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Title: Haeckel: his life and work
Author: Wilhelm Bölsche
Translator: Joseph McCabe
Release Date: April 5, 2023 [eBook #70451]
Language: English
Produced by: Tim Lindell, Adrian Mastronardi, Barry Abrahamsen and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HAECKEL: HIS LIFE AND
WORK ***
HAECKEL:
HIS LIFE AND WORK
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[Illustration:
ERNST HAECKEL.
From the Painting by Franz von Lenbach, 1899.
(Reproduced in “Jugend.”)
]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
HAECKEL:
HIS LIFE AND WORK
BY
WILHELM BÖLSCHE
WITH INTRODUCTION AND SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER BY THE TRANSLATOR,
JOSEPH McCABE
WITH THIRTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS
PHILADELPHIA
_GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO_.
PUBLISHERS
------------------------------------------------------------------------
(_All rights reserved._)
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contents
-------
PAGE
INTRODUCTION 9
CHAPTER I
EARLY YOUTH 15
CHAPTER II
AT THE UNIVERSITY 51
CHAPTER III
THE RADIOLARIA 82
CHAPTER IV
DARWIN 102
CHAPTER V
THE SCIENTIFIC 144
CONGRESS OF 1863
CHAPTER VI
THE “GENERAL 172
MORPHOLOGY”
CHAPTER VII
GROWTH OF IDEAS 252
CHAPTER VIII
THE CROWNING YEARS 294
BIBLIOGRAPHY 323
INDEX 329
------------------------------------------------------------------------
List of Illustrations
HAECKEL _Frontispiece_
_From the painting by Franz von
Lenbach._
JENA 42
A FISHING PARTY IN HELIGOLAND IN 70
1865
_Ernst Haeckel, Anton Dohrn,
Richard Greeff, Max
Salverda, Pietro Marchi._
A RADIOLARIAN 94
HAECKEL 128
_From the bust by G. Herold._
HAECKEL IN 1880 154
HAECKEL IN 1890 178
_From a relief by Kopf._
HAECKEL’S VILLA AT JENA 216
HAECKEL AND HIS ASSISTANT 244
MIKLUCHO-MACLAY AT LANZAROTE,
IN THE CANARIES, 1867
A SIPHONOPHORE 248
HAECKEL IN 1874 272
HAECKEL IN 1896 292
_From a photograph by Gabriel
Max._
HAECKEL AND A GROUP OF ITALIAN 300
PROFESSORS AT GENOA, 1904
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introduction
One of the admirable maxims that crystallises the better sense or
experience of men reminds us that we must “say nothing but good of the
dead.” Unhappily, we have taken the words of our sage fathers in too
large a sense. A feeling has grown amongst us that we should “say
nothing good except of the dead,” at least as regards those who differ
from us. So has many a man gone from the world with little suspicion of
the appreciation that might have warmed him in the last chill years;
many a man sunk into the grave with the harsh echo of dishonouring words
still rumbling in his ears. It may be that our ideas, our truths, would
not suffer greatly if we could patiently endeavour to trace the
community of humane feeling that lies beneath the wide gulfs that often
separate us intellectually from each other.
Professor Ernst Haeckel is one of those combative figures of all time
who take misunderstanding as a part of their romantic career. If he had
shut himself within the laboratory, as some of his gifted colleagues
did, all the world would honour him to-day. His vast range of biological
knowledge, almost without parallel in our specialist days, fitted him
for great scientific achievements. His superb special contributions to
biology—his studies of radiolaria, sponges, medusæ, &c.—give ample
evidence of it. As things are, he has, Professor Hertwig says, “written
his name in letters of light in the history of science.” He holds four
gold medals for scientific research (Cothenius, Swammerdam, Darwin, and
Challenger), four doctorates (Berlin, Jena, Edinburgh, and Cambridge),
and about eighty diplomas from so many universities and academic bodies.
But he was one of those who cannot but look out of the windows of the
laboratory. His intense idealism, his sense of what he felt to be wrong
and untrue, inflamed by incessant travel and communion with men, drove
him into the field of battle. In the din and roar of a great conflict
his name has passed on to a million lips and become the varied war-cry
of fiercely contending parties. A hundred Haeckels, grotesque in their
unlikeness to each other, circulate in our midst to-day.
The present work is a plain study of the personality of Haeckel and the
growth of his ideas. The character of Haeckel was forged amid
circumstances that have largely passed away from the scientific world of
our time. The features, even, of the world he has worked in of recent
years in Germany are so different from our own that no Englishman can
understand him without sober study of his life. He has often been called
“the Darwin of Germany.” The phrase is most misleading. It suggests a
comparison that is bound to end in untruth and injustice. In the same
year that Haeckel opened his Darwinian campaign in Germany he won the
prize for the long jump—a record jump. It is the note of much in his
character. He was no quiet recluse, to shrink from opposition and hard
names, but a lusty, healthy, impetuous, intrepid youth, even when his
hair had worn to grey. A story is told of how, not many years ago, the
Grand Duke of Weimar playfully rallied him, in the midst of a brilliant
company, on his belief in evolution. To the horror of the guests, he
slapped the powerful noble on the shoulder, and told him to come to Jena
and see the proofs of it. In his seventy-first year we find him severely
censuring his Emperor—the emperor of many fortresses—in a public lecture
at Berlin.
How his vigour and his resentment arose as barrier after barrier was
raised before him: how his scorn of compromise was engendered and fed:
how he accumulated mountains of knowledge in obscure, technical works
before he formulated his sharp didactic conclusions: all this is told in
the following story. For good or ill he has won an influence in this
country, and his story should be read. It is, in itself, one of rare and
varied interest, and it is told by one of the most brilliant penmen of
modern Germany, his former pupil, now a distinguished biologist,
Professor Wilhelm Bölsche.
The time seems to have come in England for the publication of some
authoritative picture of the great biologist and controversialist. One
work of his circulates by the hundred thousand amongst us, and has had a
deep and lasting influence on the thoughts of large classes of men. His
influence is hardly less in France and Italy, as well as in Germany; his
doctrines have, in fact, been translated into fifteen different tongues.
The deep, sometimes bitter, controversy that they have engendered must
have led to a desire to know more of the man and his making. The
attempts that have been made here and there to “construct” him from his
ideas and literary manner are, as the reader will see, very far removed
from the reality. Behind all the strained inferences from doctrines,
behind all the dishonouring epithets, there is a genial, warm, deeply
artistic, intensely idealist nature, sung with enthusiasm by poets who
have known him. Once, in playful scientific mood, Haeckel tried to
explain his own character in his familiar terms of heredity and
environment. He came of a line of lawyers, straight, orderly, inexorable
men. He had lived and worked in quiet Jena, in the beautiful valley of
the Saale. But he did not speak of that larger environment—the field of
battle, stretching far away, beyond the calm Thuringian hills, to the
ends of Europe. We must place Haeckel’s ardent and high-minded nature in
that field, face to face with his opponents, if we would understand him.
For the supplementary chapter I have drawn freely on another
biographical sketch by one of Haeckel’s pupils, Dr. Breitenbach, and
other sources. For the illustrations I am indebted chiefly to Professor
Haeckel himself, and can only offer him in return this grateful effort
to lift his inspiring and impressive personality above the dust and
cloud of a great controversy.
JOSEPH McCABE.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER I
EARLY YOUTH
“I am wholly a child of the nineteenth century, and with its close I
would draw the line under my life’s work.” 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.
It was a strong love that brought our century to birth.
The soul of humanity has for four centuries been passing through a grim
crisis.
Let us imagine ourselves for a moment before the noble painting by
Michael Angelo in the Sistine Chapel at Rome. What art! What utter
revelation of the power of man’s mind! But, we ask, what material did
the genius of humanity choose in those days for the manifestation of its
giant power? The last judgment: the Christ descending at the blare of
the last trumpet, to reward the faithful and banish the sinner into
everlasting pain: the Almighty, breathing His spirit into Adam, or
mystically upbuilding Eve from the rib of the man. There was no
“symbolic” intention in the picture; the deepest feeling of
hundreds—nay, thousands—of years was embodied in it. 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. Galileo turns his new optic tube to the stars,
and at once the heavens are changed, not only for the calculating,
mathematical mind, but even for the eye of sense: there are jagged peaks
on the moon, satellites circling about Jupiter, a wilderness of stars
lying across the Milky Way, spots on the sun, rings round Saturn.
Giordano Bruno shatters the ancient crystalline vault of the firmament;
every “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.
The seventeenth century, opening amid the last glare of the
martyr-fires, quickens with a vague yearning and expectation.
In the eighteenth century the old world breaks up. From the new stars,
from the new world, new ideas come. On all sides is the crash and roar
of conflict. Dread flames break out in the social, moral, and æsthetic
life of men. But the century ends in the birth of a greater artist than
Michael Angelo.
Goethe, on the morn of the nineteenth century, paints a new Sixtine
Chapel in his poetry. But he no longer depicts the old ideas. He speaks
of God-Nature. 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 and the pen; in Michael Angelo and Raphael it guides
the pencil and the brush.
All this unfolds in Goethe, as in a vision with yet half-opened eyes.
Then the nineteenth century begins. Nature is its salvation, the
salvation of its most practical, most real need. It must struggle for
its existence, like any other century, but it has new and improved
weapons for the struggle. All the earlier ages were but poor blunderers.
The lightning flashed on the naked savage, and he fell on his knees and
prayed, powerless as he was. In the eighteenth century it dawned on
men’s minds that this might be some force of nature. The nineteenth
century sets its foot on the neck of the demon of this force, presses
him into its service, plays with him. Its thoughts and words flash along
the lightning current, as if along new nerve-tracks, that begin to
circle the globe. 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. He has succeeded in bringing
nature and its forces to his feet, because it was flesh of his flesh and
blood of his blood. He is its child. A thousand tongues proclaim the
truth to him, a naïve, almost simple, revelation of reality. He digs in
the earth, and ancient bones and skulls tell him vaguely of the past.
Such once was he, devoid of civilisation, at the verge of the animal
world. He searches his frame through and through for further light.
There is the brain, where the thoughts crowd together. There is the
cell, that builds up the whole body, the cell that so closely resembles
the lowest of all living things, not yet distinct enough to be either
animal or plant. Here are the forms that he successively assumes in his
mother’s body, before he is born—forms that can hardly be distinguished
from those of the animal at the same stage of development. From almost
divine heights he has sunk down to the beast, to the primitive cell—nay,
deeper still, to the elementary, force-impelled matter of the universe.
But this early picture dissolves at once in an ennobling and inspiring
truth. Nature becomes man. In this he presses once more to the heart of
the most-high. Nature is God. Goethe sang of God-Nature. The new God
pulses in every wave of man’s blood. In Michael Angelo’s picture God
breathes his spirit into Adam. The new Adam of the nineteenth century is
God’s spirit, in body and soul, from the very first, for he is Nature.
He needs no more. When he looks up to the shining stars, he looks into
the eyes of God and his own. He has come down from those stars like the
bright dew in which they are now mirrored. He belongs to them, but they
also are in him. 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.
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. Yet that glorious day on which
Columbus found “his land” is an inspiration to us, his remote
grandchildren. The life we are going to examine will bring before us
such a morning of discovery. Columbus went in quest of Zipangu (as he
called Japan), and he found America. Not one of us, however gifted he
be, can be quite sure that, in leading humanity, he is not sailing into
another such heroic error. Let us say that at once to all, friends and
opponents. America or Zipangu—let it be so. Perhaps any man might have
found Zipangu, while only the genius could reach America.
* * * * *
When Gustav Freytag, who had a most happy quality for writing memoirs,
was composing his admirable _Pictures from the Past of Germany_, he
sought in each period some prominent man of plain and downright
character, yet who had something typical of his age in his sentiments,
as if the time-spirit spoke through him. In this quest he twice (in the
fourth volume, for the period from the close of the eighteenth century
to the Wars of Freedom) lit upon earlier members of Haeckel’s family.
The first was Haeckel’s grandfather on the mother’s side, Christoph
Sethe; the second was his father, Councillor Haeckel.
This simple fact shows the stuff of Haeckel’s race. The older Sethe was
an important man in his time. He left to his children manuscript memoirs
of his eventful life, which have, unfortunately, been only sparsely used
by Freytag, though the whole deserved to be regarded as a source of
history. The general facts in relation to him were collected by Hermann
Hüffer, who was not merely interested in the jurist because he was one
himself, but was brought into touch with him as a result of his
brilliant study of Heine. Sethe’s eldest son, Christian, the uncle of
Ernst Haeckel, is the well-known friend of Heine’s youth to whom the
poet dedicated the “Fresco-sonnets” in his _Book of Songs_ and wrote the
finest of his early letters. This Christian Sethe (he died on May 31,
1857, being then Provincial Director of Revenue at Stettin), was a
lawyer, like his father, and the father himself came of a legal family.
Haeckel’s own father, moreover, the husband of one of Christian’s
sisters, was a State Councillor at the time of his death, and his elder
brother was a Provincial Councillor. Thus Haeckel’s genealogical tree
spreads into the legal profession in a curiously complex way.
We naturally reflect for a moment if we could fancy Haeckel himself as a
lawyer. It is hardly possible. He would at least have been a very
rebellious member of the profession, and have been sadly lacking in
respect for the venerable traditions and powdered wigs of the
court—assuming, of course (which a mere layman has no right to
question), that there ought still to be such traditions and costumes in
the profession. In his vigorous _Riddle of the Universe_ he has, from
his scientific point of view, brought strictures against the legal
profession that leave nothing to be desired in the way of candour, when
we recollect the long tradition of his family. In its lingering in the
rear of the progress of the times the whole science of law seemed to him
to be a “riddle of the universe.” The jurist is apt to be respected as
an embodiment of our highest culture. In reality that is not the case.
The distinctive object of his concern, man and his soul, is only
superficially studied in the preparation for the law, and so we still
find amongst jurists the most extraordinary views as to the freedom of
the will, responsibility, and so on. “Most of our legal students pay no
attention to anthropology, psychology, and evolution, the first
requisites for a correct appreciation of human nature. They ‘have no
time’ for it. It is unfortunately all absorbed in a profound study of
beer and wine and the ‘noble art’ of fencing; and the rest of their
valuable time is taken up in learning some hundreds of paragraphs from
the books of law, the knowledge of which is supposed to qualify the
jurist to fill any position whatever in the State.”
The student of psychology, however, cannot fail to see that the
disposition that led so many members of Haeckel’s family into the legal
profession was also developed in himself to some extent. There is
perhaps no other scientist of his time with such an imperious craving
for clearness, for clean lines and systematic arrangement. At least in
the whole of the Darwinian period no other has made so great an effort
to convert the scattered flight of phenomena in the realm of life into
the even course of so many fixed “laws.” In many of his writings this
tendency to formulate laws is so pronounced that the layman
instinctively has an impression of dogmatism on the part of the author.
