Virchow

“ Henceforth there was a party in Berlin who were convinced that the growth, if growth it was, in the Crown Prince’s throat was benign. But it may serve as an illustration of the passions which the whole affair aroused when it is stated that there were many who asserted that Virchow had been deliberately deceived, and that the English specialist had refrained from submitting to him those portions of the membrane which would have clearly shown the presence of malignant disease. ”

“ The discovery made him famous, and from that day to this the name of Virchow has held somewhat the same position in the world of pathology that the name of Pasteur occupied in the realm of bacteriology. Virchow was called presently to a professorship in the University of Berlin. In connection with this chair he established his famous Institute of Pathology, which has been the Mecca of all students of pathology ever since. He did a host of other notable things as well, among others, entering the field of politics, and becoming a recognized leader there no less than in science. ”

“ No objections are listened to, no difficulties recognized, and a man like Virchow, himself the strongest supporter of evolution, who has the moral courage to say that the descent of man from any ape whatsoever is, as yet, before the tribunal of scientific zoölogy, “not proven,” is howled down in Germany in a manner worthy of Ephesians and Galatians. ”

“ But the great authority that Virchow had—an authority well founded in pathology and sociology—and his prestige as president of the German Anthropological Society, had the effect of preventing any member of the Society from raising serious opposition to him for thirty years. Numbers of journals and treatises repeated his dogmatic statement: "It is quite certain that man has descended neither from the ape nor from any other animal." ”

“ As to the Virchow business, I am beyond the years in which any one takes counsel in such matters from flesh and blood; if I set my life on any matter, I do it in the same faith in which I have, by long and severe strife, but in honest and humble prayer to God, strengthened myself, and in which no human words, even if spoken by a friend in the Lord and a servant of His Church, can alter me. ”

“ With such tendencies predominant, how grotesque is the spectacle of a man like Virchow planting himself at the doors of the German schools, and flourishing his test of what is to be admitted there! As the scientific men approach with their subjects, they are stopped by the question, "Can you make oath, gentlemen, to the truth of what you offer?" And so we have a scientific man ruling out science from the schools by a standard not recognized in education, and which, if rigidly applied, would shut up every schoolhouse in Germany. ”

“ Virchow lived on the same plane, generally speaking, with the other scientists of Europe; it is only from the American standpoint that there is any seeming disparity between his fame and his material station in life ”

“ With all these empty accusations, as with all the empty reproaches and groundless objections which Virchow brings against the doctrine of evolution, he takes good care in no way to touch the kernel of the matter. How, indeed, would it have been possible, without arriving at conclusions wholly opposed to those which he has declared? For the theory of descent proclaims, more clearly than any other scientific theory, that the equality of individuals which socialism strives after is an impossibility ”

“ When, on the occasion of Virchow's eightieth birthday last year, Lord Lister brought greetings from Great Britain, he was the only man whose work could be placed beside Virchow's; but while his method of antiseptic treatment in surgery has been one of the greatest advances in medicine, it is in some respects an isolated discovery, and can scarcely claim equality with the immense work accomplished by Virchow and Pasteur. Lord Kelvin is the only living physicist who might be ranked with Helmholtz. Darwin has no peer. ”

“ I suppose because I do not sufficiently sympathise with Socialists. All the greater is my regret that Professor Virchow did not himself unfold the links of the hidden bonds which unite evolution with revolution, and bind together the community of descent with the community of goods. ”

“ How, then, is it possible that Virchow, the experienced and skilled politician, who, above all things, preaches caution and reserve in theory, suddenly makes just such an application of transformation and Darwinism—an application so radically perverse that it actually flies in the face of the fundamental ideas of these doctrines? I myself am nothing less than a politician. ”

“ Virchow, the greatest pathologist and one of the leading anthropologists of Germany, had much to do with the inspiring of Haeckel's Monistic views in the fifties. Like several other prominent German thinkers, Virchow subsequently abandoned the positive Monistic position for one of agnosticism and scepticism, and a long and bitter conflict ensued. It is hardly too much to say that Virchow's ultra-timid reserve in regard to the evolution of man and other questions has died with him. ”

“ At the time of the interview I was corresponding for a New York newspaper intermittently, and, one day, word came from the editor that a "chat" with Virchow on the political situation would be "available." (This word available formerly troubled me a great deal in my encounters with editors, but I have at last come to terms with it. When an editor uses it, it pays to look into a good dictionary and see how many different applications it has. Its editorial significance is most elastic.) Virchow kindly granted me an interview and told me some interesting things about his fight for Liberal ideas. ”

“ Virchow's scientific work was singularly complete. He made numerous and exact observations and experiments; he deduced from them wide-reaching theories; he conducted an important journal for more than fifty years; he wrote text-books, summaries of scientific advance and books popularizing science; he established a school to which students came from all parts of the world, while at the same time taking part in the education of the people; he founded a great museum and took a leading part in scientific societies; he applied science directly to human welfare. ”

“ The distinguished position which Virchow, twenty-five years since, won by his natural conception of the nature of man, and the great fame which he then earned in the fight for the truth, rest precisely on this, that on every occasion he maintained with his utmost vigour the unity of all vital phenomena, and asserted their mechanical character. All organic life, even the soul-life, rests on mechanical principles, on that causal mechanism of which Kant said that "it alone contained a practical interpretation of nature," and that "without it no natural science can exist." ”

