Wilhelm Bölsche

“ All those doctrines of histology, embryology, and so on, built on the microscope, are thought to be poles removed from æsthetic enjoyment. They dissolve everything—man’s soft, white skin, the perfumed leaf of the rose, the bright wing of the butterfly—into “cells.” It is mere ignorance to talk in this way. Nature’s beauty is by no means so thin a covering that the microscope must at once pierce through it. Rather does it reveal to us in incalculable wealth a whole firmament of new stars, a new world of beauties, if we choose the right way to see them. Haeckel did choose the right way. ”

“ Man becomes lord of the earth, from the uppermost azure down into the dark, cold abysses of the ocean, from the icy pole to the burning tropical desert. And at length man turns his thoughts upon himself.
Man, his arm resting on the splendid instruments of modern research, raises his hand to his brow, and turns philosopher. He becomes at once more bold and more modest than ever.
What Goethe had seen in vision rises before him now in sharp, almost hard outline from his own real life-work. ”

“ Until that day he is merely a young man, an outgrowth from a rich old civilisation: a young man who has felt in him a struggle between artistic and scientific tendencies, like so many: who has vacillated between the choice of a “paying profession” and research for its own sake, and has decided for the former, like so many: who has chosen zoology, and begun to work hard on professional lines at his science: and who has been told prophetically that he will one day do something, though along a line where much has been done already. ”

“ Now let us try, starting from the idea of unity and from the plainest of all philosophical principles, that of proceeding from the known to the unknown, to reduce the forms and phenomena of life to these natural laws of chemistry and physics. Let us find out whether the whole form-world of the animals and plants—in other words, the whole province of morphology in the narrower sense—can be traced to the same natural laws that we have in chemical and physical phenomena. The globe is the object of chemistry and physics. ”

“ Giordano Bruno shatters the ancient crystalline vault of the firmament; every 17“fixed star” in the Milky Way is to him a flaming sun, the pulsing heart of a whole world, in which, perchance, human hearts like ours throb and leap on a hundred planets. The red, murderous flames of hate close over Bruno, but they cannot dim the light of the new stars. It is in the eye and the brain of the new men that arise, and will nevermore fade from them. ”

“ There was everywhere a vague feeling that the progress of science was best secured by a bald enumeration and registration of bones, of the joints in the limbs of insects, or of pollen-filaments, rather than by the romantic and spirited leaps of natural philosophy over all the real problems into the heavens above. The question now arose whether this narrow method really exhausted the nature of things; whether scientific specialism, with its laurels of victory, would not prove in the end an equally dangerous enemy. ”

“ With them began the colossal genealogical tree that branches out through the millions of years of the earth’s history. If anything on the earth has arisen by spontaneous generation out of dead matter, at the commencement of all life, it must have been a cell, or a still simpler particle of living plasm more or less resembling one. It is true that the point is put in the form of a question; but the veil has been torn away. Given one cell, the whole genealogical tree grows on, in virtue of Darwin’s laws, until it reaches its highest point in man. ”

“ He candidly acknowledged that Darwin had struck a severe blow at the great idea of his life, on one side at least. Darwin’s work not merely dismissed God to the wings as a personality, but even left no room for the finger of God, for his spiritual writing on the walls of the living world. It found evidence of natural laws alone. From them came, if not life itself, at all events selection, adaptation, and evolution by virtue of this increasing adaptation—the higher advance that converted the fish into a lizard and the lizard into a mammal. ”

“ There may be more error than truth in Darwin’s theory in its present form, as the first attempt to deal with the subject. Undeniably important as are the principles of natural selection, the struggle for life, the relation of organisms to each other, the divergence of characters, and all the other principles employed by Darwin in support of his theory, it is, nevertheless, quite possible that there are just as many and important principles still quite unknown to us that have an equal or even greater influence on the phenomena of organic nature. ”

“ No other conception of God except this that sees his spirit and force in all natural phenomena is worthy of his all-enfolding greatness; only when we trace all forces and all movements, all the forms and properties of matter, to God, as the sustainer of all things, do we reach the human idea and reverence for him that really corresponds to his infinite greatness. In him we live, and move, and have our being. Thus does natural philosophy become a theology. ”

