild fruit, we have only
produced a diseased object in Nature. One cannot prove more
effectively the thesis of Virchow (hostile to any theory of
evolution), “The plan of organisation is unalterable
within the species, kind does not depart from kind,” than
by declaring that what shows plainly how kind departs from
kind, is not a healthy, natural product of evolution, but a
diseased formation. Quite in accord with this attitude
of Virchow's to the theory of descent were, further, his
assertions in regard to the skeleton remains of the man-ape
(Pithecanthropus erectus),
which Eugen Dubois found in Java in 1894.
It
is true that these remains — the top of the skull, a
thigh-bone, and some teeth — were incomplete; and a
debate that was most interesting arose about them in the
Zoological Congress at Leyden. Out of twelve zoologists,
three were of opinion that the remains were those of an ape,
three that they were those of a human being, while six defended
the view that they belonged to an extinct transition
form, between man and ape. Dubois set out in a most
lucid manner the relation of this intermediate link between man
and ape, on the one hand to the lower races of humanity,
on the other to the known anthropoid apes. Virchow declared
that the skull and the thigh-bone did not belong together; but
that the former came from an ape, the latter from a human
being. This assertion was refuted by well-informed
palaeontologists, who, on the basis of the conscientious report
of the find, expressed themselves as of opinion that not the
smallest doubt could exist as to the origin of the bony remains
from one and the same individual. Virchow tried to prove that
the thigh-bone could only have come from a man, from the
presence of a bony outgrowth which could only proceed
from an illness that had been cured through careful human
nursing. As against that, the palaeontologist Marsh
showed that similar bony outgrowths occur also in wild
apes. A third assertion of Virchow's, that the deep groove
between the upper edge of the eye sockets and the low roof of
the skull in Pithecanthropus bore witness to its simian
nature, was refuted by the palaeontologist Nehring's
showing that the same formation existed in a human skull
from Santos in Brazil.
Virchow's fight against the evolution doctrine appears indeed
somewhat of a riddle when one reflects that this investigator,
at the beginning of his career, before the publication
of Darwin's
Origin of Species,
defended the doctrine of
the mechanical basis of all vital activity. In Würzburg,
where Virchow taught from 1848 to 1856, Haeckel sat
“reverentially at his feet and first heard with
enthusiasm from him that clear and simple doctrine.” But
Virchow fights against the doctrine of transformation created
by Darwin, which furnishes an all-embracing principle of
explanation of that doctrine. When, in the face of the facts of
palaeontology, of comparative anatomy and physiology, he
constantly emphasises that “definite proof”
is lacking, one can only point out, on the other side, that
knowledge of the facts alone does indeed not suffice for the
recognition of the doctrine of evolution, but there is needed
in addition — as Haeckel remarks — a
“philosophical understanding”
as well. “The unshakable structure of true monistic
science arises only through the most intimate interaction
and mutual penetration of philosophy and experience”
(Haeckel,
Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte,
34, Vortrag). In
any case, the campaign which Virchow has carried on for many
years past against the doctrine of descent, with the applause
of theological and other reactionaries, is more dangerous than
all the mischief which a “descent-religion” can
cause in unripe heads. A technical discussion on the
point with Virchow is made difficult by the fact that,
fundamentally, he remains standing on a bare negation, and in
general does not bring forward any specific technical
objections against the doctrine of evolution.
Other scientific opponents of Haeckel's make it easier for us
to attain clearness in regard to them because they give the
reasons for their opposition, and we can thus recognise the
mistakes in their inferences. Among these are to be reckoned
Wilhelm His and Alexander Goette.
His
made his appearance in the year 1868 with his
Researches as to the First Beginnings of the Vertebrate Body.