This has been grossly misunderstood, and made to play an important part
in the controversial work of his opponents. The truth is that this sharp
outlook and pronounced tendency to formulate clear and unambiguous
“laws” in the animal and plant worlds is a matter of temperament as much
as of judgment. It is very possible that we have here an hereditary
trait, an innate aversion for disorder and confusion—for a thoughtless
rushing ahead without clear ideas and plan. The trait was the more
important and helpful as a man of Haeckel’s type was sure to be one of
the most active revolutionaries in his science, even apart from
Darwinian ideas. It would be difficult to find another reformer in any
great province of thought who, immediately after effecting a complete
overthrow of the older ideas, has hastened so quickly to build up the
new, to devise a nomenclature and a classification down to the smallest
details, and hand on at once to his successors a splendid order once
more. Zoology, which seemed to crumble into chaos after Darwin’s victory
and the collapse of the old framework, came out of Haeckel’s hands,
after barely two years’ work, in the shape of a new and graceful
Darwinistic structure—not, indeed, perfect and finally completed, but
entirely habitable for the young generation. They could add new stones
as they thought fit, or pierce new windows, and so on; but at all events
the chaos was terminated at a critical moment by this iron man of order.
I will only add, to complete the picture, that one of the three
doctorates that Haeckel holds to-day is that of law (an honorary
degree), in addition to his qualifications in philosophy and medicine.
He now only lacks the theological degree, but I fear that he will
neither take the trouble to secure it nor have it conferred on him as an
honorary distinction for his merit in that department.
The Sethes and Haeckels of the earlier generation were not merely
zealous jurists, but also characteristic figures of Napoleonic and
post-Napoleonic Prussia. Christoph Sethe, the patriarch of the maternal
line, was Privy Councillor of the Prussian Government at Cleve at the
beginning of the last decade of the eighteenth century, though he was
then young. When the French occupied the country he accompanied the
Government to Münster, in 1802, which had become a Prussian town. But
the stalwart German was pursued even there by the detested Napoleonists.
He was sent to Düsseldorf as General Procurator in 1808, and came into
dangerous conflict with the French authorities shortly before the
Emperor’s fall. The mobilisation of the troops for the campaign of 1812
had led to a disturbance amongst the workers. Sethe’s sense of
patriotism and justice was affronted by the arbitrary proceedings of the
French. He was summoned to give an account at Paris, the chief object
being to retain him—the most powerful official in the Rhine district and
not a very safe man—as a hostage during the crisis. It was at Paris that
he made the finest phrase of his life. Roederer, the minister, tried to
intimidate him with the threat that the Emperor might have a dangerous
man like him shot at any moment. “You will have to shoot the law first,”
replied Sethe. We are often reminded of this saying in the biography of
Sethe’s grandson. If Haeckel had been burned at the stake like Giordano
Bruno, he would have thought of nothing but the “law”—the law of truth
and freedom that they would burn with him.
Christoph Sethe continued to play an important part in the service of
Prussia, to which, of course, he returned, together with the Rhinelands,
after Napoleon’s fall. He was destined to live through the terrible
reaction under Frederic William the Third, and the fiery outburst under
his successor. After the early death of his wife their youngest
daughter, Bertha, managed his house and large family.
She lived until her death (April 1, 1904) in her quiet, unpretentious
home in one of the large empty streets behind the Tiergarten at Berlin,
reaching the age of ninety-two, but never losing her freshness of mind
and memory. In my many happy talks with the aged lady the succeeding
periods seemed to melt together. The small, old furniture and the
ancient, ever-ticking clock made me forget, in dreamy twilight hours,
that the red glare in the sky above the houses beyond, that faintly lit
up the old-time room, was the reflection from the twentieth century of
the electric flames that flashed on the great modern city. On the table
lay the latest part of Haeckel’s (her nephew) fine illustrated work for
artistically minded scientists and scientifically minded artists—the
_Art-forms in Nature_. The dear old lady spoke with pride of her
knowledge of the “radiolaria,” the mysterious unicellular
ocean-dwellers, described in Haeckel’s splendid monograph, the flinty
shells of which are amongst the finest artistic treasures of nature. She
called them the “dear radiolaria” with all the tenderness of the
emotional man of science who had felt a sort of psychic relation, a
living affinity, to the tiny microscopic strangers he had been the first
to arrange and describe in their thousands. Smiling, with quiet pride,
she told me how her nephew visited her, when he came to Berlin; how,
with the unassuming ways of this sound stock, he chose to sleep in the
clothes-drying loft; how he invited his friends to come and hear of his
voyages and work, bringing thirty of them to share a single dish of
herring-salad in his naïve way, and how, as they continued to pour in,
he made seats for them of boards and tubs, and fed them with his
wonderful genius for anecdote so that none went away fasting. She dwelt
with entire satisfaction on the last, the “zoological” phase, of the
Haeckel-Sethe house. Yet it all blended softly with the old and the past
of nearly a century ago. Over the patriarchal furniture hung the oil
painting of Christoph Sethe, with the large Roman nose that runs through
the family down to Ernst Haeckel himself, and gives the chief feature to
his otherwise soft profile. Under a glass shade, in the old fashion of
our grandfathers that we perhaps do not sufficiently appreciate, was a
fine bust of Schleiermacher. He was a friend of the Sethes. Bertha Sethe
was confirmed by him. He died four days before Ernst Haeckel was born,
on February 12, 1834. The sister came from the grave to attend the
mother of the new-born child. A little fact of that character seems to
pour out a broad stream of light. The religious sense was strong in the
Sethes, but it was not of the rigid conventional character. It came from
the depths of human destinies, of individual experience. In those depths
it is always found associated with that other fundamental quality of
human experience and inner life—a zeal for the truth. Schleiermacher,
the Good, had endeavoured within the limits of his time (if not of our
time) to erect a new and firmer Christendom. Darwinism might very well
have adjusted itself to this new Christendom, that needed no record of
miracles from disputed historical works to support it, but sought the
holiest ideal prophetically in the symbolic conception and the
development of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Had Schleiermacher
read the _Natural History of Creation_, or later theologians shared his
temper, one wonders how much exaggeration and bitterness might have been
spared on either side. But religion was not prepared to dissociate
itself from “the Church,” and with the Church there could be no
compromise. Thus one’s thoughts travelled from the radiolaria in
Haeckel’s latest publication and the old bust of Schleiermacher, which
was protected by its glass shade, in this home of old-world piety, from
the wicked flies of the twentieth century.
An elder sister of Bertha Sethe and daughter of the old Christoph Sethe
had married the much older lawyer, Karl Haeckel, in the twenties. The
first-fruit of this marriage was Ernst Haeckel’s elder brother, the
Provincial Councillor Haeckel who died a few years ago, a high-minded
and sensitive man. He remained throughout life faithful to the strict
traditional forms of religious experience, in spite of all his
admiration for his gifted zoological brother.
The second and last child did not appear until ten years later. Ernst
Haeckel was born on the 16th of February, 1834, shortly after the death
of Schleiermacher, as I have explained. Most of what I know of his
earliest years was told me by his venerable aunt Bertha.
His father died long ago, in 1871. Gustav Freytag has pointed out how
eagerly he drank in the morning air of the dawning freedom before 1813.
For many years he was at a later date a very close friend of Gneisenau.
He was an earnest, conscientious, upright man, with no particular
artistic arabesques to his life, and at the same time no errors. The
victories of 1870 lit up the red sunset of his days. He was one of those
happy folk who thought that _all_ was accomplished in the great
achievements of those days, and had little suspicion of what was still
to come. The mother survived him for many years. Her son’s _Indian
Travels_ was dedicated to her on her eighty-fourth birthday, November
22, 1882. The dedication ran: “Thou it was who from early childhood
fostered in me a sense for the infinite beauties of nature: thou hast
ever watched my changeful career with all the ceaseless care and thought
that we compress in the one phrase—a mother’s love.”
Ernst Haeckel was born at Potsdam, but in the same year the father was
transferred to Merseburg, where the child was brought up. It was not his
destiny to be a child of Berlin. Saxony remained essentially his home in
many respects. We can always see in him something of this home that
looks down on its children from its great green hills. The cold lines of
the streets of the metropolis and the melancholy of the Brandenburg
pine-forests cannot be traced in him. In later years Berlin assumed more
and more in his thoughts the shape of an antipodal city. His works are
full of the sharpest strictures on Berlin science. It was at an earlier
date the city of Ehrenberg and Reichert, whom he did not love; later it
was associated with Du Bois-Reymond and Virchow, who gradually became
his bitterest opponents. But he detested it generally as the home of
Privy Councillors, of science in the Procrustean bed of official
supervision. When he compared what he himself had done at Jena with the
slenderest possible appliances, and what, in his judgment, had been done
by the heads of the Berlin schools in their princely institutes, he
would humorously—though it has been taken very seriously—lay down the
“natural law” that the magnitude of the scientific achievement is in
inverse proportion to the size of the scientific institute. The official
people at Berlin did not fail to make a biting retort to these Radical
strictures—that in 1881, when he wanted to go to Ceylon, he was formally
refused assistance by the Berlin Academy from the travelling-fee (then
at liberty) attached to the Humboldt foundation. He made the journey
without their assistance, and had the splendid revenge of giving us, in
the description of this very voyage, the most brilliant account of the
tropics that has appeared in Germany since the time of Humboldt. It was
a finer contribution to the general ideal of the Humboldt foundation
than the timid payment of a hundred pounds could have secured. However,
we are anticipating. Before that time he was to spend a short but happy
period at Berlin in the fifties, in the best days of his youth—a Berlin
of a different scientific character from the present city, being at once
less pretentious and more profound, whichever the reader chooses to
dwell on.
Certain traits could be recognised unmistakably in the boy. He had a
great love of nature, of light, colour, and beauty, of flowers and trees
and butterflies, of the sun and the blue heavens. There was also a
strong sense of independence and individuality. This did not imply that
he was lacking in gentler feeling. It is said that he would do anything
that he was asked but nothing that it was sought to compel him to do.
The little fair, blue-eyed lad would sit quietly if they gave him a
daisy to pull to pieces. First he would, as if he were a student
analysing it, detach the white leaves from the central yellow ground.
Then he would carefully replace them, piece by piece, round the yellow
centre, clap his little hands and cry out, “Now it’s all right again.”
It is a very pretty trait that tradition has preserved. In the play of
the child we seem to see the chief lines of the man’s character like two
branches of a tree; the analytic work of the scientist and the
reconstructive tendency of the artist who restores the dissected world
to harmony.
His excellent training in those early years fostered his feeling for
nature and his sense of independence with wise adaptation to the
personal character of the boy. The mother gladly cultivated his love of
nature. On the deeper development of his character a decisive influence
was exercised, with every regard for freedom, by a friend of the family,
the physician Basedow. His ideal was education without compulsion, by
means of a sort of constant artificial selection and cultivation of the
good that grew up spontaneously in the soul of the child. The father, a
great worker, was content to give a word of praise occasionally; to urge
him to go to the root of things always, and never to coquet idly with
his own soul. If the young dreamer stood at the window and looked up at
the clouds, his father would pat him on the shoulder and say, “Every
minute has its value in this world. Play or work—but do something.” It
was, in a sense, the voice of the restless nineteenth century itself
that spoke. The whole life of the youth and the man was to be an eternal
proof that he had heard the message. He has pressed unwearyingly
forward, as few other men have done. There was ever something in him of
the mountaineer, hurrying on and watching every hour that he may reach
the summit. The day of rest may come afterwards, down below in the
valley. In truth, it never came. It is well known that the man wrote
some of his most difficult, most widely read, and most controverted
works subsequently in a few months, encroaching upon his night’s rest
until his health was endangered. In a remote Cingalese village in
Ceylon, where the enervating tropical climate forces even the strongest
to indulge in the afternoon siesta, he tells himself that, in view of
the great expense of the journey, each day is worth a five-pound note.
He refuses to sleep long hours or take the siesta, rises at five in the
morning, and uses the hottest hours of the day, from twelve to four, for
“anatomical and microscopic work, observing and drawing, and for packing
up the material collected.” He met to the full the claim of the
nineteenth century, for all the inner poetic tendency of his character.
Such a character he must have had to become a philosopher, as he has
done; but it lay, as it were, in deeper recesses of his being. To the
eye of the observer he seemed to be ever rushing on with a watch in his
hand until old age. When we think of the enormous number of problems and
the vast range of interests that brought him into the front rank in the
nineteenth century, we may say that he advanced at a pace that would
have given concern to the aged adviser of his youth in his small world.
In the long run we may say of all education as of the physician in the
old saying, “The best doctor is the one we don’t need, because we are
not ill.” Haeckel was sent to the school at Merseburg. This instruction
came to a close in his eighteenth year. He thought of some of his old
teachers with affection forty years afterwards. On the whole his later
opinion of the usual schooling was as severe as that of many of his
contemporaries. In his _General Morphology_ (1866), his most profound
work, he speaks of the “very defective, perverse, and often really
mischievous instruction, by which we are filled with absurd errors,
instead of natural truths, in our most impressionable years.” Sixteen
years afterwards (in a speech delivered at Eisenach) he hopes that the
triumphant science of evolution “will put an end to one of the greatest
evils in our present system of education—that overloading of the memory
with dead material that destroys the finest powers, and prevents the
normal development of either mind or body.” “This overloading,” he says,
“is due to the old and ineradicable error that the excellence of
education is to be judged by the quantity of positive facts committed to
memory, instead of by the quality of the real knowledge imparted. Hence
it is especially advisable to make a more careful selection of the
matter of instruction both in the higher and the elementary schools, and
not to give precedence to the faculties that burden the memory with
masses of dead facts, but to those that build up the judgment with the
living play of the idea of evolution. Let our tortured children learn
only half what they do, but learn it better, and the next generation
will be twice as sound as the present one in body and soul. The reform
of education, which, we trust, will be brought about by introducing the
idea of evolution, must apply to the mathematical and scientific, as
well as the philological and historical sections, because there is the
same fault in them all, that far too much material is injected, and far
too little attention is paid to its digestion.” Seventeen years later
again, in the _Riddle of the Universe_, the elementary schools are
severely handled. Science is still the Cinderella of the code. Our
teachers regard it as their chief duty to impart “the dead knowledge
that has come down from the schools of the Middle Ages. They give the
first place to their grammatical gymnastics, and waste time in imparting
a ‘thorough knowledge’ of the classical tongues and foreign history.”
There is no question of cosmology, anthropology, or biology; instead of
these “the memory is loaded with a mass of philological and historical
facts that are quite useless either from the theoretical or the
practical point of view.” In these expressions, which recur constantly
throughout the whole of a thoughtful life, we can clearly see a very
intense general experience of youth, and this is a more valuable
document than any individualised complaint against this or that bad
teacher in particular.
However, Haeckel (who, in point of fact, took everything seriously and
would have all in the clearest order) made a very thorough appropriation
of his Latin and Greek. When the new Darwinian zoology and botany needed
several hundred new Latin-Greek technical terms in after-years, he
showed himself to be an inventor of the first rank in this department.
No other scientist has made anything like the same adroit use of the
classic vocabulary for the purposes of the new system and created a new
terminology for the entirely new science. His creations were certainly
ingenious, and not without grace at times; in other cases, as was almost
inevitable, they were less pleasing. And to this we must add thousands
of names of new species which he had to coin, as the discoverer of
radiolaria, medusæ, sponges, &c. In the radiolaria alone he has formed
and published the names of more than 3,500 new species. I fancy that
even the oldest pastor of the most fertile congregation has never
conducted so many christenings. In each case it was necessary to impose
two names, the generic and specific. We may well expect to find a few
that will not last, but the reader is amazed at the philological
creative power of this busy godfather and the inexhaustibility of his
vocabulary; they show far more than the usual training in humanities.
His real predilection was pronounced enough in those early years. It was
what the classical pedagogue would regard as child’s play and waste of
time—zoology and botany. A large double window in his parents’ house was
fitted up as a conservatory, and plants were gathered very zealously.
