Ernst Haeckel

“ If a distinguished man, be he never so remarkable for uncommon power of work and universal gifts, passes the whole day in the friction of political party-struggles, and throws himself as well into all the petty and wearisome details of daily civic life, it is impossible for him to maintain the requisite feeling for the progress of science—particularly when it advances so rapidly and incessantly as is the case in our day. It is therefore quite intelligible that Virchow should soon have lost this feeling, and in the course of the last two decades have become more and more estranged from science. ”

“ Never, in the whole of history, has true science risen to such an astounding height as it has at the beginning of the twentieth century. Never before did the human mind penetrate so deeply into the darkest mysteries of nature, never did it rise so high to a sense of the unity of nature and make such practical use of its knowledge. These brilliant triumphs of modern civilization have, however, only been made possible by the various forces co-operating in a vast division of labor, and by the great nations utilizing their resources zealously for the attainment of the common end. ”

“ Consequently, the so-called “history of the world”—that is, the brief period of a few thousand years which measures the duration of civilization—is an evanescently short episode in the long course of organic evolution, just as this, in turn, is merely a small portion of the history of our planetary system; and as our mother-earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. ”

“ Whether we marvel at the majesty of the lofty mountains or the magic world of the sea, whether with the telescope we explore the infinitely great wonders of the starry heaven, or with the microscope the yet more surprising wonders of a life infinitely small, everywhere does Divine Nature open up to us an inexhaustible fountain of aesthetic enjoyment. Blind and insensible have the great majority of mankind hitherto wandered through this glorious wonderland of a world ”

“ The truth can but struggle against it.... Nowhere do we find so much and such systematic lying as in Catholic science, and in the history of the Church and the papacy; nowhere are the lies and misrepresentations more pernicious than here; they have become part and parcel of the Catholic religion. The facts of history tell plainly enough that the papacy is anything but a Divine institution; that it has brought more curses and ruin, more bloody turmoil and profanation, into humanity's holiest of holies, religion, than any other power in the world. ”

“ But if the doctrine be true, then the recognition of the animal origin and pedigree of the human race will necessarily affect more deeply than any other progress of the human mind the views we form of all human relations, and the aims of all human science. It must sooner or later produce a complete revolution in the conception entertained by man of the entire universe. I am firmly convinced that in future this immense advance in our knowledge will be regarded as the beginning of a new period of the development of Mankind. ”

“ At this point the science of human evolution has a direct and profound bearing on the foundations of philosophy. Modern anthropology has, by its astounding discoveries during the second half of the nineteenth century, compelled us to take a completely monistic view of life. Our bodily structure and its life, our embryonic development and our evolution as a species, teach us that the same laws of nature rule in the life of man as in the rest of the universe. ”

“ Are not the Semitic myth of Adam and Eve, the old Greek legend of Paris and Helena, and so many other famous traditions, only the poetic expression of the vast influence that love and sexual selection have exercised over the course of history ever since the differentiation of the sexes? All the other passions that agitate the heart of man are far outstripped in their joint influence by this sense-inflaming and mind-benumbing Eros. On the one hand, we look to love with gratitude as the source of the greatest artistic achievements—the noblest creations of poetry, plastic art, and music ”

“ When viewed in this light, the Theory of Descent as applied to man opens up the most encouraging prospects for the future, and frees us from all those anxious fears which have been the scarecrows of our opponents.
We can even now foresee with certainty that the complete victory of our Theory of Development will bear immensely rich fruits—fruits which have no equal in the whole history of the civilization of mankind. Its first and most direct result—the complete reform of Biology—will necessarily be followed by a still more important and fruitful reform of Anthropology. ”

“ Every year increases my belief that the dualism of Kant and the prevalent metaphysical school must give way to the monism of Goethe and the rising pantheistic tendency. In this we do not lose sight of our ideals. On the contrary, our "realist philosophy of life" teaches us that they are rooted deep in human nature. While occupying ourselves with the ideal world in art and poetry, and cultivating the play of emotion, we persist, nevertheless, in thinking that the real world, the object of science, can be truly known only by experience and pure reason. ”