His attack was primarily directed against the doctrine that the
form-development of a higher organism from the first germ to
the fully-developed condition can be explained from the
evolution of the type. We ought not, according to him, to
explain this development by regarding it as the outcome of the
generations from which the single organism descends through
inheritance and adaptation, but we should seek in the
individual organism itself the mechanical causes of its
becoming, without regard to comparative anatomy and ancestral
history. His starts from the view that the germ,
conceived as a uniform surface, grows unequally at
different spots, and he asserts that in consequence of
this unequal growth the complex structure of the organism
results in the course of development. He says: “Take a
simple layer and imagine that it possesses at different places
a different impulse to enlargement. One will then be able to
develop from purely mathematical and mechanical laws the
condition in which the formation must find itself after a
certain time. Its successive forms will accurately correspond
to the stages of development which the individual
organism runs through from the germ to the perfected
condition. Thus we do not need to go beyond the
consideration of the individual organism in order to understand
its development, but can deduce this from the mechanical law of
growth.
“All formation, whether consisting in cleavage, in
the formation of folds, or in complete separation, follows as a
consequence from this fundamental law.” The law of growth
brings into existence the two pairs of limbs as follows:
“Their disposition is determined, like the four corners
of a letter, by the crossing of four folds which limit and
bound the body.” His rejects any help drawn from the
history of the species, with the following justification:
“When the history of development for any given form has
thoroughly fulfilled the task of its physiological deduction,
then it may rightly say of itself that it has explained this
form as an individual form” (cp. His,
Unsere Körperform und das physiologische Problem ihrer
Entstehung).
In reality, however, nothing whatever has been
accomplished by such an explanation. For the question still
remains: Why do different forces of growth work at
different spots in the germ? They are simply assumed by His to
exist. The explanation can only be seen in the fact that the
relations of growth of the individual parts of the germ have
been transmitted by inheritance from the ancestral
animals, that therefore the individual organism runs through
the successive stages of its development because the changes
which its forefathers have undergone through long ages
continue to operate as the cause of its individual
becoming.
To
what consequences the view of His leads may best be seen from
his theory as to the orbital lobule, by which the so-called
“rudimentary organs” of the organism were to be
explained. These are parts which are present in the organism
without possessing any sort of significance for its life. Thus
man has a fold of skin at the inner corner of his eye which is
without any purpose for the functions of the organ of sight. He
possesses also muscles corresponding to those by which certain
animals can move their ears at will. Yet most people cannot
move their ears. Some animals possess eyes which are covered
over with a skin and thus cannot serve for seeing. His explains
these organs as being such, to which “up to the present
it has not been possible to assign any physiological role,
analogous to the snippets, which, in cutting out a dress,
cannot be avoided even with the most economical use of the
stuff.” The evolution theory gives the only possible
explanation of them. They are inherited from remote ancestors,
in whom they subserved a useful purpose. Animals which
to-day live underground and have no seeing eyes, descend from
such ancestors as once lived in the light and needed eyes. In
the course of many generations the conditions of life of such
an organic stock have changed. The organisms have adapted
themselves to the new conditions in which they can dispense
with organs of sight. But these organs remain as heirlooms from
an earlier stage of evolution; only in the course of time
they have become atrophied, because they have not been used.
These rudimentary organs
[Purposeless organs. As to
these organs Haeckel observes in his book
Die Welträtsel,
p. 306: “All higher animals and
plants, indeed all those organisms whose bodies are not quite
simply built, but are composed of several organs working
purposefully together, reveal on attentive examination a number
of useless or ineffective, yes, even of dangerous and harmful,
arrangements. ... The explanation of these purposeless
arrangements is quite simply given by the theory of descent. It
shows that these rudimentary organs are atrophied, and
that by want of use. ... The blind struggle for existence
between the organs conditions just as much their historical
destruction, as it originally caused their arising and
development.”]
form one of the strongest means of proof for the
natural theory of evolution. If any deliberate intentions
whatever had ruled in the building up of an organic form,
whence came these purposeless parts? There is no other possible
explanation of them, except that in the course of many
generations they have gradually fallen into disuse.
Alexander Goette, also, is of opinion that it is unnecessary to
explain the developmental stages of the individual organism by
the roundabout road through the history of the species. He
deduces the shaping of the organism from a “law of
form” which must superadd itself to the physical and
chemical processes of matter in order to form the living
creature. He endeavoured to defend this standpoint exhaustively
in his Entwickelungs-geschichte der Unke (1875).