“ The artist merely gave an imperishable external form to the most treasured truth of his time.
Yet, slowly and gradually, what a mighty change has come about!
Columbus has sailed over the blue seas, and a new side of the earth lies in the violet haze of the dawn. Copernicus sees the ball of the earth roll round the sun through space, by force of some mysterious law. Kepler dreams of the world-harmony that will replace the ever-acting Deity, and discovers at length an unsuspected regularity in the framework of the heavens. ”

“ To him God is the eternal force of the All. His thoughts turn no longer on Creation and the Last Judgment. An eternal evolution is the source of his inspiration. He regards the whole universe as a single, immeasurable revelation of spirit. But this spirit is the rhythmic outflow of infinite developments. It becomes Milky Way and sun and planet, blue lotus-flowers and gay butterfly. At last it takes the form of man, and reads the stars as an open book. In Homer and Goethe it directs the style 18and the pen; in Michael Angelo and Raphael it guides the pencil and the brush. ”

“ Thus does Professor Haeckel speak of himself. There is a note of gentle resignation in the words, but the time is coming when men will give them a different meaning. Whatever greater achievements may be wrought by a future generation in the service of truth and human welfare, their work will be but a continuation of the truth of our time, as long as humanity breathes. On the intrepid, outstanding figures of the nineteenth century will shine a light that is peculiarly theirs, an illumination that men will dwell on for ever—as we look back, in personal life, on the young days of love. ”

“ Above is man, built of myriads of cells woven into the most ingenious tissues and the most perfect organs for each function of life; below we have the radiolarian, in which a single cell must discharge all the vital functions, because its whole body is merely one cell. But there is another wonder. This tiny particle of living slime, floating in the blue waves at Messina, hardly more visible than a drop of spittle, has a most remarkable quality. ”

“ In other words, God is the universal law of causality. God is absolutely perfect; he cannot act in any other than a perfectly good manner; he cannot therefore act arbitrarily or freely—God is necessity. God is the sum of all force, and therefore of all matter. Every conception of God that separates him from matter, and opposes to him a sum of forces that are not of a divine nature, leads to amphitheism (or ditheism) and on to polytheism. In showing the unity of the whole of nature, Monism points out that only one God exists, and that this God reveals himself in all the phenomena of nature. ”

“ As Goethe had already declared, morphology as such can be formed into a real and profound science. It will then not confine itself pedantically to a registration of forms. It will compare them with each other, and seek the hidden law in the straggling phenomena. It will mark out broad lines that will enable the human mind to grasp its objects in all their fulness. Johannes Müller had only been able to confirm that in the narrower sphere of biology. This was the nerve that gave vitality to zoology and botany, and made them a province of the mind in the higher sense. ”

“ If one ancestral stage, that of the fish, is reproduced in the young animal belonging to a higher group, why not several?—why not all of them? No doubt the ancestral series of the higher forms is of enormous length. What an immense number of stages there must have been before the fish! And then we have still the amphibian, the lizard, and the bird or mammal, up to man.
Why should not the law run: the whole ancestral series must be reproduced in the development of each individual organism? ”

“ Life is a voyage of discovery to the man who passes through it. He looks out with his child-eyes and discovers the world—at the bottom, discovers only himself. But one day a greater veil is torn from before his self. Genius, the greater I, stirs within him like the butterfly in its narrow pupa-case. For the world at large 103that is the hour when the great man is born who will leave his mark on it.
Haeckel’s biography only begins on a certain day, if we look at it rightly and broadly. ”

“ Every glance into the microscope is a service of God. It was Goethe’s deepest sun that threw a great, radiant spark out of this curious, dark, angular, unintelligible jewel.
Such a man was bound to be more than Kölliker, Virchow, and Gegenbaur to Haeckel. Müller was still teaching at Berlin, and Haeckel’s best star brought him to sit in reality at the feet of the great teacher, who could so well speak soul to soul to him. ”

“ When Columbus crossed the seas in his three frail barques long ago to seek a new world in the distant haze, he little dreamed that the gray waters buried other new worlds a thousand yards beneath his keel—worlds of the deep-sea, into which our age has slowly dipped with its dredges. So we in turn may run our eye over the blue surface of nature, and think of its mysterious gold-lands and spice-islands, without suspicion of all that outspreads beneath our keel. ”