His love of botany was so great that any one would have pronounced him a
botanist in the making. But fate determined that he was to be a
zoologist. In his eleventh year the boy, while paying a visit to his
uncle Bleek (a professor of theology!) at Bonn, spent a whole day
searching the remotest corners of the Siebengebirg for the _Erica
cinerea_, which he had heard could not be found in any other part of
Germany. At the Merseburg school he had two excellent teachers, Gandtner
and Karl Gude, who fostered his inclination, and changed it from a mere
collector’s eagerness into the finer enjoyment of the scientific mind.
The young student wrote a contribution to Garcke’s _Flora Hallensis_.
The professional decision gives many a troubled hour.
It is significant to find that as the novice tended his herbarium it
dawned on him that there was a weak point somewhere in the rigid
classification given in the manuals of botany. The books said that there
were so many fixed species, each invariably recognisable by certain
characters. But when the youth tried to diagnose his plant-treasures in
practice by these rules, there seemed to be always a few contraband
species smuggled in, like the spectres in the Wahlpurgis night to which
the sage vainly expostulates, “Begone: we have explained you away.”
Often the individual specimens would not agree with the lore of the
books. There were discrepancies; sometimes they cut across one type,
sometimes another, and at times they shamelessly stretched across the
gap between one rubric and another. What did it mean? Were there really
no fixed species? Was “species” only an idea, and was the reality of the
plant-world in a state of flux like the sea? Teachers and books insisted
that the “species” is, in its absolute nature, the basis of all
botanical science, the great and sacred foundation that the Moses of
botany and zoology, Linné, had laid down for ever. How could it be so?
The mature worker would look back on this dilemma of his youth with a
smile of satisfaction thirty years afterwards. He would know then what
sort of a nut it was that he was trying to crack in his early
speculations. It was nothing less than the magnificent problem that
presented itself to Darwin, the crucial question of the fixity or
variability of species. “The problem of the constancy or transmutation
of species,” he wrote, “arrested me with a lively interest when, twenty
years ago, as a boy of twelve years, I made a resolute but fruitless
effort to determine and distinguish the ‘good and bad species’ of
blackberries, willows, roses, and thistles. I look back now with fond
satisfaction on the concern and painful scepticism that stirred my
youthful spirits as I wavered and hesitated (in the manner of most ‘good
classifiers,’ as we called them) whether to admit only ‘good’ specimens
into my herbarium and reject the ‘bad,’ or to embrace the latter and
form a complete chain of transitional forms between the ‘good species’
that would make an end of all their ‘goodness.’ I got out of the
difficulty at the time by a compromise that I can recommend to all
classifiers. I made two collections. One, arranged on official lines,
offered to the sympathetic observer all the species, in ‘typical’
specimens, as radically distinct forms, each decked with its pretty
label; the other was a private collection, only shown to one trusted
friend, and contained only the rejected kinds that Goethe so happily
called ‘the characterless or disorderly races, which we hardly dare
ascribe to a species, as they lose themselves in infinite varieties,’
such as rubus, salix, verbascum, hieracium, rosa, cirsium, &c. In this a
large number of specimens, arranged in a long series, illustrated the
direct transition from one good species to another. They were the
officially forbidden fruit of knowledge in which I took a secret boyish
delight in my leisure hours.”
These little scruples, however, did not interfere with what he felt to
be the chief interest of botany. The collecting of plants harmonises
well with a general love of nature and a passion for wandering over hill
and valley. Long walks had already become a feature of his life. The
scientific interest made it superfluous to have a companion. Botany went
with him everywhere as his lady-love, and remained ever faithful to him.
“I have preferred to travel alone most of my life,” he used to say to
me; “I never feel _ennui_ when I am alone. My love of and interest in
nature are much better entertainment than conversation.” One of the
features in this interest at all times, even in later years, was
botanical research. The material for it is found everywhere. Darwin, a
great traveller with an unusually strong appreciation of good scenery,
has said that the traveller who would combine the pursuit of knowledge
with æsthetic satisfaction must be above all a botanist(in the closing
retrospect of his _Naturalist’s Voyage Round the World_, one of the
finest passages in the work). Whenever Haeckel spoke in later years of
his adopted Jena, he never failed to explain, amongst the other
excellent qualities of the little university town, that so many fine
orchids grew in its woods. When he left Jena to make the long voyage to
Ceylon, his last look was at the drops of dew that sparkled like pearls
“in the dark blue calices of the gentians, with their tender lashes,
that so richly decked the grass-covered sides of the railway cutting.”
The _Letters from India_, that described his voyage, owes a good deal of
its peculiar charm to his skill in botanical description. I know no
other work that approaches it in conveying so effective an idea of the
luxuriant vegetation of the tropics.
In those early years there was one particular point of close union
between botany and the sense of beauty. It was only two years before
Haeckel’s birth that Goethe, the man who had put into inimitable verse
new and pregnant truths of botany, passed to his rest at Weimar.
It is no longer a special distinction of any prominent personality of
the nineteenth century to have been influenced by Goethe. It is a kind
of natural necessity from which one cannot escape. All that is great in
the century can be traced back to Goethe. He flows beneath it, like a
dark stream through the bowels of a mountain. Here and there the flanks
open and the stream becomes visible; not a restless bubbling spring, but
a broad mirror. There is, however, a closer following of Goethe. There
are a few strong spirits that have been consciously inspired by him from
the first in all their thoughts; have throughout life felt themselves to
be the apostles of the “gospel of Goethe”; and in every new creation of
their own have held that they did but reflect or expand his ideas, did
but carry on his principles to these further conclusions. Haeckel is, in
his whole work, one of this smaller band; his whole personality is, in
fact, one of its most conspicuous manifestations in the second half of
the century.
In Goethe we find the basic ideas of his philosophy. Goethe took from
him his God, and gave him a new one: took from him the external,
transcendental God of the Churches, and gave him the God that is in all
things, in the eternal development of the world, in body and soul alike,
the God that embraces all reality and being, beside whom there is no
distinct “world,” no distinct “sinful man,” no special beginning or end
of things. When Haeckel found himself, at the highest point of his own
path, by the side of Darwin, he was the first to see and to insist that
Darwin was but a stage in the logical development of Goethe’s ideas.
Fate decided that Haeckel should be even externally in some sense an
heir of the Goethe epoch. Jena, the university that Goethe had regarded
with such affection, and at which Schiller had toiled with his heart’s
blood in “sad, splendid years,” owes its fame in the last third of the
century to Haeckel. It is not an excess of adulation, but a simple
truth, to say that among the general public and abroad the reputation of
Jena passes directly from Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte to Haeckel. His
name stands for an epoch in the life of Jena, like theirs; all that lies
between is forgotten and unknown. In the district itself it is as if the
old epochs and the new came into direct touch.
[Illustration:
JENA.
_From “Jena in Wort und Bild” (Frommann’sche Hofbuchhandlung, Jena)._
]
I shall never forget the hour when this thought came upon me in all its
force. It was on a snowless December day, when the dying fire of autumn
still lingered on the trees and bushes where the blackbirds sang in
front of the observatory. The table and seat of sandstone stood out
bleakly. A tablet indicated, in phrases of Goethe’s, that Schiller had
dwelt there. It was there that the Wallenstein was born. There the two
often sat in conversation—the conversation of two of the greatest minds
of the time, each in his way a master spirit. To-day the little dome of
the observatory looks down on the spot; it is not a luxurious building,
but it is a stage in the onward journey, a symbol of the nineteenth
century as it leaps into the twentieth. A little farther off rises the
modern structure of the Zoological Institute. In Goethe’s day no one
dreamed that such a building would ever be seen. It was opened by
Haeckel in 1884. The zoological collection it houses was chiefly brought
together under his direction. Amongst its treasures are, besides
Haeckel’s corals and the like, the outcome of the travels of Semon and
Kükenthal in Australia and New Guinea—lands whose very outline could
barely be traced in the mist when Schiller was a professor at Jena. At
the entrance there are two stuffed orangs, our distant cousins. One wall
of the lecture-hall is covered with huge charts depicting the
genealogical tree of life, as it is drawn up by Haeckel. With what eyes
Schiller would have devoured them! Yet classic traits are not wanting.
From Haeckel’s fine study in the Institute the eye falls on the
Hausberg, “the mountain-top from which the red rays stream.” It is the
room in which the deep-sea radiolaria of the _Challenger_ Expedition
were studied, a zoological campaign in depths of the ocean that were
stranger to Schiller’s days than the surface of the moon is to us.
Behind this Goethe-Schiller seat at the observatory there is a natural
depression full of willows that reminds us of the time when all was
country here. But just beyond it is a modern street—“Ernst Haeckel
Street,” as it was named, in honour of him, on the occasion of his
sixtieth birthday. Close to it is the villa where he has lived for many
years with his devoted family, full of wonderful reminiscences
(oil-paintings and water-colours from his own hand) of his many travels.
In Schiller’s day a voyage to Ceylon would have been a life’s work.
To-day it is an episode in an infinitely richer and broader life. On the
stone seat now we see the proud and handsome figure of the man himself,
recalling pleasantly the masters who have stood here before him, the
wide hat covering the white hair that is belied by the rosy cheeks; a
straight and strong figure, yet revealing in the finer lines of the face
the sensitive, æsthetic temper that does not look on scientific
investigation as a brutal power of the dissecting knife, but remembers
he is the heir of Goethe, even in the Zoological Institute yonder. Over
my mind came the feeling of a strange rebirth of things. I felt that
life is an eternally new and mystic resurrection, immeasurably more
wonderful and profound than all the crude ideas of resurrection that
have yet prevailed. A mind such as we love to picture to ourselves in
our ideal of the future historian must seek the eternal and constant
features in all change, even in two epochs that are so distinct and in
the men who have lived in them. It is our incorrigible schoolmaster
disposition that divides things. In the real world there must be one
straight line of development. To-day the highest is sought in the melody
of immortal verse: to-morrow a Zoological Institute rises on the spot
where the poet had stood.
It is said that the boy did not come under the influence of Goethe
without some difficulty. His mother did not like Goethe; she preferred
Schiller. Goethe was too great for every true soul to follow him in his
arduous path. Weimar itself had more than once been disposed to desert
him. How much more the general public in its conventional fetters! How
many fell away from him when he published the _Roman Elegies_, and again
when he brought out the _Elective Affinities_. In Haeckel’s youth people
remembered Börne’s narrow and hostile strictures. Goethe began to
penetrate into the German family as a classic in spite of the general
feeling. But the German family was still far below him. He had gradually
to lift it up from its Philistine level. At times it rebelled against
him, as every stubborn level does against a peak. It was his aunt Bertha
that first put Goethe’s works into the boy’s hands. He received them as
a delightful piece of moral contraband.
Gottfried Keller has finely described, about the same period, in his
_Green Henry_, the effect of such a revelation on a sensitive young man.
A bookseller brings to the house the whole of Goethe’s works, fifty
small volumes with red covers and gilded titles. The young Swiss
Heinrich, Keller’s picture of himself, reads the volumes unceasingly for
thirty days, when they are taken away because his mother cannot pay for
them. But the thirty days have been a dream to the boy. He seems to see
new and more brilliant stars in the heavens as he looks up. When the
books are removed, it is as if a choir of bright angels have left the
room. “I went out into the open air. The old town on the hill, the rocks
and woods and river and sea and the lines of the mountains lay in the
gentle light of the March sun, and as my eye fell on them I felt a pure
and lasting joy that I had never known before. It was a generous love of
all that lives, a love that respects the right and realises the import
of each thing, and feels the connectedness and depth of the world. This
love is higher than the artificial affection of the individual with
selfish aim that ever leads to pettiness and caprice; it is higher even
than the enjoyment and detachment that come of special and romantic
affections; it alone can give us an unchanging and lasting glow.
Everything now came before me in new and beautiful and remarkable forms.
I began to see and to love, not only the outer form, but the inner
content, the nature, and the history of things.” The poet compresses his
experience into one episode. In real life it comes slowly, step by step.
In fine, a third element was born in the young botanist and lover of
beauty—Goethe’s view of life behind all else: that which Goethe himself
called “objective.” The mystic might call it a return to God: but it was
Goethe’s God.
Three other books influenced Haeckel in his school-days, besides the
works of Goethe. The first was Humboldt’s _Aspects of Nature_. This is
another work that has had an effect on all the sensitive spirits of the
nineteenth century. It is most unjustly depreciated by the young,
_blasé_ generation of our time, which dislikes the older style. In the
first two volumes of the _Cosmos_ we see the play of a great mind
wherever we look for it.
Then came Darwin’s _Naturalist’s Voyage round the World_. The ardent
youth had as yet on suspicion what the name would one day mean to him.
Darwin was then regarded as a completed work on which final judgment had
been rendered. He was appreciated as a traveller, a student of the
geology of South America, and especially as the gifted investigator of
the wonderful coral reefs of the Indian Ocean. His name stood thus in
all the manuals, close even to that of Humboldt. Probably the young
reader thought he had died long before. At all events, no one had a
presentiment that this quiet naturalist and student of corals was about
to light a torch that would flame over the world. The chief advantage
that Haeckel drew from the two works was an ardent desire to see the
tropics, with their virgin forests and blue coral seas. It has come to
so many after reading these works, and persisted in their lives as the
vivid image of a dream, like that which drove Goethe to Italy—the dream
of a home of the soul that must one day be sought.
The third book was Schleiden’s _The Plant and its Life_. Matthias Jacob
Schleiden was then in the best of his power, and had an influence that
amounted to fascination on many of the younger men. Behind him lay a
terrible struggle. He had begun his career as a lawyer, and had been so
unfortunate that he even attempted his life. With his interest in botany
a new life began, and he worked with the energy of one raised from the
dead. He was certainly an original thinker. His name is known to us
to-day especially as the founder of the cell-theory. This is the
greatest distinction that he has earned. But at that time he had a much
more general importance as a leader in the struggle to introduce a
certain method of scientific research. A somewhat obscure epoch was
coming to a close, a more or less superficial natural philosophy having
sought to replace sound investigation. The struggle had ended with the
decisive victory of the simple discovery of facts. 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. What was “better” for the time being might be very far from
really “good.” It was here that Schleiden stepped in. He fought against
the prevailing specialism, at first in his own particular province of
botany. He did not, indeed, take up the cause of the exploded
pyrotechnics of the older natural philosophy, but pleaded for more
general critical-philosophical methods. These must be preserved in any
circumstances. The great botanist, he said, is not the man who can
determine ten thousand species of plants according to the received
models, but the man of clear logic and wide deductions from his lore.
Botany must be conceived as a distinct branch of general thought;
otherwise it is worthless, and its herbarium may rot unnoticed in the
corner and its discoveries be the outcome of blind hazard. Schleiden
himself had no perception of the great idea that Darwin was to bring
into his province afterwards—the idea of the variability of species and
of evolution, which brought to a critical stage the question whether the
botanist was to be merely a subordinate museum-secretary or a creative
thinker, a prophet of nature to whom plants would be part of a general
philosophy, a part of God in the ideal sense of evolution. Yet
Schleiden’s simple warning cry made a deep impression on many of the
young men especially. There was a note of aspiration in it, an assurance
that they were waiting for a sun that _must_ rise somewhere. He was a
master of language. There was the stuff of the poet in him. His works
strayed out far beyond the range of his own province. Haeckel himself
did the same work in later years. It is no wonder that Schleiden had a
magical influence over him. In this case, indeed, it seemed as if the
attraction was to determine his own career.