“ The end of all the history of creation is thus arrived at and the series of revolutions of the earth is closed. Man, the child and image of God, gives him so much to do, causes him so much pleasure and trouble, that he is wearied no longer, and therefore need not undertake a new creation. It is clear that if, according to Agassiz, we once assign to the Creator entirely human attributes and qualities, and regard his work of creation as entirely analogous to human creative activity, we are necessarily obliged to admit such utterly absurd inferences as those just stated. ”

“ For as all chemistry, viewed as a system of doctrine, rests solely on such hypotheses, it may be indeed a subject of investigation but not of teaching.
Having thus convinced ourselves that chemistry as well as physics, those "exact sciences," those "mechanical" bases of all other sciences, rest on mere unproved hypotheses, and so must not be taught, we may make short work of the other faculties. For they collectively are more or less historical sciences and dispense wholly or in part with even those half-exact, fundamental principles on which physics and chemistry are based. ”

“ Ever clearer does it become that all the wonderful phenomena of nature around us, organic as well as inorganic, are only various products of one and the same original force, various combinations of one and the same primitive matter. Ever more irresistibly is it borne in upon us that even the human soul is but an insignificant part of the all-embracing "world-soul"; just as the human body is only a small individual fraction of the great organised physical world. ”

“ In that theory we have the key to “the question of all questions,” to the great enigma of “the place of man in nature,” and of his natural development. If we are in a position to-day to recognize the sovereignty of the law of evolution—and, indeed, of a monistic evolution—in every province of nature, and to use it, in conjunction with the law of substance, for a simple interpretation of all natural phenomena, we owe it chiefly to those three distinguished naturalists; they shine as three stars of the first magnitude amid all the great men of the century. ”

“ If we glance for a moment at the various fields in which the idea of evolution is scientifically applied we find that, firstly, the whole universe is conceived as a unity; secondly, our earth; thirdly, organic life on the earth; fourthly, man, as its highest product; and fifthly, the soul, as a special immaterial entity. Thus we have, in historical succession, the evolutionary research of cosmology, geology, biology, anthropology, and psychology. ”

“ Our Theory of Development explains the origin of man and the course of his historical development in the only natural manner. We see in his gradually ascensive development out of the lower vertebrata, the greatest triumph of humanity over the whole of the rest of Nature. We are proud of having so immensely outstripped our lower animal ancestors, and derive from it the consoling assurance that in future also, mankind, as a whole, will follow the glorious career of progressive development, and attain a still higher degree of mental perfection. ”

“ Such a conception of an immaterial force, which at the first creates matter, is an article of faith which has nothing whatever to do with human science. Where faith commences, science ends. Both these arts of the human mind must be strictly kept apart from each other. Faith has its origin in the poetic imagination; knowledge, on the other hand, originates in the reasoning intelligence of man. Science has to pluck the blessed fruits from the tree of knowledge, unconcerned whether these conquests trench upon the poetical imaginings of faith or not. ”

“ The astonishment with which we gaze upon the starry heavens and the microscopic life in a drop of water, the awe with which we trace the marvellous working of energy in the motion of matter, the reverence with which we grasp the universal dominance of the law of substance throughout the universe—all these are part of our emotional life, falling under the heading of “natural religion.” ”

“ I have been unable to reconcile belief in the immortality of the soul and the freedom of the will with my psychological experiences, and I have been just as unable to discover throughout the whole world a single trace of a moral order or a beneficent providence. If it is true that an intelligent Deity rules the world, he cannot be a God of love, but an all-powerful demon, whose constant entertainment is an eternal and merciless play of being and becoming, building up and destroying. ”

“ Every one who has attentively followed his occasional utterances on the theory of descent during the last decade with an unprejudiced eye and an unbiassed judgment, must be convinced that he fundamentally rejects it. Still, his dissent has always been so obscured, and his judgment on Darwinism in particular so wrapped in ambiguities, that an opportune conversion to the opposite side seemed not impossible; and many, even among those who stood near to Virchow—his friends and disciples—did not know to what point he was in fact an opponent of the evolution hypothesis in general. ”