“ But it is certainly a confusion of all standards when the shrewdness of the individual tries to entrench itself behind ostensible claims of scientific method; when research abandons all advance on certain sides on the plea of “exactness” instead of philosophising—and then itself makes use of this exactness for compromising with an ecclesiastical tradition that only differs from real philosophy in its antiquity and rigidity, its disdain of rational argument, and its employment of secular weapons that certain historical events have put in its hand without any merit on its own part. ”

“ Johannes Müller had the great and splendid gift of never lying on the shoulders of his pupils with an Alpine weight of authority. It was a secret of his personality that we admire but can hardly express in words to-day. Everybody learned from him what a great individuality is. He exerted a kind of moral suggestion in teaching men to be free, great, enlightened, and true. His pupils have worked at the development of his ideas with absolute freedom. ”

“ It embodied the unity of nature. It formed the framework of facts for a unified natural philosophy, Monism. The monon, the “one,” embracing all things, that included nature in itself and itself in nature, became the last scientific definition of what people called “God.”
Thus the volume, which had begun the system of nature with the monera, closes with a chapter on the Monistic God—“the God in nature.” The conception of God in human fashion is rejected. Man is merely a vertebrate, a mammal, adapted in his whole structure to our little planet. ”

“ All-Nature: and he is a part of Nature. All-development: and he is a phase of the development.
That is the great philosophical dream of the nineteenth-century worker. His hand is black with labour, but his spirit is full of light, the light of the stars and of the world.
No one can understand the greatness of a man like Ernst Haeckel who has not learned this melody. Nature is not a flat surface: it is an ocean. ”

“ On one side was the raw material of the world with the ordinary natural laws; on the other side a lord and master, the law of evolution, playing with the laws as it pleased, and moulding the material into new life-forms in an advancing series. It is true that they no longer pictured to themselves a venerable being with a white beard creating the ichthyosauri, but the finger of God remained in the law of evolution, attenuated into a special and spectral form. ”

“ He looked upon every individual man as a mysterious plurality—a plurality of cells. Pathology, the science of disease, must take account of this. Health was the harmonious co-operation of the cell-state; disease was the falling-away of some of the cells to special work that injured or destroyed the whole community. This conception had inaugurated a new epoch in medicine, making it a consciously ministering art in the service of the living human natural organism. The Darwinian had now the task of showing the validity of this conception in his own province. ”

“ We have in Germany many professors and teachers who are more learned, and have read far more books than your poor Jena schoolmaster. But from my earliest youth, since I tore up flowers and admired butterflies in my fourth year, I have yielded to the inclination of my heart and studied incessantly one great book—Nature. 316This greatest of all books has taught me to know the true God, the God of Spinoza and Goethe. Then as physician I saw human life in all its heights and depths, and in my many travels through half the globe I learned the inexhaustible splendour of the earth. ”

“ Your eye, embracing its whole length, drinks in its beauty in deep draughts. What will your microscope make of it? Its field can only take in a single drop of water, and this does not grow more blue when you thus analyse it. Let science go further afield: this is the land of beauty. ”

“ For good or evil Haeckel’s great influence on our generation is a reality. It is the biographer’s duty to record and measure it: the reader’s to appraise it. The future historian of the dramatic course of humanity’s ideals must be left to interpret it in cosmic perspective. Do the stars exult, or do they grow thinner and colder in their light, over this great stirring? The far-distant generation, that will have reached the summit of the hill, will know. We who, with narrow horizon, are cutting our fond paths up the slope, have but the poor luxuries of faith and hope. ”

“ What an age can conceive is true to that age. There is nothing higher in the bounds of time and the development in which we are involved. All truth and science began for humanity in the form of possibilities. Copernicus’s theory was only a possibility when it first came. All that we call human culture has come of the putting together of thousands upon thousands of these possibilities, like so many stones. ”

“ It is not man that separates things; nature, or rather God who created nature, has already distinguished them. In this respect zoology and botany are of God. The various species of plants and animals are something firmly established by God. Take the polar bear, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, or a particular species of palm, or vine, or rose. There they are, and all that man has to do is to learn their specific characters in order to determine and name them.
Behind all this we really have the ancient idea of the Mosaic story of creation. ”

“ Every hair on a man’s head is twofold; there is the natural hair and a hair that can at any moment be changed, transformed, annihilated, or created afresh from nothing, by divine power. The man who has lived in this atmosphere of practical Dualism for years must be saturated to his innermost being with a feeling of the absolute contradiction between this conception of God and nature and Goethe’s philosophy. ”