Schleiden taught botany at Jena University. Haeckel was still in the
higher forms of his school at Merseburg, and remained there when his
father resigned his position in the State service, and eventually
removed to Berlin. At this time the ardent botanist decided to adopt the
science of plants as his life-study when his final examination was over.
Schleiden would teach him how to combine philosophy with botany. Then he
would try to roam over the world as a practical botanist and visit the
far-off zones where Mother Earth poured out her cornucopia of forms so
generously.
While still in the higher form at school he made a preliminary visit to
Jena. Everything seemed so pleasant and charming. He made the journey on
foot. These long walks have always been his pride—to start out like a
travelling scholar, with hardly anything in his pocket, to live on bread
and water, and sleep in the hay at night; but to enjoy to the full all
the incomparable delights that the great magician, nature, provides for
the faithful novice—scenery, beautiful orchids, thoughts of God, Goethe,
and the world. It was in 1849 that he visited Jena. He has described it
himself: “After I had reverently admired the Goethe-room in the castle
of Dornburg, I wandered, on a hot July day, over the shady meadows to
Jena, singing lustily with my gay comrades. As I entered the venerable
old market-place I found a troop of lively students in front of the
Burgkeller, with coloured caps and long pipes, singing, and drinking the
famous Lichtenhain beer from wooden tankards. It made a great impression
on me, and as I took a tankard with them I made up my mind that I would
some day be one of them.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER II
AT THE UNIVERSITY
It was botany itself that thwarted all these designs. The examination
had passed off happily. Rooms were taken at Jena, at the Easter of 1852,
for the advanced study under Schleiden. Then the indefatigable collector
had an adventure on a cold March day. He spent hours in the wet meadows
by the river Saale, searching for a rare plant, the squill (_Scilla
bifolia_). He met with the fate of the angler in the story, who fell
into the water in his haste to secure his big pike. He landed the fish,
but not himself. The plant was found, but Haeckel’s zeal was punished
with a severe rheumatism. He had to go home to his parents at Berlin to
be tended. At Berlin he begins his studies, and the event to some extent
decides his career. It would now be many years before he would see Jena
again; and through his efforts it would become one of the leading
schools, not of botany, but of zoology—a school of _philosophical_
zoology, however, in the sense of Schleiden.
Berlin had secured a botanist of the first rank a year before, Alexander
Braun. He, too, was a thoughtful botanist, who would in his way agree
very well with Schleiden. He was convinced that botany did not wholly
consist in the determination of new plant forms and the almost fruitless
effort to set up a system on which all particular diagnoses would be
rigidly played as on a piano. He believed that there must be a more
profound conception of it, which would take “form,” as such, as one of
its problems, and would aim, not at the formation of as large a
collection as possible, but at the construction of a science for which
Goethe had long ago found a name—morphology, or the science of forms. It
happened that Braun was a friendly visitor at the house of Haeckel’s
parents at Berlin. The now convalescent freshman became devoted to him,
body and soul; they became close friends, not merely master and pupil.
Berlin at that time afforded many an opportunity for practical
botanising. Rare marsh-plants then flourished in the bed of the Spree,
which has since been cleared. The Botanical Garden was full of good
things. Haeckel used to tell with pride, long afterwards, with what
readiness he flung himself into the work, practical as well as
theoretical, on these excursions with Professor Braun. “On one of our
botanical expeditions we wanted to get a floating chara from a pond.
Braun took off his boots in his usual way in order to wade to the spot.
But I was before him. I quickly undressed, forgot my naughty rheumatism,
and swam to the spot, to bring him a quantity of the plant he wanted.
That was my first piece of heroism, perhaps my greatest.”
But in all this pleasant botanising there was no serious outlook on his
future profession. Haeckel’s father, with his official way of looking at
things, could not reconcile himself to scientific research as an
avocation. It is an old belief that the way to all preoccupation with
the science of living things lies through medicine. One may question
that to-day. It was the rock on which Darwin nearly came to grief. A man
may be a very gifted botanist, yet be quite unfitted for the medical
profession. One must have a real vocation to become a physician, more
than for any other calling, or else it is a hopeless blunder. The
talents are divided in much the same way as between the historian and
the soldier. It is true that the two may be united, but it is equally
true that very good historians have made very poor soldiers. What the
medical man learns in his studies is, of course, always valuable. But it
offers no test of personal talent for scientific research, nor should it
be supposed that a capacity of this kind would be able, by mere formal
study, to acquire the true qualities of a physician. We must learn to
appreciate the physician’s calling too much ever to look on it as an
incidental occupation. It always reminds me of the amiable notion of the
Philistine, that a man with a turn for poetry must first take up some
solid profession, and then, once he is “in the saddle,” pour out verses
in his leisure hours. Poetry can never be a mistress: it demands
marriage or nothing. Otherwise—well, we have instances enough.
Haeckel himself afterwards said that he only acceded to his father’s
wish, that he should study medicine, with a botanical mental
reservation. He thought of going through the discipline conscientiously
until he became a physician, and then secure a place as ship’s doctor,
and travel over the world and see the tropics. Things turned out very
differently. He never became a medical man such as his father had
wished, but he passed over the profession into zoology. Botany remained
the lost and never-forgotten love of his youth. When we look back on his
whole career we can see that he was, on the whole, fortunate. Zoology
afforded a richer, more abundant, and more varied material at that time.
It proved to be more “philosophical.” He went after his father’s asses
and found a kingdom. But to him personally it seemed to be an
unmistakable renunciation—the first in an active career that was to see
many resignations.
* * * * *
“He goes farthest who does not know where he is going.”
Haeckel once applied this motto to himself and his star, in a humorous
after-dinner speech. With this kind of safe predestination he reached
Würtzburg in the autumn of 1852 as a medical student. Medicine had in
those days received an entirely new theoretical basis from Würtzburg—a
basis that was calculated to attract a young inquirer, who brought much
more of the general Faust-spirit to his work than aspiration to the
profession and the doctor’s cap, or the practical side.
Let us recall for a moment how medicine had gradually reached the
position of an independent science. Medicine was the outcome of a remote
mythical epoch. It was content with the effect of certain venerable
traditional medicaments on the living body, but knew little or nothing
of the inner structure of the body on which it tried its drugs. The
dissection and examination of even a corpse was regarded as a deadly
sin, and was visited with secular punishment. Scientific medicine did
not exist until this prohibition was removed; its first and most
necessary foundation was anatomy, the science of the bodily structure
and its organs. The art of “cutting up” bodies had seemed too revolting.
Moreover, no sooner had the science of anatomy been founded than the
range of the human eye itself was considerably enlarged. The microscope
was invented. A new world came to light in the dissection of the body.
Beyond their external appearance it revealed the internal composition of
the various organs. The eye sees a shred of skin, a piece of intestine,
or a section of the liver. The microscope fastens on a tiny particle of
this portion of the body, and reveals in it a deeper layer of
unsuspected structures. It is well known in the history of microscopic
discovery that the more powerful lenses and the improved methods of
research were only gradually introduced, and enabled students to found a
new and much profounder anatomy. As soon as this science appeared it was
given the special name of “histology,” or the science of the tissues
(_hista_). Its particular achievement is the discovery that in man, the
animal, and the plant, all the parts of the body prove, when
sufficiently magnified, to be composed of small living elements, which
are known as cells. The discovery of the cell was made in the latter
part of the third decade of the nineteenth century. These cells join
together in homogeneous groups in order to accomplish one or other
function in the body, and thus form its “tissues.” Their intricate
structure is unravelled by the histologist, microscope in hand. It is
evident that in this way a new basis was provided for anatomy, and
therefore also for medicine. In the fifties Würtzburg was the leading
school of histology, or the science of these tissues composed of cells.
Albert Kölliker, professor of anatomy there since 1847, published his
splendid _Manual of Histology_ at the very time when Haeckel was
studying under him. Franz Leydig, a tutor there since 1849, was working
in the same direction. The third member of the group, made professor in
1849, was Rudolf Virchow, a young teacher then in his best years. It was
Virchow who did most to bring practical medicine into line with
histology. As the vital processes in the human body seemed to him, with
his strict histological outlook, to be traced back always to the
tissue-building cells, he concluded that disease also, or the
pathological condition of the body, and therefore the proper field of
the medical man, was a process in these cells. Man seemed to him to be a
“cell-state”: the tissues were the various active social strata in this
state: and disease was, in its ultimate source, a conflict in the state
between the citizens, the tissue-forming cells, that normally divide the
work amongst them for the common good. Pathology must be cellular
pathology. The science was already being taught by Virchow at Würtzburg,
and the dry bones of it were covered with flesh for his hearers. But his
ideas were not published until a few years afterwards (1858).
In the first three terms Haeckel studied chiefly under Kölliker and
Leydig. They taught him animal and human embryology, as it was then
conceived. Embryology was the science of the development of the
individual animal or man, the description of the series of changes that
the chick passes through in the egg or the human embryo in the womb.
This science, also, had been profoundly affected by the invention of the
microscope. Firstly, the spermatozoa, the active, microscopically small
particles in the animal and human sperm, had been discovered. Then, in
the twenties, Karl Ernst von Baer had discovered the human ovum. The
relation of these things to the cell-theory was clear. It was
indubitable that each of these male spermatozoa and each female ovum was
a cell. They melted together and were blended into a new cell in the act
of procreation, and from this, by a process of repeated cleavage of
cells, the new individual was developed with all his millions of cells
and all the elaborate tissues that these cells united to form. A whole
world of marvellous features came to light, but the key to the
unriddling of them was still wanting.
However, the Würtzburg school was at least agreed as to _method_, which
was the main thing; its leaders were determined to press on to the
solution of these problems on purely scientific lines. Everything was to
be brought into a logical relation of cause and effect, and there was to
be no intrusion of the supernatural, no mysticism. Natural laws must be
traced in the life of the cells and in the history of the ovum and the
embryo. The cells were to be regarded in the same way as the astronomer
regards his myriads of glittering bodies. In this way the science of
histology had been founded, and embryology had assumed a scientific
character in the hands of Von Baer. The microscope kept the attention of
students to facts, and did not suffer them to lose themselves in the
clouds. Thus a foundation-stone was laid in Haeckel’s thoughts which he
would never discard.
In the later years of the Darwinian controversy he was destined to come
into sharp conflict with both Virchow and Kölliker. Each of them came to
look on him as the sober hen does on the naughty chick it has brought
into the world, that madly tries to swim on the treacherous waters of
Darwinism. But forty years afterwards—after many a knife-edged word had
been thrown in the struggle—the aged Kölliker was one of those who
entered their names in the list of men of science who erected a bust in
the Zoological Institute at Jena in honour of Haeckel’s sixtieth
birthday.
However, it was a different, an apparently trivial, yet, as it turned
out, most momentous interest that quickened him during these University
years.
The impulse to microscopic research, that had led to the foundation of
histology and embryology, had brought about a third great advance
which had an important bearing on zoology. When we stroll along the
beautiful shore of the Mediterranean at Naples to-day, with eyes bent
on the blue surface from which Capri rises like a siren, and on the
cloud-capped Vesuvius with its violet streaks of lava cutting across
the green country, we notice in the foreground of the picture a stout
building, with very large windows, planted with the boldness of a
_parvenu_ amongst the foliage. It is the “Zoological Station,” built
by Dohrn, a German zoologist, at the beginning of the seventies. Anton
Dohrn was one of Haeckel’s first pupils, and was personally initiated
by him into the study of marine life, at Heligoland in 1865.
Zoologists who work in the station to-day find it very comfortable.
Little steamers with dipping apparatus bring the inhabitants of the
bay to them. There is a large aquarium at hand. You sit down to your
microscope, and work. The material is “fresh to hand” every day. There
are now many of these stations at well-exposed spots on the coast in
various countries—sea-observatories, as it were, in which the student
examines his marine objects much as the astronomer observes his
planets and comets and double stars at night. To-day, when a young man
is taking up zoology, and he is asked what university he is going to,
he may say that he is going down to the coast, to Naples, to do
practical work. When the long vacation comes, swarms of professors go
from the inland towns to one or other seaside place, as far as the
purse will take them. All this is a new thing under the sun. The
zoologist of the olden days sat in his study at home. He caught and
studied whatever was found in his own district. The rest came by
post—skins, skeletons, amphibians and fishes in spirit, dried insects,
hard shells of crustacea, mussels and snails of all sorts; but only
the shells always, the hard, dry parts of star-fishes, sea-urchins,
corals, &c. Animals of the rarest character were thrown away because
they could not very well be preserved in spirit and sent from the
North Sea or the Mediterranean to Professor Dry-as-dust. In this state
of things the advance in microscopic work brought no advantage. But at
last it dawned on students that the sea is the cradle of the animal
world. Whole stems of animals flourished there, and there only. Every
wave was full of innumerable microscopic creatures, of the most
instructive forms. Amongst them were found the young embryonic forms
of familiar animals. At last the cry, “To the sea,” was raised. The
older professor of zoology had suffered from a kind of hydrophobia. It
was not possible to teach very much at Berlin about the anatomy,
histology, and embryology of the sea-urchin from a few dried flinty
shells. At Würtzburg, animals were subtly discussed by men who had
never made a journey to see them, while they were trampled under foot
every day by the visitors bathing in Heligoland. They must move. It
was not necessary to go round the world: a holiday journey to the
North Sea or the Mediterranean would suffice. Every cultured man had
always considered that he must make at least one pilgrimage to classic
lands before his education was complete. It was only a question of
changing material. They were not to confine themselves to examining
ruined temples and aqueducts, but to take their microscopes down to
the coast, draw a bucketful of sea-water, and examine its living
contents—the living medusa and sea-urchin, and the living world of the
swarming infusoria. But it was like the rending of the great curtain
of the temple. Zoology seemed to expand ten-fold, a hundred-fold, in a
moment. A room in an obscure inn by the sea, a microscope, and a
couple of glasses of salt-water with sediment every morning—and the
finest studies at Paris and London were as ploughed land, without a
single blade, in face of this revelation. It was a Noah’s ark in the
space of a pinch of snuff.
One day the young medical student heard, in the middle of his histology
and zoology, that Kölliker had come back from Messina. He had been
studying lower marine life there. In 1853, two young men were together
in the Gutenberg forest near Würtzburg. One of them, Karl Gegenbaur, had
been abroad with Kölliker. With his impressions still fresh, he tells
Haeckel about his zoological adventures in the land of the Cyclops.
Gegenbaur, eight years older than Haeckel, was by birth and education a
typical Würtzburger. He, too, had studied medicine, and had practised at
the hospital. But he had already advanced beyond that. His stay at
Messina had been devoted entirely to zoological purposes. A year later
he would be teaching anatomy at Würtzburg, and a year later still he
would be called to Jena. From that time he began to be known as a master
of comparative anatomy—especially after 1859, when his _Elements_ of the
science was published, a classic in its way that still exercises some
influence.
There is nothing romantic in his career, nor could we seek any element
of the kind in a man of Gegenbaur’s character. But his young and
undecided companion seemed to catch sight of a new ideal as he spoke. He
would complete his medical studies, and then shake himself free of
surgery and hospital. He would take his microscope down South, where the
snowy summit of Etna towered above the orange-trees, and study the
beautiful marine animals by the azure sea and the white houses, in the
orange-laden air, and drink in ideas at the magic fount of these
wonderful animal forms, and live out the lusty, golden years of youth on
the finest coast in Europe. From that moment Haeckel felt a restless
inspiration. He had no idea what it was that he was going to investigate
at Messina; and he certainly did not know when and how he was to get
there. But he continued his medical studies with a vague hope that it
was only preliminary work; that some day he would do what his friend
Gegenbaur had done.