“The essence of development consists in the complete but
gradual introduction into the existence of certain natural
bodies of a new moment, determined from without, viz., that of
the law of form.” Since the law of form is supposed to
superadd itself from without to the mechanical and physical
properties of matter, and not to develop itself from these
properties, it can be nothing else but an immaterial idea, and
we have nothing given us therein which is substantially
different from the creative thoughts, which, according to the
dualistic world-conception, underlie organic forms. It is
supposed to be a motive-power existing outside of organised
matter and causing its development. That means, it employs the
laws of matter as “helpers,” just like Eduard von
Hartmann's idea. Goette is forced to call in the help of this
“law of form,” because he believes that “the
individual developmental history of organisms”
alone explains and lies at the basis of their whole shaping.
Whoever denies that the true causes of the development of the
individual being are an historical result of its
ancestral development, will be driven of necessity to have
recourse to such ideal causes lying outside of
matter.
Weighty evidence against such attempts to introduce ideal
formative forces into the developmental history of the
individual, is afforded by the achievements of those
investigators who have really explained the forms of
higher living creatures on the assumption that these forms are
the hereditary repetition of innumerable historical changes in
the history of the species, which have occurred during long
ages. A striking example in this respect is the
“vertebral theory of the skull-bones,” already
dimly anticipated by Goethe and Oken, but first set in the
right light by Carl Gegenbauer on the basis of the theory of
descent. He demonstrated that the skull of the higher
vertebrates, and also that of man, has arisen from the gradual
transformation of a “root-skull” whose form is
still preserved by the “root-fishes,” or primordial
gastrea, in the formation of the head. Supported by such
results, Gegenbauer therefore remarks rightly: “The
descent theory will likewise find a touch-stone in comparative
anatomy. Hitherto there existed no observation in
comparative anatomy which contradicts it; all
observations rather lead us towards it. Thus that theory will
receive back from comparative anatomy what it gave to its
method: clearness and certainty” (cp. the
Introduction to Gegenbauer's Vergleichende Anatomie).
The descent theory has directed science to seek for the real
causes of the individual development of each organism in
its ancestry; and natural science on this road replaces the
ideal laws of development which might be supposed to superpose
themselves on organic matter, by the actual facts of the
ancestral history, which continue to operate in the individual
creature as formative forces.
Under the influence of the theory of descent, science is ever
drawing nearer to that great goal which one of the greatest
scientists of the century, Karl Ernst von Baer, has depicted in
the words: “It is one fundamental thought which runs
through all forms and stages of animal evolution and dominates
all particular conditions. It is the same fundamental
thought which gathered together the scattered masses of the
spheres in universal space and formed them into solar systems;
the same thought caused the disintegrated dust on the surface
of the planet to sprout forth into living forms. But this
thought is nothing else but Life itself, and the words and
syllables wherein it expresses itself are the various forms of
that which lives.” Another utterance of Baer's gives the
same conception in another form: “To many another will a
prize fall. But the palm will be won by the fortunate man for
whom it is reserved to trace back the formative energies of the
animal body to the general forces and vital functions of the
universe as a whole.”
It
is these same general forces of Nature which cause the stone
lying on an inclined plane to roll downwards, which also,
through evolution, cause one organic form to arise from
another. The characteristics which a given form acquires
through many generations by adaptation, it hands on by heredity
to its descendants. That which an organism unfolds to-day, from
within outwards, from its germinal dispositions, had developed
itself outwardly in its ancestors in mechanical struggle with
the rest of the forces of Nature. In order to hold this view
firmly it is doubtless necessary to assume that the formations
acquired in this external struggle should be actually
transmitted by heredity. Hence the whole doctrine of evolution
is called in question by the view, defended especially by
August Weismann, that acquired characteristics are not
inherited. He is of opinion that no external change which has
occurred in an organism can be transmitted to its offspring,
but that only can be inherited which is predetermined by
some original disposition in the germ. In the germ-cells of
organisms innumerable possibilities of development are
held to lie. Accordingly, organic forms can vary in the course
of reproduction. A new form arises when among the descendants
possibilities of development come to unfoldment other than in
the ancestors.
