Ernst Haeckel

“ For the moment, I will merely recall the fact that in Berlin, the "metropolis of intelligence," as it has been called, the theory of evolution, now generally accepted, met with a more stubborn resistance than in most of our other leading educational centres, and that this opposition was due above all to the powerful authority of Virchow.
We can only glance briefly here at the victorious struggle that the idea of evolution has conducted in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. ”

“ The zoologist or anthropologist who studies our genealogy in a strictly scientific spirit takes no more notice of these tendencies than of the Almanach de Gotha. He seeks to discover the naked truth, as it is yielded by the great results of modern science, in which there is no longer any doubt that man is really a descendant of the ape—that is to say, of a long extinct anthropoid ape. As has been pointed out over and over again by distinguished supporters of this opinion, the proofs of it are exceptionally clear and simple—much clearer and simpler than they are in regard to many other mammals. ”

“ In Germany, the birthplace of the Reformation, the Reichstag and the Government vie with each other in smoothing the paths for the Jesuits, and fostering, instead of suppressing, the intolerant spirit of the sectarian school. Let us hope that the latest episode in the history of evolution, its recognition by Jesuitical science, will bring about the reverse of what they intend—the substitution of rational science for blind faith. ”

“ What is this mysterious "living substance" that we find everywhere as the material foundation of the "wonders of life"? Plasm, or protoplasm, is, as Huxley rightly said thirty years ago, "the physical basis of organic life"; to speak more precisely, it is a chemical compound of carbon that alone accomplishes the various processes of life. In its simplest form the living cell is merely a soft globule of plasm, containing a firmer nucleus. ”

“ He recognised that the theory of evolution was the only natural solution of the problem of creation; but he laughed at the application of it as a poor romance, and declared that the phylogenetic inquiries into the relationship of the various species had about as much value as the research of philologists into the genealogical tree of the Homeric heroes. The distinguished botanist, Alexander Braun, stood quite alone in his full and warm assent to the theory of evolution. ”

“ To-day, when evolution is almost universally recognised in biology, when thousands of anatomic and physiological works are based on it every year, the new generation can hardly form an idea of the violent resistance that was offered to Darwin's theory and the impassioned struggles it provoked. In the first place, the Churches at once raised a vigorous protest; they rightly regarded their new antagonist as the deadly enemy of the legend of creation, and saw the very foundations of their creed threatened. ”

“ The spokesmen of Catholic and Evangelical beliefs, especially the Romanist Germania and the Lutheran Reichsbote, have vied with each other in deploring my lectures as "a desecration of this venerable hall," and in damning my theory of evolution—without, of course, making any attempt to repute its scientific truth. They have, in their Christian charity, thought fit to put sandwich-men at the doors of this room, to distribute scurrilous attacks on my person and my teaching to those who enter. ”

“ The great traveller, whose clear mind had recognised the unity of Nature, and had, with Goethe, discovered therein the real knowledge of God, endeavoured to convey his thoughts in popular form to the educated Berlin public, and to establish the universality of natural law. It was my aim to establish, as regards the organic world, precisely what Humboldt had proved to exist in inorganic nature. I wanted to show how the great advance of modern biology (since Darwin's time) enables us to solve the most difficult of all problems, the historical development of plants and animals in humanity. ”

“ They merely cease to pose as truths in the realm of pure science. As imaginative creations, they retain a certain value in the world of poetry. Here they will not only, as they have done hitherto, furnish thousands of the finest and most lofty motives for every branch of art—sculpture, painting, or music—but they will still have a high ethical and social value in the education of the young and in the organisation of society. ”

“ The "purely zoological conception of man," which has been established beyond question by the anatomical and embryological comparison with the ape, is said to fail because it does not take into account the chief feature, his "mental life." It is "psychology that is best fitted to deal with the nature and origin of man." All the facts of anatomy and embryology that I have gathered together in my Evolution of Man in proof of the series of his ancestors are either ignored or misconstrued and made ridiculous by Wasmann. ”

“ As he rightly says, the danger consists "in a systematic introduction of the Jesuitical spirit into science, a persistent perversion of all its problems and solutions, and an astute undermining of its foundations; to speak more precisely, the danger is that people are not sufficiently conscious of it, and that they, and even science itself, fall into the cleverly prepared pit of believing that there is such a thing as Jesuitical science, the results of which may be taken seriously." ”

“ In a richly illustrated and widely read work that Hans Kraemer published a few years ago, under the title, The Universe and Man, an able and learned anthropologist, Professor Klaatsch of Heidelberg, deals with "the origin and development of the human race," and admirably describes the primitive history of man and his civilisation. However, he denounces the idea of man's descent from the ape as "irrational, narrow-minded, and false"; he grounds this severe censure on the fact that none of the living apes can be the ancestor of humanity. ”

“ But in this study we had in view mainly the structure of the body and its various organs. We touched very briefly on the evolution of the human mind, or the immaterial soul that dwells in the body for a time, according to a venerable tradition. To-day we turn chiefly to the development of the soul, and consider whether man's mental development is controlled by the same natural laws as that of his body, and whether it also is inseparably bound up with that of the rest of the mammals. ”

“ Our Monistic god, the all-embracing essence of the world, the Nature-god of Spinoza and Goethe, is identical with the eternal, all-inspiring energy, and is one, in eternal and infinite substance, with space-filling matter. It "lives and moves in all things," as the Gospel says. And as we see that the law of substance is universal, that the conservation of matter and of energy is inseparably connected, and that the ceaseless development of this substance follows the same "eternal iron laws," we find God in natural law itself. ”