They were very good friends, these two. They were drawn together by the
strong magnetism of two true natures that understood each other to the
golden core, though in other respects they were as different as
possible. Gegenbaur was no enthusiast. His ideal was “to keep cool to
the very heart.” But he was at one with Haeckel in a feeling for a broad
outlook in scientific research. He never shrank from large connections
or vast deductions, as long as they were led up to by a sober and
patient logic. This logical character he afterwards recognised in
Darwin’s idea of evolution, and so the friends once more found
themselves in agreement, and for a long time they were a pair of real
Darwinian Dioscuri. This feeling for moderation and at the same time for
far-reaching logic was combined in Gegenbaur with a certain steady and
unerring independence of character. He made little noise, but he never
swerved from his aim. What he accomplished with all these qualities, in
many other provinces besides Darwinism, cannot be told here. It may be
read in the history of zoology. He had, as far as such a thing was
possible, a restful influence of the most useful character on Haeckel.
If we imagine what Darwinism would have become in the nineteenth century
in the hands of such men as Gegenbaur, without Haeckel, we can
appreciate the difference in temperament between the two men. With
Gegenbaur evolution was always a splendid new technical instrument that
no layman must touch for fear of spoiling it. With Haeckel it became a
devouring wave, that will one day, perhaps, give its name to the
century. In other natures these differences might have led to open
conflict. But Haeckel and Gegenbaur show us that, like so many of our
supposed “differences,” they can at least live together in perfect
accord in the freshest years of life, each bearing fruit in its kind.
* * * * *
When we find Haeckel intimate in this way with Gegenbaur, his senior by
eight years, we realise how close he was at that time to the whole of
the Würtzburg circle. The two generations were not yet sharply divided,
as they subsequently were. Most of them fought either with or against
him at a later date, but they belonged, at all events, to the same
stratum. But the split between the two generations was felt when one
pronounced the name of Johannes Müller, of Berlin—the physiologist (not
the historian).
All who then taught histology, embryology, comparative anatomy, or
cellular pathology at Würtzburg had sat at his feet, either spiritually
or in person. Johannes Müller, born at the beginning of the century, was
appointed Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Berlin the year before
Haeckel was born. That indicates the distance between them. It was in
Müller’s incredibly primitive laboratory that, as Haeckel tells, the
theory of the animal-cell was established by his assistant, Theodor
Schwann, after Schleiden had proved the vegetal cell. Müller himself had
founded histology in his own way. He was the real parent of the idea
that the zoologist ought to go and work by the sea. We have a model of
this kind of work and at the same time a superb work for embryological
matters in Müller’s epoch-making _Studies of the Larvæ and Metamorphoses
of the Echinoderms_. He had brought comparative anatomy beyond the stage
of Cuvier, to a point where Gegenbaur could begin. From his school came
Rudolf Virchow, who applied the cell-theory to medicine, and Emil du
Bois-Reymond, who opened out a new path in physiology by his studies of
animal electricity. Müller had done pioneer work with remarkable vigour
in all the various branches of research, diverging afterwards to an
enormous extent, that pursue these methods. The many-headed (young and
half-young) generation, in which Haeckel was growing, saw the whole
previous generation embodied in the single name of Müller. He seemed to
be a kind of scientific Winkelried, except that the fifty spears he bore
on his breast were so many lines of progress emanating from him alone.
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. No part of them was to be regarded as
sacred, and, as a matter of fact, in the chief questions no part has
remained.
One approaches the inner life of a man like Müller with a certain
timidity, and asks how he became what he was. There can be no question
that the fundamental trait of his character was a peculiarly deep
religious feeling. At heart he was a mystic. The whole magic of his
personal influence sprang from these depths. By profession he was a
physiologist, an exact scientist. Never did he swerve a hair’s breadth
from the iron laws of research. But beneath it all was a suppressed glow
of fervour. Every one who understood him, every one who was a true pupil
of his, learned it by a kind of hypnotism. Externally he was all for
laborious investigation, whether in dissecting a star-fish for you or
classifying fishes—though he would have a full sense of your ardent
longing for an inner trust in life and a philosophy of life. Both
elements might change considerably in the pupil: the method of
investigation without—the ideal of the comprehensive vision within. But
what never left any man who had followed Müller was the warning cry that
these things, within and without, should go together; that, in the
larger sense, it is not possible to count the joints in the stalk of an
encrinite without feeling a thrill in the deepest depth of the mind and
the heart.
It is so common a spectacle in history for disciples to condemn their
masters with cold smiles that we forget how pitiful it is. No pupil of
Johannes Müller has ever felt that he had done with him, and might quit
him with ingratitude. He had pupils, it is true, who did not lack belief
in themselves, and who became famous enough to give them a sense of
power; men who have eventually come to conclusions diametrically opposed
to those that Müller had taught them. Yet they respect him. Living
witnesses still tell of the glance that bored into you, and could not be
evaded. But there must have been a greater power in the man than this
piercing glance. It was a glance that survived the grave, and laid on
one a duty; a glance that shot up in the darkness of memory if the duty
was not fulfilled—the duty of going to the foundation of things. Whether
you are examining the larva of an echinoderm or the light of a distant
star, God is there. Whether you explain your echinoderm-larva in this
way or that; whether you believe your star to be a sun or a burnt-out
cinder; whether you conceive God in this way or another—you shall feel
that the bridge is there in absolutely everything. 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.
At the Easter of 1854 Haeckel returned from Würtzburg to Berlin. He was
now twenty years old, and it was at this juncture that, to use his own
phrase, the vast impression of Müller fell on him. A portrait of Müller
still hangs over the desk in his study in the Zoological Institute at
Jena. “If I ever become tired at my work,” he says, “I have only to look
at it to get new strength.” The influence of the much older man, who,
however, died at a far earlier age than Haeckel will do, only lasted for
a short time. But Haeckel has preserved a memory of him that is only
eclipsed by the memory of one other man—Darwin. Müller did not live to
read Darwin’s decisive work, so that these two great ideals of Haeckel’s
never crossed each other, either for good or evil. He himself felt that
there was a pure evolution from one to the other in his mind.
In the summer of 1854 he studied comparative anatomy under Müller, for
which Kölliker had sufficiently prepared him. He has recorded his first
impressions. “I soon got to know him personally, but I had so great a
respect for him that I did not venture to approach him more closely. He
gave me permission to work in the museum. I shall never forget the hours
I spent there, drawing skulls, while he walked up and down, especially
on Sunday afternoons. Often when he went past me I wanted to ask him
something. I went up the step with beating heart and took hold of the
bell, but returned without venturing to say anything.” Müller took some
notice of the zealous young student. When the long vacation came round
in August, and the master, following the new custom, packed up his
bundle in order to spend two months on practical work by the sea, he
allowed Haeckel to go with him. Müller’s son and the later Professor La
Valette joined the party. They went to Heligoland. Müller taught his
pupils his simple method of studying the living subject. There was no
witchcraft in it, but it had had to be invented by some one. They put
out to sea in a small boat. A little net of linen or fine gauze, with a
wide opening and short body, was fastened on a pole. The mouth of the
net was thrust directly under the surface or a little deeper, vertically
to the surface, and the boat was slowly rowed forward. The contents of
the filtered sea-water remained in the meshes of the net, and were from
time to time emptied into a glass containing sea-water. “I shall never,”
says Haeckel, “forget the astonishment with which I gazed for the first
time on the swarm of transparent marine animals that Müller emptied out
of his fine net into the glass vessel; the beautiful medley of graceful
medusæ and iridescent ctenophores, arrow-like sagittæ and serpent-shaped
tomopteris, the masses of copepods and schizopods, and the marine larvæ
of worms and echinoderms.” Müller called these very fine and generally
transparent creatures, of whose existence no one hitherto had had any
idea, “pelagic sweepings” (from _pelagos_, the sea). More recently the
word “plancton” (swimming matter) has been substituted for his phrase.
As we now send whole expeditions over the seas to study “plancton,” the
word has found its way into ordinary literature. The regular anglers who
were then in Heligoland must have looked on this subtle work with a
butterfly net as a sort of pleasant joke born from the professional
brain. The young student must have made an impression on them with his
vigour, though he had not yet turned himself into a marine mammal,
living half in the water for days together. They called him a
“sea-devil.” What pleased the master most in him was the talent he
already showed of quickly sketching the tiny, perishable creature from
the surface of the sea while it was fresh. Haeckel had been passionately
fond of drawing from his early years. Now the old bent agreed with the
new zeal for zoology. “You will be able to do a great deal,” Müller said
to him. “And when once you are fairly interested in this fairy-land of
the sea, you will find it difficult to get away from it.” The dream of
Messina, that Gegenbaur had conjured up, seemed to draw nearer.
[Illustration:
FISHING IN HELIGOLAND IN 1865.
Anton Dohrn (Naples). Richard Greeff (Marburg). Ernst Haeckel (Jena).
Max Salverda (Utrecht). Pietro Marchi (Florence).
]
These lively days at Heligoland provided Haeckel with the material for
his first little zoological essay. It dealt with the development of the
ova of certain fishes (_On the Ova of the Scomberesoces_, published in
Müller’s _Archiv_ for 1855). Müller lent him ova from the Berlin
collection to complete his study. It is the same volume of the _Archiv_
in which, in Reichert’s introduction, the great controversy breaks out
over Virchow’s pregnant assertion that each human being is a state
composed of millions of individual cells.
Haeckel remained with Müller at Berlin for the whole winter, and was
drawn more and more into the province of comparative anatomy, or, to
speak more correctly, zoology. The official Professor of Zoology at
Berlin at the time was really the aged Lichtenstein, who had occupied
the chair since 1811. Haeckel has humorously described himself in later
years as self-taught in his own subject, saying that he had attended
many most excellent colleges, but never visited an official school of
zoology. The only opportunity to do so at the time was under
Lichtenstein, but that professor bored him so much that he could not
attend his lectures. Lichtenstein was a venerable representative of the
old type of zoologist; his ideal was to give a careful external
description of the species on the strength of specimens chosen from a
well-stocked museum. A whole world lay between these surviving followers
of Linné and the splendid school of Johannes Müller.
However that may be, the fact was that under these alluring attractions
Haeckel’s studies were drifting from the medical profession to an
“impecunious art.” But as medical work had been chosen, if only as a
temporary occupation, Haeckel had to tear himself away from the great
magnet, at the Easter of 1855, by removing to a different place. He
chose, as the least intolerable compromise, to return to Würtzburg. At
all events we find him spending three terms there. I have already said
that Rudolf Virchow was one of the distinguished Würtzburgers at the
time who sought most keenly the solution of the new problems of biology
on the medical side. Hence Virchow had to help him to find the bridge
between the work he really loved and the work he was obliged to do. As a
fact, Virchow directed the whole of his studies on this side in the
three terms.
Virchow was not so fascinating as Johannes Müller, even in his best
years. But it was something to be initiated into medical science by such
a man. A later generation has, unfortunately, grown accustomed to see
mental antipodes in Virchow and Haeckel. In 1877 they had a controversy
with regard to the freedom of science that echoed through the whole
world of thought. Yet seventeen years afterwards Haeckel himself (who
was first attacked by Virchow), looking back on the days he spent at
Würtzburg, had nothing but grateful recognition to say of Virchow. “I
learned,” he says in 1894, “in the three terms I spent under Virchow the
art of the finest analytic observation and the most rigorous control of
what I observed. I was his assistant for some time, and my notes were
especially praised by him. But what I chiefly admired in him at
Würtzburg was his wide outlook, the breadth and philosophic character of
his scientific ideas.”
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.
We can see very well that this was quite natural. If there was any man
likely to put forward such views it was Virchow. He had passed through
Müller’s school, but was now one of the younger group who, even during
Müller’s life, were gradually adopting certain very profound views on
life and man, without any particular resistance on the master’s part.
The chief characteristic of nearly the whole of this group was the lack
of the volcanic stratum below of deep and personal religious feeling; in
Müller this had been throughout life an enchained Titan among the rocks
of his logical sense of realities, yet it had given a gentle glow and
movement to the floor of his mind. Rudolf Virchow was the coolest,
boldest, and clearest-minded of the group. He went to the opposite
extreme. If Müller was standing on a volcano, which he only repressed by
the giant force of his will—a nature that was above all master of
itself—Virchow, on the contrary, was standing on a glacier, and he had
never taken the trouble to conceal it. I should not venture to count him
amongst the instinctively Monistic minds, in the sense of Goethe, to
whom the unity of God and nature, the inorganic and the organic, the
animal and the man, comes as an ardent and irresistible feeling. 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. The
controversy he afterwards engaged in ran on different lines. It seems to
me that at an early stage of his development he became convinced that
there must be limits to scientific inquiry, not on logical, but on
diplomatic grounds; because it is not an absolute agency, but only a
relatively small force amongst many more powerful institutions, the
Church, the State, and so on. Hence it would have to respect limitations
that were not drawn from its own nature; in given cases it would have to
keep silent in order not to jeopardise its existence as a whole. It is
my firm belief that this diplomatic attitude as such would lead to the
destruction of all pursuit of the truth. It carefully excludes the
possibility of any further martyrdoms, but at the cost of science’s own
power to illumine the world. In my opinion the free investigation of the
truth is an _absolute_ right. Churches, States, social orders, moral
precepts, and all that is connected with them, have to adjust themselves
to this investigation, and not the reverse.
However, the point is that under Virchow—more particularly under
Virchow, in fact—Haeckel would be educated into the general attitude
with regard to God, nature, life, and man, to which he has since devoted
his whole energy. In spite of Goethe—and who would be likely to take
Goethe as his guide in his twenty-first year?—the ardent young student
was as yet by no means firmly seated in the saddle. He grubbed, and
sought, and rejected. In his _Riddle of the Universe_ he tells us that
he “defended the Christian belief in his twenty-first year in lively
discussions” with his free-thinking comrades, ... “although the study of
human anatomy and physiology, and the comparison of man’s frame with
that of the other animals, had already greatly enfeebled my faith. I did
not entirely abandon it, after bitter struggles, until my medical
studies were completed, and I began to practise. I then came to
understand Faust’s saying, ‘The whole sorrow of humanity oppresses me.’
I found no more of the infinite benevolence of a loving father in the
hard school of life than I could see of ‘wise providence’ in the
struggle for existence.”
When the three terms of medical training were over, he received another
impulse to his own particular interest in science. Kölliker invited him
in August, 1856, to spend the two months’ holiday with him on the
Riviera. It was the first Mediterranean school of zoology, though as yet
only a kind of “payment on account.” On the journey he made the
acquaintance of the zoological museum at Turin and its well-travelled
director, Filippo de Filippi, and he saw the grandeur of the Maritime
Alps on the Col di Tenda. The master, Kölliker, Heinrich Müller, Karl
Kupffer (afterwards professor at Munich), and he established themselves
at Nice, and fished for all sorts of creatures with the Müller-net at
Villefranche. Fortunately, Müller himself happened to be visiting the
Riviera at the same time, and they received a direct stimulus from him.