From among the ever new forms arising in this way, those will
survive which can best maintain the struggle for existence.
Forms unequal to the struggle will perish. When out of a
possibility of evolution a form develops itself which is
specially effective in the battle of competition, then this
form will reproduce itself; when that is not the case, it must
perish. One sees that here causes operating on the
organism from without are entirely eliminated. The reasons why
the forms change lie in the germ. And the struggle for
existence selects from among the forms coming into existence
from the most diverse germ-dispositions those which are the
fittest. The special characteristic of an organism does not
lead us up to a change which has occurred in its ancestors as
its cause, but to a disposition in the germ of that ancestor.
Since, therefore, nothing can be effected from outside in the
upbuilding of organic forms, it follows that already in the
germ of the root-form, from which a race began its development,
there must have lain the dispositions for the succeeding
generations.
We
find ourselves once more in face of a doctrine of Chinese boxes
one within another. Weismann conceives of the progressive
process through which the germs bring about evolution, as
a material process. When an organism develops, one
portion of the germ-mass out of which it evolves is solely
employed in forming a fresh germ for the sake of further
reproduction. In the germ-mass of a descendant,
therefore, a part of that of the parents is present, in the
germ-mass of the parents a portion of that of the grandparents,
and so on backwards to the root-form. Hence through all
organisms developing one from another there is maintained an
originally present germ-substance. This is Weismann's theory of
the continuity and immortality of the germ-plasm. He believes
himself to be forced to this view, because numerous facts
appear to him to contradict the assumption of the inheritance
of acquired characteristics. As one specially noteworthy fact
he cites the presence of the workers, who are incapable of
reproduction, among the communal insects — bees, ants,
and termites. These workers are not developed from special
eggs, but from the same as those from which spring the
fruitful individuals. If the female larvae of these
animals are very richly and nourishingly fed, they then lay
eggs from which queens or males proceed. If the feeding is less
generous, the result is the production of sterile workers. Now,
it is very easy and obvious to seek the cause of this
unfruitfulness simply in the less effective nourishment.
This view is represented among others by Herbert Spencer, the
English thinker, who has constructed a philosophical
world-conception on the basis of natural evolution. Weismann
holds this view to be mistaken. For in the worker-bee the
reproductive organs do not merely remain behindhand in their
development, but they actually become rudimentary; they
do not possess a large proportion of the parts necessary for
reproduction. But now, he contends, one can demonstrate in the
case of other insects that defective nourishment in no way
entails such a degeneration of organs. Flies are insects
related to bees. Weismann reared the eggs laid by a female
bluebottle in two separate batches, and fed the one
plentifully, the other meagrely. The latter grew slowly
and remained strikingly small. But they reproduced themselves.
Hence it appears that in flies insufficient nourishment does
not produce sterility. But then it follows also that in the
root-insect, the common ancestral form, which in line
with the evolution doctrine must be assumed for the allied
species of bees and flies, this peculiarity of being rendered
unfruitful by insufficient nourishment cannot have existed. On
the contrary, this unfruitfulness must be an acquired
characteristic of the bees. But at the same time there can
be no question of any inheritance of this peculiarity, for the
workers which have acquired it do not reproduce themselves, and
accordingly, therefore, can pass on nothing by heredity. Hence
the cause must be sought for in the bee-germ itself, why at one
time queens and at another workers are developed. The
external influence of insufficient nourishment can accomplish
nothing, because it is not inherited. It can only act as a
stimulus, which brings to development the
preformed disposition in the germ.
Through the generalisation of these and similar results,
Weismann comes to the conclusion: “The external
influence is never the real cause of the difference, but plays
the part of the stimulus, which decides which of the available
dispositions shall come to development. The real cause,
however, always lies in preformed changes of the body itself,
and these — since they are constantly purposeful —
can be referred in their development only to processes of
selection,” to the selection of the fittest in the
struggle for existence. The struggle for existence (selection)
“alone is the guiding and leading principle in the
development of the world of organisms”
(Aüssere Einflüsse der Entwickelungsreize,
p. 49). The English
investigators Francis Galton and Alfred Russel Wallace hold the
same view as Weismann as to the non-inheritance of acquired
characteristics and the omnipotence of selection.