“ What is the position of the "ecclesiastical evolution" of the Jesuits (the "latest course of Darwinism") , as regards this great question of the soul? Man is, according to Wasmann, the image of God and a unique, immaterial being, differing from all other animals in the possession of an immortal soul, and therefore having a totally different origin from them. Man's immortal soul is, according to this Jesuit sophistry, "spiritual and sensitive," while the animal soul is sensitive only. God has implanted his own spirit in man, and associated [102] it with an animal soul for the period of life. ”

“ To these leading masters in biology, and to all other anatomists, physiologists, zoologists, and botanists up to 1858, the question of organic creation was an unsolved problem; the great majority regarded it as insoluble. The theologians and their allies, the metaphysicians, built triumphantly on this fact. It afforded a clear proof of the limitations of reason and science. A miracle only could account for the origin of these ingenious and carefully designed organisms; nothing [33] less than the Divine wisdom and omnipotence could have brought man into being. ”

“ I made the first attempt in 1866, in my General Morphology, to present connectedly the whole subject of evolution and make it the foundation of a consistent Monistic philosophy; and I then gave a popular summary of my chief conclusions in the ten editions of my History of Creation. In my Evolution of Man I made the first attempt to apply the principles of evolution thoroughly and consistently to man, and to draw up a hypothetical list of his animal ancestors. ”

“ Thousands of new discoveries and observations in all sections of botany, zoology, protistology, and anthropology, were brought forward as empirical evidence of evolution. This is especially true of the remarkable progress of paleontology, comparative anatomy, and embryology, but it applies also [40] to physiology, chorology (the science of the distribution of living things) , and œcology (the description of the habits of animals) . How much our horizon was extended by these, and how much the unity of our Monistic system gained, can be seen in any modern manual of biology. ”

“ Since the earlier of these dates the iron necessity of natural law had ruled in inorganic nature, in the formation of the mountains and the movement of the heavenly bodies. In organic nature, on the contrary, in the creation and the life of animals and plants, people saw only the wisdom and power of an intelligent Creator and Controller; in other words, everything was ruled by mechanical causality in the inorganic world, but by teleological finality in the realm of biology.
Philosophy, strictly so called, paid little or no attention to this dilemma. ”

“ Hence what we call the soul of man or the animal has not pre-existed, but begins its career at the moment of impregnation; it is bound up with the chemical constitution of the plasm, which is the material vehicle of heredity in the nucleus of the maternal ovum and the paternal spermatozoon. One cannot see how a being that thus has a beginning of existence can afterwards prove to be "immortal." ”

“ Virchow demanded as late as 1877 that the dangerous doctrine of evolution should be excluded from the schools. The Ministers of Instruction of the two chief German States gratefully adopted this warning from the leader of the progressive party, forbade the teaching of Darwinian ideas, and made every effort to check the spread of biological knowledge. Now, twenty-five years afterwards, the Jesuits come forward, and demand the opposite. They recognise openly that the hated theory of evolution is established, and try to reconcile it with the creed! ”

“ We have seen that even the most advanced organism, man, was not brought into being by a creative act, but gradually developed from a long series of mammal ancestors. We also saw that the most man-like mammals, the anthropoid apes, have substantially the same structure as man, and that the evolution of the latter from the former can now be regarded as a fully established hypothesis, or, rather, an historical fact. ”

“ The ovum transmits to the child by heredity the personal traits of the mother, the sperm-cell those of the father; and this hereditary transmission extends to the finest characteristics of the soul as well as of the body. The modern research as to heredity, which occupies so much space now in biological literature, but was only started by Darwin in 1859, is directed immediately to the visible material processes of impregnation. ”

“ From this very decided turn at Munich until his death, twenty-five years afterwards, Virchow was an indefatigable and very influential opponent of evolution. In his annual appearances at congresses he has always contested it, and has obstinately clung to his statement that "it is quite certain that man does not descend from the ape or any other animal." To the question: "Whence does he come, then?" he had no answer, and retired to the resigned position of the Agnostic, which was common before Darwin's time: "We do not know how life arose, and how the various species came into the world." ”

“ The most primitive races, such as the Veddahs of Ceylon, or the Australian natives, are very little above the mental life of the anthropoid apes. From the higher savages we pass by a complete gradation of stages to the most civilised [101] races. But what a gulf there is, even here, between the genius of a Goethe, a Darwin, or a Lamarck, and an ordinary philisthine or third-rate official. All these facts point to one conclusion: the human soul has only reached its present height by a long period of gradual evolution; it differs in degree, not in kind, from the soul of the higher mammals ”

“ Each of us was, at the beginning of his existence, a simple globule of protoplasm, surrounded by a membrane, about 1 120 of an inch in diameter, with a firmer nucleus inside it. These important embryological discoveries confirmed the rational conception of the human organism that had been attained much earlier by comparative anatomy: the conviction that the human frame is built in the same way, and develops similarly from a simple ovum, as the body of all other mammals. Even Linné had already (1735) given man a place in the mammal class in his famous System of Nature. ”

“ It is certainly eminently calculated (in connection with geography) to enlarge the mind, and acquaint the child with the idea of evolution. An educated person who knows the elements of geology will never experience ennui. He will find everywhere in surrounding nature, in the rocks and in the water, in the desert and on the mountains, the most instructive stimuli to reflection. ”