The first result of this journey in the summer and autumn was that
Haeckel secured his degree with a zoological-anatomical work, instead of
with a strictly medical treatise. As he had done from Heligoland two
years before, he now brought home from the Mediterranean the material
for a short technical theme. He again spent the winter at Berlin to put
it together. It was an histological study of the tissues of crabs, and
therefore lay in the province of the articulates, an animal group, it is
curious to note, which he has not entered into more fully in the course
of his long and varied work as special investigator. At Nice he made a
thorough study of the nerve-tubes of the spiny lobster and other
available marine crustacea, and discovered several remarkable new
structural features in them. At Berlin he entered upon a minute
microscopic study of the common craw-fish. His dissertation for the
doctorate embodied the main results of his research. It was entitled _De
telis quibusdam Astaci fluviatilis_, and was printed in March, 1857. It
appeared the same year in an enlarged form in Müller’s _Archiv_, with
the title _The Tissues of the Craw-fish_. On March 7th he received his
medical degree, Ehrenberg, the great authority on the infusoria,
presiding. In the customary way the young doctor had to announce and
defend several theses. One of them is rather amusing in view of later
events.
He most vigorously contested the possibility of “spontaneous
generation.” The meaning of the phrase is that somewhere or at some time
a living thing, animal or plant, has arisen, not in the form of a seed
or germ or sprout from a parent living thing, but as a direct
development out of dead, inorganic matter. Haeckel had not made a
personal study of the subject. What he said in his thesis was merely a
faithful repetition of Müller’s opinion. At that time it was believed
that science had empirically disproved spontaneous generation. An old
popular belief held that fleas and lice were born every day from
non-living dirt and dust, but that had been refuted long before. No egg,
no animal: every living thing develops from an egg. This had been laid
down as a fixed rule. When the microscope revealed an endless number of
tiny creatures in every drop of stagnant water, in the air and the dust
and the soil, it was a question whether the rule was not wrong. Surely
these simplest of all living things, apparently, were born by
spontaneous generation? However, the question was believed to have been
settled in two ways. Schwann, the co-discoverer of the cell-theory, had
made certain experiments which seem to prove directly that even these
tiny beings, the infusoria and bacteria, were never formed in a vessel
containing water and dead matter, if it had been carefully assured
beforehand that the minute living germs of these animals that floated in
the air could not penetrate into the vessel. At the same time Ehrenberg
and others stoutly denied that the infusoria were the “simplest”
organisms, or that they could conceivably be born in that way. They
declared that the infusoria were “perfect organisms” in spite of their
smallness. The belief that these tiny creatures consisted of “one cell,”
and so formed, as it were, the ultimate elements of the plant and animal
worlds on the lines of the cell-theory, was seriously menaced, and
apparently on the way to be destroyed. Finally, the tapeworm and similar
parasites had been declared to evolve by a kind of spontaneous
generation from the contents of the intestines. But this also was proved
to be untrue. Thus there was ample material for a solid dogma: there was
no such thing as spontaneous generation. The dogma, moreover, harmonised
with the prevailing belief in a special vital force and a radical
distinction between the living and the dead, which was still shared in a
subtle form by even a man like Müller. The dogma was formulated.
Spontaneous generation was struck out of the scientific vocabulary as
unscientific and a popular superstition. The young doctor, duly
initiated into these ideas of the time, could not resist the temptation
to give his own kick to the fallen theory. Yet how strangely things have
changed since then! Two years afterwards Haeckel ceased to believe in a
special vital force; he was now absolutely convinced that there were
unicellular beings; his whole theory of life seemed to demand
spontaneous generation as a postulate, and he even doubted the force of
the experiments of Schwann and others. Haeckel himself became the
keenest apostle of the theory of spontaneous generation. Whenever it is
mentioned to-day, we think of the weight of his name which he has cast
in the scale in its favour. So the leaves change even in the forest of
science: yesterday green, to-day red and falling, to-morrow green once
more. On the same branch as the dogmas we find the correctives growing,
that will at length split them open and cast them as empty husks to the
ground.
The history of Haeckel’s medical doctorate can be written in a few plain
and touching lines. After receiving his degree he was sent by his
prudent father, to keep him away from crabs and other monsters of the
deep, to Vienna for a term, to do hospital work under Oppolzer, Skoda,
Hebra, and Siegmund. All that we find recorded of this term is that his
old love of botany revived in earnest. Immense quantities of dwarf
Alpine plants were collected. When the traveller passed by the spot
twenty-four years afterwards on a quiet autumn Sunday, on his way to
take ship at Trieste for the tropical forests and giant trees of Ceylon,
the memory of Schneeberg and the Rose-Alp came upon him like a dream.
However, the hospital work, together with a short span of cramming in
the winter at Berlin, must have had some effect, as he passed the
State-examination in medicine. In March, 1858, he was a “practising
physician.” He had in his hand the crown of prudent ambition—and he felt
like a poor captive. There was one source of consolation—Johannes
Müller. While one was near him there was a possibility of more real
work. He discussed with him the plan of the study of the development of
the gregarinæ (parasitic protozoa), which he wanted to conduct in
Müller’s laboratory in the summer of 1858. Then he was stricken, like so
many others, with the thunderbolt of the news of Müller’s sudden death,
on April 28th of the same year. What must he do now? He began to
practise. It is said on his own authority that he fixed the hours of
consultation from five to six in the morning! The result was that during
a whole year of this philanthropic occupation he had only three
patients, not one of whom died under his earnest attention.
“This success was enough for my dear father,” says Haeckel. We can well
believe it.
The kindly old man consented to one more year of quite extravagant
study, in which all was to come right. It was to be a year of travel, in
Italy. He was to devote himself to the study of marine animals, not
merely for pleasure, but earnestly enough for him to find a basis for
his life in the result. This he succeeded in doing. Like the children of
fortune, who at the very moment when they cannot see a step before them
make a move that the Philistine regards as the safest and last refuge,
Haeckel becomes engaged that very year to his cousin, Anna Sethe. After
that, in January, 1859, he goes down to the coast. He makes for the blue
Mediterranean, which he already knows will prove anything but an
“unprofitable sea” for him. He will conjure up treasures of science from
its crystal depths with his Müller-net; then on to fortune, position,
marriage, and the future. The fates have added a world-wide repute, if
they have denied many a comfort.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER III
THE RADIOLARIA
In the January of 1859 Haeckel, then in his twenty-fifth year, came to
Italy with the determination “to do it thoroughly.” By the autumn the
body of the peninsula had been covered down to Naples, Capri, and
Ischia. The winter, until April, 1860, was spent at Messina.
There are plenty of very strenuous students, later Privy Councillors as
well as archæologists and zoologists, who find a year in Italy a very
simple matter. They arrive, make the due round of sights, and then at
once disappear into some library or institute, burying themselves like
moles in some special work or other, just as they would do at home. The
only time you can see them is over their Munich beer in the evening; and
if there are a number of them together they smoke their cigars and sing
a German student’s song, as they would do at home. These good folk have
very different dispositions behind their goggles, but they have never
been lit up by the fire of Goethe. They are quite content to write home
like the churlish Herder; Italy is pretty enough in Goethe’s writings,
but one ought not to go there oneself. The modern scholar of this type
may add that the cigars are bad and beer dear. Very different was
Haeckel’s verdict. “In Sicily I was nearly thrown out of my line and
made a landscape-painter.” The æsthetic man in him was the first to lift
up his arms with vigour under this new, free, inspiring sun. His words
are no idle phrase. The moment he tried it Haeckel discovered that he
had a genius for landscape-painting. Even in regard to this gift we see
the truth of what I have already said in other connections; the sternest
materialists and scientific revolutionaries of the nineteenth century
were men of considerable artistic power. There was the solid Vogt, a
painter and poet; Moleschott, the soul-comrade of Hermann Hettner;
Strauss, who wrote some poems of great and lasting beauty; Feuerbach,
and others. Even Büchner, the boldest and most advanced of them all, has
written poetry under a pseudonym.[1] Darwin took only two books with him
in the little cabin of his ship, Lyell’s _Geology_ and _Paradise Lost_.
There is a complete gallery of fine water-colours in Haeckel’s house
to-day that have been brought from three quarters of the globe. His son
Walter has inherited the artistic gift, and become a painter. It might
be said that a good landscape-painter would hardly recompense us for the
loss of the philosopher and scientist that Haeckel became in the
nineteenth century. The simple steel pen, the inspired pencil of the
thinker, did more for humanity in his hand than could have been done by
the most splendid colour-symphonies of the most inspired
landscape-painter. I have often thought this as I looked over, in the
evening at Haeckel’s house, the then unpublished treasures of his
artistic faculty. A work like his _History of Creation_ has counted for
a stratum in the thought of humanity. What are even the masterpieces of
a Hildebrandt in comparison with it! Yet there was undoubtedly the note
of genius in these drawings; some of them showed more than Hildebrandt’s
cleverness (we know to-day that Hildebrandt’s highly coloured pictures
did not even approximate to the real natural light of southern scenes)
and glow of colour. It seemed to me that here again the man had dreams
of a lost love: a dream of the gay, wandering _pittore_, who asks
nothing but a sunset in violet, carmine, and gold, instead of being the
sober unriddler of the world’s problems. Since that time the house of
Fr. Eugen Köhler, to which we owe the fine new edition of Naumann’s
classic work on birds, with its coloured plates, has undertaken to
publish Haeckel’s water-colours, as “Travel Pictures,” in a splendid and
monumental work.
Footnote 1:
Büchner’s brother tells how, when Ludwig furtively brought to him the
manuscript of _Force and Matter_, he at once guessed it was a romance
or an epic that so much secret work had been expended on. [Trans.]
During the year in Italy all these gifts were employed together. Italy
was exactly the land for Haeckel’s temperament, with its mixture of
lofty classic elements and natural beauty and simple, naïve
unpretentiousness. For the first time he felt that he was a cosmopolitan
student. He had never been a devotee of the student’s beer-feasts. He
had no need of alcoholic stimulant. Gegenbaur of Würtzburg, the
insatiable smoker, once said to him in joke, “If you would only smoke,
we might make something out of you.” It was done, in any case. His
personal inclinations were in his favour: an illimitable love of travel,
good spirits that rose in proportion to the absurdity of his
accommodation, and a simple delight in everything human that enabled him
to talk and travel with the humblest as if they were his equals. He
spent a night with a young worker in a haystack, and when he was asked
what he was, he pointed to his paint-box and brush: “House-painter.” “I
thought so when I saw you,” said the youth, and he asked Haeckel to
start a workshop together with him. Italy was the ideal land for a
visitor of that type. There was no part of the world from which he was
so pleased to receive recognition in his years of fame as Italy; and he
received it in abundance, for the appreciation was mutual.
I will add a page here that was supplied for the present work by a
friendly hand, a man who is as well known to thousands as Haeckel
himself—Hermann Allmers, “the poet of the fens, chief of Frisia, and
splendid fellow,” as Haeckel has called him. He died in the spring of
1902 at an advanced age. He met Haeckel in Italy, and tells the story in
his verse and prose. Forty years after their meeting he wrote me that
Haeckel was “the finest man he ever met.”
“TO ERNST HAECKEL.
Dost thou remember the magic night,
A night I never cease to see,
That brought us both to Ischia?
How smooth the boat sailed gently in,
How silent was the great broad bay
Unutterably noble and sublime,
In all its star-lit loveliness,
As sky and sea met in embrace.
With fairy-light the waters gleamed
As helm ploughed gently through the wave,
And overhead a deep red glow
Vesuvius from its larva poured.
We were yet strangers at the time,
One hour alone had each the other seen,
Yet something urged us both to speak—
To speak, anon, from heart’s great deeps.
To speak of all we held of worth,
All that had led us to the spot,
All the fair gifts of happy fate,
And the untoward accidents of life;
Of distant home, of fatherland,
Of the full days of beauty’s quest.
Hand clasped in hand we told our joy:
Need I recall it from the mist?
In fine of thy dear love thou told’st
And sacred silence fell on thee.
On moved the barque with leisured pace
Across the deeper silence of the bay.
Behind us vanished Posilippo
And Baja’s gulf and Cape Miseno.
As Procida passed slowly by
The gentle dawn stole o’er the night,
And Epomeo’s head was lit,
With the first rays of new-born sun,
And Ischia, nobler than our dreams,
Uprose before our wondering eyes.
Above, mantled in its own loveliness,
Calling us sweetly from the bay
Up to its gentle, vine-clothed heights,
Sat radiant Casamicciola.
How thou and I the glad days spent
Thou knowest well. And now?
Now all is ruin and decay,
A ghastly tomb. We’ll let it rest.
Think rather of the linkèd lives
We spent, and the whole joy of earth,
That never more will gladden us
While sun and stars gleam overhead.
What was it opened then our hearts?
What was it forged the golden chain?
It was—thou know’st it well, comrade—
The sailing on that magic night.”
“Yes, dear reader, whenever I let these verses and their splendid truth
vibrate again in my soul—and how often and how gladly I do it!—I have to
say, Such days thou shalt never know again—such happy entrance into
another’s heart. And what a heart it was that bared itself to me with
all it hid and would soon reveal! We were in a café at Naples, a copy of
the _Allgemeine Zeitung_ lying between him and me. It was in the best
part of the spring of 1859. We both reached for it, and told our names,
and the friendship was begun. ‘You must excuse me,’ Haeckel said, ‘I
have to go to Ischia to-night by the market-boat.’ ‘To Ischia? That’s
good: I am going there myself. ‘I am very glad, because I heard I was to
be alone. It starts at nine o’clock.’ That was all that had passed
between us before the crossing. What I have described in the above
verses only began when we, the only Germans on board, made ourselves
comfortable on the open deck. Before the journey was over we were
intimate friends, and have remained friends in joy and sorrow to this
moment, though the mental differences between us are enormous. However,
Casamicciola brought us together in a wonderful way. We had common
quarters, and always went out together for walks or botanising; we were
never separated when we painted or drew, as Haeckel did with real
passion. On the third morning, when we found some rare thermal plants in
an almost broiling meadow and discovered nearly at the same spot the
ruins of an ancient Roman bath, the remarkable coincidence affected us
so much that we embraced each other joyously and dedicated the rest of
our flask to them. We both felt that we could not do otherwise. So we
pleasantly enjoyed the magnificent scene that lay at our feet from the
height of Epomeo. We stripped off nearly the whole of our clothes, and
dipped, in almost primitive nakedness, in the warm muddy streams that
shot up out of the dark depths under a growth of tendrils and ferns. We
shouted out, ‘How fine it is in these warm and beautifully shaded
brooks! How delightful it must be in the ravines of Atlas! We must go
there.’ We spent more than a whole day in the most marvellous ravines of
Atlas, though neither of us had the least idea of them. But we
determined to make the journey there, and sketched it out in detail, to
be undertaken as soon as we left Italy. He contracted a perfect fever
for travelling. We were four weeks in Pagano’s excellent inn at Capri
with a few artists, and he completely lost himself with delight. He
became intimate with the young artists; being hitherto surrounded by men
of scientific interests, he had avoided them. The intermediary between
Haeckel and them was myself. I liked no one better than genial artists.
Now Haeckel was seized with a passion for painting landscapes day after
day. He was especially interested in the most fantastically shaped
rocks. On the other hand, he neglected his marine animals, and did not
return to them entirely until he got to Messina, where he devoted
himself to the radiolaria, which were destined to play so important a
part in his work. Darwin, who was soon to dominate his whole thought,
had little significance for him at that time, as the struggle for life
had not yet been discovered. We rarely spoke of it, but talked
constantly of Johannes Müller. He was Haeckel’s ideal, as long as I kept
in touch with him. He also spoke often and generously of his university
friends, Dr. W. D. Focke, who was his special botanical comrade, Dr.