“ The scientific side, although there is enough of it to fill up an ordinary human life, is only one side of Professor Virchow's career. His life is equally full on the political and practical side. Since 1859 he has been an alderman of the city of Berlin, and has in that capacity given conscientious attention to the details of the government and wants of the municipality. ”

“ Virchow, Rudolf, eminent pathologist, born in Pomerania; is distinguished as a politician as well as a man of science, and is in the former regard a strenuous Liberal; his services not only in the interests of medicine but of science generally and its social applications have been very great ”

“ The theory that Virchow put before his pupils was pure Monism, or a unified conception of the world without any distinction of physical and metaphysical. Life was defined, not as a mystic eccentricity in an orderly nature, but plainly as a higher form of the great cosmic mechanism. Man, the object of medical science, was said to be merely a higher vertebrate, subject to the same laws as the rest. ”

“ The most profound physicist of Europe, Professor Virchow, of Berlin, has lately asserted that this theory of man's evolution from the brute has no solid scientific foundation. Why need you and I seek to disprove what no man has ever yet proved or will prove? The other theory of man's origin comes down to us in the oldest book in existence, the Book of Job, and tallies exactly with the narrative in the next oldest books, those compiled by Moses: "The spirit of God hath made me, and the breath of the Almighty hath given me life." ”

“ But it would have been strange if, in those years and in the middle of the whole scientific current of his time, his own organ, his icy logic, had not led him to the same conclusion; that it is a simpler method of research to believe in natural law alone, to regard the living merely as a complex play of the same forces that we have in physics and chemistry, and to consider man, with the bodily frame of an ape-like mammal, to be really such an animal. I believe, indeed, that Virchow never abandoned this simple solution in his own mind at any part of his career. ”

“ Hence, too, Virchow can have no independent views as to the historical development of the higher from the lower animals, because the abundant living forms of the lower animals are almost unknown to him, and because he has hardly any conception of the marvellous strides which hundreds of industrious workers have made in this very department within the last twenty years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ One immediate result of his investigations, which appeared in a lecture at the Royal Institution (February 7, 1862) , "On the Fossil Remains of Man," was incorporated in "Man's Place in Nature." But a more important consequence of this impulse was that he went seriously into the study of Ethnology. Of his work in this branch of natural science, Professor Virchow, speaking at the dinner given him by the English medical profession on October 5, 1898, declared that in the eyes of German savants it alone would suffice to secure immortal reverence for his name. ”

“ In Germany the alliance of the Emperor with the Catholics saddens him, but—the Jesuits are accepting evolution, over the fresh grave of Virchow. Abroad his ideals, even his ideas, are making triumphant progress. He thinks of the vast changes that have taken place since he stood out, almost alone, reckless of all but honour and truth, at the Stettin Congress in 1863. “Das Leben ist schön,” he still repeats. What will men say of 321him when the lines of history draw in, and the critic will have the proper perspective? I believe no great worker ever thought less about it. ”

“ A few days afterward, Virchow, the great pathologist,—an active member of the "progressive" parliamentary party, hating new theories in politics just as much as in science—violently assailed the Darwinian theory of organic evolution, and, moved by a very just presentiment, hurled against it this cry of alarm, this political anathema: "Darwinism leads directly to socialism." ”

“ Haeckel then tries to prove that Virchow is a believer in the creation theory, although he nowhere says as much openly. Virchow's expression, which Haeckel quotes, that "the scheme of organization within the species is immutable—like will beget like," is susceptible of more than one interpretation. ”

“ Oscar Schmidt might with justice retort, "If the socialists would think clearly they would feel that they must do all they can to choke the doctrine of descent, for it declares with express distinctness that socialist ideas are impracticable." And he proceeds to add, "And why has not Virchow made the gentle doctrines of Christianity responsible for the excesses of socialism? ”

“ Virchow discovered an arrow-head manufactory on the shores of Lake Burtneek, and in 1884 the Moscow Society of Natural Sciences made known the existence of important workshops near the Vetluga River, in the province of Kostroma, so that we know that in remote prehistoric times men lived and fought in a rigorous climate in districts but sparsely populated in our own day. ”

“ Every new find, upon investigation, proves the truth of Virchow's words: "We must really acknowledge that there is a complete absence of any fossil type of a lower stage in the development of man. Nay, if we gather together all the fossil men hitherto found, and put them parallel with those of the present time, we can decidedly pronounce that there are among living men a much greater proportion of individuals which show a relatively inferior type than there are among the fossils known up to this time. ”

“ Yet to the end of his own career Virchow stoutly maintained that in all its essential significance his own fundamental principle remained quite untouched by the newer discoveries. And, as a fact, this view could indeed be maintained. For if diseases proved to be the consequences of the presence of parasites, the diseases themselves, so far as they belonged to the diseased organism, were still not the parasites, but were, as before, the reaction of the organism to the veränderte Bedingungen which the presence of the parasites entailed. So Virchow could well insist. ”