The
facts which these investigators advance are certainly in need
of explanation. But they cannot receive such an explanation in
the direction indicated by Weismann without abandoning the
entire monistic doctrine of evolution. But the objections urged
against the inheritance of acquired characteristics are the
least capable of driving us to such a step. For one only needs
to consider the development of the instincts in the
higher animals to convince oneself of the fact that such
inheritance does occur. Look, for instance, at the
development of our domestic animals. Some of them, as a
consequence of living together with men, have developed mental
capacities which cannot even be mentioned in connection with
their wild ancestors. Yet these capacities can certainly
not proceed from an inner disposition. For human influence,
human training, comes to these animals as something wholly
external. How could an inner disposition possibly come to
meet exactly an arbitrarily determined action of man? And yet
training becomes instinct, and this is inherited by the
descendants. Such an example cannot be refuted. And countless
others of the same kind can be found. Thus the fact of the
inheritance of acquired characteristics remains such; and
we must hope that further investigations will bring the
apparently contradictory observations of Weismann and his
followers into harmony with monism.
Fundamentally, Weismann has only stopped half-way to dualism.
His inner causes of evolution only have a meaning when they are
ideally conceived. For, if they were material
processes in the germ-plasm, it would be unintelligible why
these material processes and not those of external
happenings should continue to operate in the process of
heredity. Another investigator of the present day is more
logical than Weismann — namely, J. Reinke, who, in his
recently published book,
Die Welt als That; Umrisse einer Weltansicht auf
naturwissenschaftlicher Grundlage,
has taken unreservedly the leap into the dualistic camp. He declares
that a living creature can never build itself up from out of the
physical and chemical forces of organic substances. “Life
does not consist in the chemical properties of a
combination, or a number of combinations. Just as from the
properties of brass and glass there does not yet emerge the
possibility of the production of the microscope, so
little does the origination of the cell follow from the
properties of albumen, carbohydrates, fats, lecithin,
Cholesterin, etc.” (p. 178 of the above-named work).
There must be present besides the material forces also
spiritual forces, or at least forces of another order, which
give the former their direction, and so regulate their combined
action that the organism results therefrom. These forces of
another order Reinke calls “dominants.” “In
the union of the dominants with the energies — the
operations of the physical and chemical forces — there
unveils itself to us a spiritualisation of Nature; in this mode
of conceiving things culminates my scientific confession of
faith” (p. 455). It is now only logical that Reinke also
assumes a universal world-reason, which originally brought the
purely physical and chemical forces into the relation in which
they are operative in organic beings.
Reinke endeavours to escape from the charge that through such a
reason working from outside upon the material forces, the laws
which hold good in the inorganic kingdom are rendered powerless
for the organic world, by saying: “The universal reason,
as also the dominants, make use of the mechanical forces; they
actualise their creations only by the help of these forces. The
attitude of the world-reason coincides with that of a
mechanician, who also lets the natural forces do their
work after he has imparted to them their direction.” But
with this statement the kind of conformity to law which
expresses itself in mechanical facts is once more declared to
be the helper of a higher kind of law, in the sense of Eduard
von Hartmann.
Goette's law of form, Weismann's inner causes of development,
Reinke's dominants are fundamentally just nothing else but
derivatives of the thoughts of the world-creator who
builds according to plan. As soon as one forsakes the clear and
simple mode of explanation of the monistic
world-conception, one inevitably falls a victim to
mystical-religious conceptions, and of such Haeckel's saying
holds good, that “then it is better to assume the
mysterious creation of the individual species”
(Uber unsere gegenwärtige Kenntniss vom Ursprung
des Menschen, p. 30).
Besides those opponents of monism who are of opinion that the
contemplation of the phenomena of the world leads up to
spiritual beings, who are independent of material phenomena,
there are still others
[Other opponents of Haeckel.