Dreyer and Dr. Strube, who were his chief friends at the university at
Würtzburg. The ordinary life and pleasures of the student, and their
heavy beer-drinking, were a torture to him; he avoided them as much as
possible. Very often I could not understand how it was that I brought
him to the highest pitch of gaiety, whereas on all his earlier travels,
especially when botany was still his favourite science, he would, after
the common meal, withdraw quietly with his books and plants to the
solitude of his own room. Yet he could be the gayest of all. In fact,
his hearty and wonderful laugh, in all notes up to the very highest,
rings over and over again in the memory of any man who has once heard
it; it is the frank laughter of a glad human heart. And whoever has seen
the deep earnestness with which the great scientist threw himself into
the study of the most arduous problems would be astounded to hear it.”
* * * * *
The Strait of Messina is the pearl of Italy. In my opinion it is finer
than Naples. The huge volcano and the deep blue strip of water, that
seems to be confined between the white coasts like some fabulous
giant-stream, give a feeling of sublimity beside which the Bay of Naples
seems but an idyll in the memory. The colours are more vivid; you think
you would catch hold of the blue bodily if you put your hand in the
water. It is a land of ancient myths. The Cyclops hammer their work in
Etna. Scylla and Charybdis lurk in the Strait. Once, in the days of
Homer, when the sun of civilisation still lay on a corner of Asia, a dim
Münchhausen-world was lived here, such as we find to-day in the heart of
Africa or New Guinea. But times changed. Zoologists came and fished with
Müller-nets for tiny transparent sea-creatures in the gentle periodic
currents, that may once have given rise to the legend of Scylla and
Charybdis. There is no place more favourable for the purpose than the
harbour of Messina. The basin is open only at one spot, towards the
north. The westerly wind is cut off from the town by the mountains, and
can do no harm. Even the detested southern wind, the sirocco, that
lashes the Strait till it is white with foam, cannot enter. There is
only the north wind that drives the water into the basin. The waves it
brings in are full of millions of sea-animals, which accumulate in the
_cul-de-sac_ of the harbour. In fact, if the sirocco has previously been
blowing in the Strait and gathered great swarms of animals from the
southern parts at the mouth of the harbour, and then the north wind
drives them all inside, the whole of the water seems to be alive with
them. If you dip a glass in it, you do not get water, but a sort of
“animal stew,” the living things making up more of the bulk than the
fluid—little crystalline creatures, medusæ, salpæ, crustacea, vermalia,
and others of many kinds.
It was at this classic spot that Haeckel would lay the foundation of his
fame as a zoologist, by the study of a group of minute creatures that
appealed equally to the æsthetic sense by the mysterious beauty of their
forms. There can be little doubt that we can see in this, not only a
fortunate accident, but also the play of some hidden affinity. In such a
spot the artist in Haeckel could compromise with the zoologist. His
æsthetic nature had revelled in landscape, peasantry, and song. Now the
Müller-net and the microscope revealed a new world of hidden beauty that
none had appreciated before him. In devoting himself to it he was still
half engrossed in his quest of beauty; but the other half of him was
rapidly attaining a mastery of serious zoology.
It is a common belief that æsthetic appreciation ceases as soon as we
sit down to the microscope. There is the magnificent blue Strait of
Messina. 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. 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.
At his very first dips into the harbour of Messina, in October, 1859, he
got certain curious lumps and strips of jelly. The local fishermen
called them _ovi di mare_ (sea-eggs). It was, in fact, natural enough to
regard these inert creatures as strings of mollusc-eggs, when their real
nature was unknown. But our young student already knew what they were.
They were social _radiolaria_.
[Illustration:
A RADIOLARIAN.
(_Lychnaspis miranda._)
]
The word “radiolarium,” from _radius_ (a ray), means a raying or
radiating animal. It is difficult for the inexpert to imagine the
structure of one of these creatures. He must first put entirely on one
side all the features that he usually associates with an “animal.” The
radiolarian lives, moves, has sensations, breathes, eats, and
reproduces, but in a totally different way from that we are accustomed
to see. Its body consists essentially of a particle of homogeneous
living matter. There is merely a firmer nucleus in the centre of it, and
the soft gelatinous matter is thickened at the surface to form a kind of
capsule. Otherwise there is no trace of any real “organ.” The little
blob of jelly eats—but it has no stomach; it eats with its whole body,
its soft, jelly-like substance closing entirely over particles of food
and absorbing them. It breathes (with the animal type of
respiration)—but it has neither lungs nor gills; the whole body takes in
oxygen and gives off carbonic acid. It swims about—yet it has neither
legs nor fins; the pulpy mass of its body flows, when it is necessary,
into a crown of streamers or loose processes, that keep the body neatly
balanced; when they are no longer required, they sink back into the
gelatinous mass. We study the “histology” of these curious social-living
creatures under a powerful microscope. As I have explained, the tissues
and organs of the higher animals break up under the microscope into a
most ingeniously constructed network of tiny living gelatinous
corpuscles with a nucleus in the centre—the cells. But our radiolarian
has no more got tissues composed of cells than it has stomach or lungs
or any other organ. It is merely a single cell with a nucleus and a
jelly-like body. Yet in this case the single cell is a whole individual,
a complete animal, that lives, moves, eats, breathes, and so on. The
radiolarian is, in comparison with the splendid cell-tapestry of the
higher animals, a poor little atom of life. It must be put deep down in
the animal series. What a vast distance! 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. It
is able to assimilate a kind of matter that the chemist calls siliceous
(flinty) matter—the stuff that forms, when it is crystallised in
chemical purity, the well-known rock-crystal. This flint matter (and
sometimes a similar substance) is then exuded again by the
radiolarian—no one knows quite how—from its gelatinous body, and built
into so beautiful a form that even a child will clap its hands and cry,
“How lovely!” when it sees it through the microscope. We may put it that
the radiolarian forms a coat of mail for itself from this siliceous
matter: we may at the same time call it a float or buoy. The hard flinty
structure serves to keep it balanced when it is swimming, just as when a
loose piece of jelly attaches itself to a cork disk. Thus a round
trellis-work shell is formed about the animal, and through the apertures
it thrusts gelatinous processes that act as oars, and can be put forth
or drawn in at will; outside this shell, again, may be all sorts of
structures, such as zigzag shaped rods, radiating stars, bundles of
streamers, and so on. It is a most wonderful sight. It is as if each
class of these beings had its private taste, and, in virtue of a kind of
tradition, built a different type of flinty skeleton from all the
others. Here begins the peculiar artistic wizardry of these tiny and
lowly creatures, that lifts them at once high up in the scale of
animated natural objects with a great display of beauty. We find every
possible variation of ornament within the limits of the particular type:
an infinite number of crystalline and superb variations on the theme of
trellis-work, stars, radiating shields, crosses, and halberds. They give
an impression at once of human art-work, for there is nothing else in
the whole of nature with which we may compare them. The radiolarian,
therefore, is an animal of the utmost simplicity of bodily frame that,
by some force or other, creates the highest and most varied beauty that
we find anywhere in nature, living or dead, below the level of human
art.
Haeckel’s good genius brought him to these radiolaria. Until the winter
of 1859-1860 he knew very little about them. When a radiolarian dies its
soft body naturally melts away and perishes. But the art-work of its
life, the star or shield of flinty matter, remains; it either sinks to
the bottom or is washed ashore, where numbers of them may accumulate. If
a pinch of mud or sand from the shore is put under the microscope the
observer will see lovely artistic fragments, and ask what is the meaning
of the miracle. Ehrenberg, the venerable Berlin microscopist, was the
first to have the experience. He was not in the habit of going to the
sea himself, but had specimens sent to him, and found in them shells of
the radiolaria. Though they were so small, their artistic quality seemed
to him to be so great that he assumed they were built by very advanced
animals of the star-fish or sea-urchin type. That there were unicellular
protozoa with a simple gelatinous body and no higher organs he stoutly
denied, and he had the support of his leading contemporaries everywhere.
But his colleague, Johannes Müller, who fished in the sea himself, came
across living specimens in the Mediterranean in the first half of the
fifties. It appeared that they were really very lowly animals at least.
Müller christened them the radiolaria, classified the fifty species that
he discovered, and at his death left the subject well prepared for the
first student who should go more fully into it. His final work on them
did not appear until after his death, in 1858, the sunset-glow of his
brilliant scientific career. Perhaps he would have gone more deeply into
the mysteries he had encountered but for a curious accident. Just as he
discovered the subject, two years before his death, he had a terrible
experience. The ship in which he was returning from a holiday in Norway
was wrecked. A favourite pupil of his was drowned, and he himself
narrowly escaped by swimming to land. After that he could not be induced
to enter a boat during his last trips to the sea, and so the thorough
study of these most graceful inhabitants of the Mediterranean was
abandoned. But when Haeckel fished at Villefranche with Kölliker of
Würtzburg, and Müller was at Nice, he was urged by the master, as a kind
of testamentary injunction, that “something might be done” with the
radiolaria. And when he fished up a pretty crown of socially-united
radiolaria on first rowing over the Messina harbour, he thought it would
be a grateful offering to the memory of the dead hero of his zoological
dreams to continue the study of the radiolaria. At once he seemed to
enter the treasure-house of a fairy tale. When the campaign was ended in
the Messina harbour in April, 1860, he had discovered no less than 144
new species, and each species proved a fresh master of decorative art.
At the same time he studied the nature of the gelatinous body.
Ehrenberg’s theory was destroyed for ever. Granting that there were
certain difficulties (since explained away) in the way of admitting the
existence of real unicellular creatures, he at all events gathered an
enormous amount of new and helpful information as to the nature of these
soft, almost organless beings and of the slimy living matter (called
sarcode or protoplasm) of which they were composed. His mind matured
rapidly in these quiet days at Messina, while his æsthetic nature was
plunged in admiration of the beauty of the siliceous coats. The last
scruple with regard to the old story of creation fell from him like the
covering of a pupa. If a naked bit of slime like the radiolarian could
form from its body this glorious artistic structure, why may not man
also, as he paints his pictures under the glow of Italy’s colour, be
merely a natural being, of like texture to the radiolarian? And if this
radiolarian had in its life built up the crystalline, rhythmic
structure, why may there not be merely a difference of degree, not of
kind, between the “dead” crystal and the “living” radiolarian?
In May, 1860, Haeckel returned from Messina to Berlin. He brought with
him splendid drawings of the perishable body of his treasures, numbers
of prepared specimens, and whole bottles full of their imperishable
shells. On the 17th of September, 1860, he made the first communication
of his discoveries to his colleagues in the zoological section of the
Scientific Congress at Königsberg. Virchow was amongst his admiring
audience. On the 13th and the 20th of December in the same year Peters
read a short account in the Berlin Academy of Science that drew more
general attention. He set to work on a fine monograph, with splendid
plates and with all his conclusions in the text. Before it was finished,
however, he had a number of personal experiences and changes of mind.
Gegenbaur had in the meantime been appointed Professor of Anatomy at
Jena. Before he started for Italy, Haeckel had visited his friend at
Jena during the celebration of the third centenary of the university.
“We spent a very happy time there,” Haeckel wrote afterwards, “enjoying
the beautiful prospect (from the heights of the Saale valley) and the
Thuringian beef-sausages.” Now there were more serious things to
discuss. Gegenbaur’s lot had once seemed to him a kind of model. Now a
part of it was fulfilled: he had been to Messina. Meantime Gegenbaur had
advanced a station. Haeckel wanted to follow him, and get a position at
Jena. There was no such thing as a professorship of zoology or a
zoological institute there, but all that might—nay, must—be changed some
day. What Gegenbaur was doing left plenty of room for another chair to
be set up. And to be with his best friend!
In March, 1861, Haeckel completed the _Dissertatio pro venia legendi_ at
Jena that he had quickly decided on. It dealt, of course, with his new
field: the limit and the system of the animal group to which the
radiolaria belonged, the rhizopods. He was immediately appointed private
teacher at Jena, and found himself in the lovely valley of the Saale,
beneath the mountain about whose summit the red rays lingered. He had
been drawn from Berlin to Messina to find a home—a home for ever—in the
increasing stress.
In the following year, 1862, the official position of Extraordinary
Professor of Zoology was created, and this brought him close, even
externally, to Gegenbaur. Everything was, it is true, in a very
primitive condition at first. In August he married Anna Sethe—a sunny
dream of fresh young happiness. In the same year he published his
_Monograph on the Radiolaria_, a huge folio volume with thirty-five
remarkably good copperplates, such as our more rational but slighter
technical methods no longer dare produce. Wagenschieber, of Berlin, the
last of the fine scientific copper etchers, had been in constant
personal touch with Haeckel, and reproduced his original drawings in
masterly style. With this work Haeckel was fully established in his
position as a professional zoologist. It is still one of the finest
monographs that was issued in the nineteenth century; from the literary
point of view, also, it was one of the purest and most lucid works of
its kind, full of great and earnest thoughts, and without any
bitterness—a work, perhaps, that Haeckel has not since equalled. The
most influential and official scientists of the time had to respect this
work: possibly with the sole exception of the aged Ehrenberg, to whom it
dealt a deadly blow in this department, without, of course, undervaluing
his great antecedent services. He never even studied it sufficiently to
be able to quote the title of it correctly.
Nevertheless, a flame broke out at one spot in this monograph. In a very
short time Haeckel’s whole figure would stand out in the red reflection
of its glow—a figure really great, solitary, suddenly deserted by all
the bewigged and powdered professors—Haeckel himself, as the world has
come to know him.
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CHAPTER IV
DARWIN
We still celebrate, at a distance of centuries, the return of the
birthday of great men. In reality it is a mistake. We ought to celebrate
the hour when not merely life, but _the idea of their life_, quickened
them. That is the really important birth that calls for commemoration.
Luther’s real birthday was when he nailed his theses to the church door.
Then was born the Luther that belongs to the world. Over the
world-cradle of Columbus shines, not the trivial and evanescent planet
given in his horoscope, but the little red flickering star of Guanahani,
the light that he saw from the shore on the night before he landed on an
island of the New World.
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 that 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. 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. In the
whole of this development we have as yet no indication of the real tenor
of his life.
It comes first with the name of Darwin. The arabesque of a very
different life begins to blend with that of his own.
In the February of the year in which Haeckel was born (1834),
twenty-eight years before the point we have arrived at, Charles Darwin
was on a scientific expedition to South America. There is a romantic
element in the earlier story of this journey. The naked Fuegians had
stolen a boat from an English Government ship that was engaged in making
geographical measurements, towards the close of the twenties, on the
wild coast of Tierra del Fuego. FitzRoy, the captain, arrested a few of
the natives, brought them on board as hostages, and in the end took them
with him to England. They were to be instructed in morality and
Christianity and then taken back to their people, in order to introduce
these elements of civilisation, for the advantage of shipwrecked sailors
or distressed travellers who might fall in with them. We feel a breath
of the spirit of Rousseau in it. As a fact nothing came of the device.
The good Fuegians were clothed and improved by civilised folk for a year
or two, returned home, immediately abandoned their trousers and their
Christianity, and remained naked savages. But the bringing home of these
hostages led, in the early thirties, to a new expedition of FitzRoy to
Tierra del Fuego. The Government directed him to draw up further charts,
and he looked about for a man of science to accompany him.