Here we can only speak of such objections to Haeckel's doctrines
as are, to a certain extent, typical and have their origin in
antiquated, although still always influential, circles of
thought. The numerous “refutations” of Haeckel, which present
themselves merely as variants of the main objections cited,
have to be left unnoticed equally with those which Haeckel
himself has disposed of in his book on
Die Welträtsel,
by saying to these valiant warriors,
“Acquire by a diligent five years' study of
natural science, and in particular of anthropology
(especially the anatomy and the physiology of the brain!), that
indispensable empirical prior knowledge of the
facts, which you still lack entirely.”]
who seek to save
the domain of a supernatural order hovering over the natural
one, by denying entirely to man's power of knowing the capacity
to understand the ultimate grounds of the world-happenings.
[Limits of knowledge. In my
Philosophie der Freiheit
I have shown the misunderstanding upon which is based the
assumption of limits of knowledge.]
The ideas of these opponents have found their most eloquent spokesman
in Du Bois-Reymond. His famous “Ignorabimus” speech,
delivered at the Forty-fifth Congress of German Scientists and
Doctors (1872), is the expression of their confession of
faith. In this address Du Bois-Reymond describes as the highest
goal of the scientist the explanation of all
world-happenings, therefore also of human thinking and
feeling, by mechanical processes. If some day we shall succeed
in saying how the parts of our brain lie and move when we have
a definite thought or feeling, then the goal of natural
explanation will have been reached. We can get no further. But,
in Du Bois-Reymond's view, we have not therewith understood in
what the nature of our spirit consists. “It seems,
indeed, on superficial examination, as though, through the
knowledge of the material processes in the brain, certain
mental processes and dispositions might become intelligible.
Among such I reckon memory, the flow and association of ideas,
the consequences of practice, the specific talents, and so on.
A minimum of reflection, however, shows that this is a
delusion. Only with regard to certain inner conditions of the
mental life, which are somehow of like significance with the
outer ones through sense impressions, shall we thus be
instructed, not with regard to the coming about of the mental
life through these conditions.
“What thinkable connection exists between the definite
movements of definite atoms in my brain on the one hand; and,
on the other, those for me primary, not further definable, not
to be denied facts: ‘I feel pain, I feel pleasure, I taste
something sweet, smell the odour of roses, hear the sound of an
organ, see red,’ and the equally immediate certainty flowing
therefrom, ‘therefore I am!’? It is just entirely and for ever
incomprehensible that it should not be indifferent to a number
of carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen, etc., atoms, how they
lie and move, how they lay and moved, how they will lie and
move.”
But
who asked Du Bois-Reymond first to expel mind from matter, in
order then to be able to observe that mind is not in matter?
The simple attraction and repulsion of the tiniest particle of
matter is force, therefore a spiritual cause proceeding from
the substance. From the simplest forces we see the
complicated human mind building itself up in a series of
developments; and we understand it from this its becoming.
“The problem of the origin and nature of consciousness is
only a special case of the general problem in chief: that of
the connection of matter and force” (Haeckel,
Freie Wissenschaft and freie Lehre,
p. 80). As a matter of fact, the problem is not at all, How does
mind arise out of mindless matter? but, How does the more
complex mind develop itself out of the simplest mental (or
spiritual) actions of matter — out of attraction and
repulsion? In the preface which Du Bois-Reymond has written to
the reprint of his “Ignorabimus” speech, he
recommends to those who are not contented with his declaration
of the unknowableness of the ultimate grounds of being, that
they should try to get along with the faith-conceptions
of the supernatural view of the world. “Let them, then,
make a trial of the only other way of escape, that of
supernaturalism. Only that where supernaturalism begins,
science ceases.” But such a confession as that of Du
Bois-Reymond will always open the doors wide to
supernaturalism. For whenever one sets a limit to the knowledge
of the human mind, there it will surely start the beginning of
its belief in the “no longer knowable.”
There is only one salvation from the belief in a supernatural
world-order, and that is the monistic insight that all grounds
of explanation for the phenomena of the world lie also
within the domain of these phenomena. This insight can only be
given by a philosophy which stands in the most intimate harmony
with the modern doctrine of evolution.
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