The man proved to be Charles Darwin, then in his twenty-second year.
The son of a prosperous provincial physician, he had begun to study
medicine without much success, and was transferred to theology, only to
find after three years of study that he was as little fitted to become a
country clergyman as a country doctor. He had an unconquerable love of
scientific investigation. He collected all kinds of things, and desired
to travel, without any very clear idea of his destiny. A chance
introduction came to the young man as a godsend, and he joined FitzRoy’s
expedition to South America. Once more, it was this journey that made
him “Darwin,” the mighty intellectual force in the nineteenth century.
Darwin found an idea in South America. You have to examine it very
closely to appreciate it clearly. Let us recapitulate very briefly the
hundred years of zoology and botany that had gone before.
In the eighteenth century Linné drew up, for the first time, a great
catalogue of plant and animal species. Each species had a solid Latin
name, and was provided with its particular label, by which every
representative of the species could be recognised at once. Then the
species were bracketed together in larger groups, and a general system
was formed. It was an immense scientific advance, and is still generally
appreciated as such. But we have to make one reserve. 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. God made the animals and plants, species by species, put them
in their places, and said to man, “Name them as you think fit, classify
them, putting the like together and separating the unlike.” So God spake
to Adam when he stood before him, naked as a Fuegian. Linné comes on the
scene some six thousand years afterwards to set about this naming and
arranging in earnest. But that does not make much difference. There are
the species created by God. They have ceaselessly reproduced themselves
since the days of Paradise according to the command to increase and
multiply, each one in its own kind, so that the polar bear has only
begotten polar bears, the giraffe giraffes, the hippopotamus
hippopotami. Thus, in spite of death, the primitive Paradise is still
there, and Linné, the official professor at Upsala, with his venerable
wig and embroidered coat, can take up the work of the naked Adam with a
good conscience, and finish what the patriarch had not been able to do.
Linné died in 1778 (about the time when Goethe was beginning the
_Iphigenia_ and _Wilhelm Meister_) in the full fame of all these
achievements and all his hypotheses from the giraffe to God. Fifty years
elapsed between this and Darwin’s voyage; but in those fifty years the
following process is accomplished:—
An increasing number of bones and other relics of animal species, that
exist no longer, were dug out of the earth. In South America the
skeleton was found of a giant-sloth, the megatherium, the remains of a
kind of animal, larger than the elephant, that no traveller could find
living in the country. The famous mammoth-corpse came to light in the
ice of Siberia; an entirely strange elephant with curved tusks and a red
woolly coat. Ichthyosauri were found in the rocks in England, and so on.
All these “extinct” species had to be named and arranged in the system.
A special scientific indication was put on them, which means “extinct.”
But this was not enough for thought—which cannot be “entirely dispensed
with,” as some one well said, even in exact science.
Where did these extinct species come from? What is their relation to the
Creator? Were they created long ago in Paradise with the others, and
afterwards conveyed in the ark, only to disappear in the course of time?
And what was the cause of their disappearance? Must we conclude that
part of what Adam saw was not available for Linné and his pupils? These
four remains, a few bones here and there, do not tell us much about
them.
Therefore, species may perish: many of them have perished.
There was something new in this, something that obscured the clear lines
of earlier science. However, a way of escape was found. It was claimed
that these grotesque monsters—ichthyosauri, megatheria, mammoths,
&c.—represent an earlier creation, with which Adam had nothing to do.
Cuvier developed the theory in his grandiose way in 1812. Before the
creation of the animal and plant species that Adam found in Paradise
there was a long series of periods in the history of the earth, each of
which had its own animal and plant population. It was in one of these
periods that the forests grew which we find fossilised in our coal. In
another the ichthyosauri, gigantic lizards, filled the ocean. In a third
the hideous megatherium dragged along its huge frame, and so on. It is
true that there is nothing in the Bible about these ancient and extinct
periods; but the Mosaic verses move quickly—they press on to come to
man. The repeated creations of the animal and plant worlds are summed up
in a single one. We must read something between the lines.
Apart from that, everything is clear. Hence the ancient species were
made fixed, solid, and unchangeable by God just like the later species
that Adam found in Paradise, and that still exist. Without the will of
God they could no more have died out than the actual ones; and there
were no human beings there to destroy them. But the divine action
intervened. At the end of each of these old-world periods a terrible
spectacle was witnessed. The heavens poured out their punishing floods;
the seas were heated to steam by fiery masses of rock that were summoned
by the divine power from the bowels of the earth. In the course of a
single day the carboniferous forests were swallowed up; the megatheria
disappeared, legs uppermost, like flies in butter, in the sand dunes of
the terrible floods.
The might of the creative act was equalled by the might of the
destruction. The science of these vast new creations and divine
revolutions before Adam’s birth was called geology. It lived in peace
with Linné’s theory of fixed species. Its parent, Cuvier, was so great a
genius that it seemed quite impossible that he had made a mistake.
Before twenty years were out he was, in the opinion of a contemporary
and equally able geologist, declared to be certainly wrong on one point.
Lyell wrote a magnificent work in which he proved, from the point of
view of scientific geology, that the whole story of these terrible
revolutions was a fiction. There are no such sharp sections in the early
history of the earth. Everything goes to show that throughout the whole
period of the earth’s development the same natural laws have been at
work as we find to-day. It is true that the relative positions of sea
and land, hill and valley, forest and desert, have often changed; but
very, very slowly, in the course of millions of years. A single drop of
water, constantly falling, will hollow out a stone. In these millions of
years the water has swept away rocks here, and formed new land by the
accumulation of sand there. In these millions of years the sand has been
compressed into the gigantic masses that tower above us to-day as
sandstone mountains; they are formed of sand that was originally laid
like mud, layer by layer, on the floor of the ocean.
It was all very plausible; it seemed to picture an eternal flow of
things in which there was no room for God. The changes in the earth’s
surface were easily brought about without catastrophes, in the course of
incalculable ages. God was excluded from geological discussions of the
formation of hill and dale. And when it was fully realised, it brought
the question of species to the front once more.
It was impossible to retreat simply to Linné’s position. Lyell by no
means denied Cuvier’s various periods in the earth’s development as
such. He believed, moreover, that the plant and animal populations were
different in these epochs. When the forests flourished which have formed
the mass of our coal-measures there were no ichthyosauri; when the
ichthyosauri came there were no longer any carboniferous forests; with
the ichthyosauri there were no megatheria, and the last ichthyosaurus
was extinct before the megatheria arrived. All that Lyell rejected was
the great divine catastrophes. But when these were abandoned, it was no
longer possible to attribute the “end” of the extinct species to a
divine act. We were faced with the slow and natural conversion of
terrestrial things in the course of endless ages.
Species must have been liable to be destroyed by purely natural causes.
The catastrophes were abandoned, yet species _had_ been destroyed. And
when that was granted—it was the devil’s little finger—a further
conclusion was inevitable. If species have died out slowly and naturally
in the history of the earth, and new species have made their appearance
at the same time, may not these new species have _arisen_ slowly and
naturally? Suppose these simple and purely natural causes, that had
brought about the extinction of certain species, had been for others the
very starting-point of development? In one word: if the extinction was
not due to a mighty divine interference, was it not conceivable that the
origin also may not have needed such?
One more deduction, and the demon of knowledge had hold of the entire
hand. May not this natural extinction and natural new-birth have been
directly connected in many cases? As a fact, some of the species had
been wholly extirpated. But others had provided the living material of
the new arrivals; they had been _transformed_ into these apparently new
species. That was the decisive deduction. It did away with the need of
any sudden creation. It merely made a claim that was appalling to the
Linnean principles: namely, that species may change. In the course of
time and at a favourable spot one species may be transformed into
another.
Another fairly obvious deduction could be made. Who brought about the
transformation? Lyell proved that, without any catastrophes, terrestrial
things are constantly changing—the water and the land, the mountains and
the valleys, and even the climate. In this gradual change the
environments of living things were at length altered to such an extent
that they were bound to cause a change in the organisms. However,
different species reacted in different ways. Some gradually died out.
Others adapted themselves to the new conditions; just as, in human
affairs, one race breaks down under changed conditions while another
rises to a higher and richer and new stage on that very account. No
creation! Merely transformations of species, development of new forms
from older ones by adaptation to new, naturally modified conditions.
Even zoology and botany were without the finger of God from the earliest
days.
Of course there was no trace of these latter deductions in Lyell. But
they pressed themselves with an irresistible and decisive force on the
mind of one of his first readers, Darwin.
He took Lyell’s book with him to South America. Step by step the logic
of it forced him to admit that this was what must have taken place
somewhere. First the idea of “extinct species” became a concrete picture
to him there, a sort of diabolic vision. The whole substratum of the
pampas is one colossal tomb of strange monsters. The bones lie bare at
every outcrop. Megatheria, or giant-sloths, as large as elephants, and
with thighbones three times as thick as that of the elephant, able to
break off branches in the primitive forests with their paws: armadilloes
as big as rhinoceroses, with coats as hard as stone and curved like
barrels; gigantic llamas, the macrouchenias, compared with which the
modern specimens are Liliputians; mastodons and wild horses, of which
America was entirely free even in the days of Columbus, and lion-like
carnivores with terrible sabre-teeth. There they all are to-day—extinct,
lost, buried in the deserted cemetery of the pampas-loam.
When the young Darwin stood by these groves, like Hamlet, he did not
know how closely this ghost-world came to our own day. At that time the
armour of the gigantic armadillo, the glyptodon, that had formed
shelters over the heads of the human dwellers in the pampas, like
Esquimaux huts, had not yet been discovered. The cave of Ultima
Esperanza in Patagonia had not been searched, and no one had seen the
red-haired coat of the sloth as large as an ox, the gryptotherium (a
relative of the real megatherium), cut by some prehistoric human hand,
amongst a heap, several yards deep, of the animal’s manure—in such
peculiar circumstances as to prompt the suggestion that the giant-sloths
had been kept tame in the cavern, as in a cyclopean stable, by
prehistoric Indians. Darwin thought the remains were very old, though
this by no means lessened the inspiration.
As our geological Hamlet speculated over these bones of extinct
monsters, the ideas of Linné and Cuvier struggled fiercely in his mind
with the new, heretical ideas inspired by Lyell. How was it that these
ancient, extinct animal forms of America resembled in every detail and
in the most marked characteristics certain living American animals?
Before him were the relics of past sloths, armadilloes, and
giant-llamas. In the actual America, also, there were sloths,
armadilloes, and llamas, though with some difference. And nowhere else
on earth, either in past or present time, were there sloths,
armadilloes, and llamas. Cuvier had replied, God had pleased to create
those ancient megatheria, glyptodons, and macrouchenias of America.
Then, one day, he sent his destructive catastrophe, and swept them all
away, as a sponge goes over the table. Then, in the empty land, he
created afresh the sloths, armadilloes, and llamas of to-day. But why
had God made the new animals so like the old that the modern zoologist
has to class the megatherium in the same narrow group as the actual
sloth, the ancient glyptodon with the modern armadillo, and so on?
Darwin, who had studied theology, was unshaken with regard to God
himself. However, something occurred that occurs so often and with such
good result in the history of thought. It appeared to him that the
notion of a direct creation is by no means the simplest way of
explaining things, but the most puzzling and complicated. Darwin
believed in Lyell. There had been no destructive catastrophe at all to
sweep away the megatherium and its companions. They had disappeared
gradually, by natural means. Was it not much more rational to suppose
that the actual sloths and armadilloes came into being gradually, by
natural means? Part of the old animal population had not perished, but
been transformed into the actual species. There was a bond of
relationship between the past and the present. One or other grotesque
and perhaps helpless giant form may have completely disappeared in the
course of time. But the golden thread of life was never entirely broken.
Other and more fortunate species had preserved the type of the sloth,
the armadillo, and the llama; they had developed naturally into the
living animals of America. God might remain at the groundwork of things.
He had launched matter into space, and impressed natural laws on it. But
these sufficed for the further work. They created America. They
developed the mammal into the sloth and the armadillo in the days of the
megatherium and the glyptodon. They maintained these types in the
country, in a straight line of development; the progressive principle of
life bringing about the extinction of certain forms, and transforming
others by a more fitting adaptation to their environment.
Darwin always looked back on this first conflict of his ideas in
presence of the dead shells and bones of the ancient pampas animals as
an hour of awakening. It was the birth of his humanity in the higher
sense. It is of interest to us because it coincides exactly with the
date of Haeckel’s birth in the ordinary sense.
In Darwin’s fine account of his voyage, which is mostly arranged in the
form of a diary, we find a passage written on the east coast of
Patagonia on January 9, 1834, and the next on April 13th. In the
meantime the ship had made a short zigzag course, which is spoken of in
another connection. But the interval between the two dates is taken up
with a passage on these gigantic animals, the reasons for their
extinction and the striking fact of their bodily resemblance to the
living animals of South America. “This remarkable resemblance,” we read,
“between the dead and the living animals of one and the same continent
will yet, I doubt not, throw more light on the appearance of organic
beings on the earth than any other class of facts.” This is clearly a
summary of Darwin’s deepest thoughts at the time. Haeckel was born on
February 16th of the same year, 1834. Thus the bodily birth of one of
the two men whom we conceive to-day as Dioscuri coincides with the
spiritual rebirth of the other. But it would be nearly thirty years
before they would meet in spirit never to part again. At the very
beginning of their acquaintance Darwin wrote a letter to Haeckel
(October 8, 1864) in which he speaks of the earliest suggestions of his
theory. The Hamlet-hour comes back vividly to his memory. “I shall never
forget my astonishment when I dug out a gigantic piece of armour, like
that of a living armadillo. As I reflected on these facts and compared
others of a like nature, it seemed to me probable that closely related
species may have descended from a common ancestor.”
However we take it, Darwin then saw for the first time that his
difficulty about the mutability of species was from the first, in his
own mind, a difficulty about God. He began his doubts with the ancient
armadillo; he ended with God.
On the return journey from South America, which amounted to a
circumnavigation of the globe, the struggle was renewed at the Galapagos
islands. Volcanic forces had raised these islands from the bed of the
ocean in comparatively recent times. They were, therefore, bound to be a
virgin province at the time. Now, however, the walls of the crater were
clothed with vegetation, birds flew after insects, and gigantic turtles
and lizards lived on the shores. Whence did these plants and animals
come? Darwin examines them. They have an unusual appearance, and seem to
point to America. Yet not a single species is now wholly American; each
has its peculiarities. An historical controversy arises over the
islands, and men range themselves in parties once more. Empty islands
emerge from the blue waters. How are they to be populated? There are two
possibilities. One is that God has created the animals and
plants—Galapagos animals and plants. But in that case why has he created
them entirely on the American model, while diverging from it in small
details? The second possibility is that the animals and plants were
brought by the current or the wind from the neighbouring American coast;
they are American plants and animals. After landing on the islands, they
adapted themselves to their new surroundings, and were altered. Hence
both the resemblance and the difference. The theory assumes, of course,
that species are mutable. If that is so, we can explain
everything—without God.
But the greatest and tensest struggle began when Darwin returned home.
He approached the most audacious, but most striking fact, for his
purpose. Up to this the question had been whether new species were
produced by God or by natural necessity. Now a third element was
introduced, man himself. He also alters species, as a breeder of
pigeons, rabbits, sheep. He has done it with success for ages—only the
Linnés and Cuviers had not noticed the fact. How does he accomplish it?
A breeder desires to give his sheep finer wool. He examines the wool of
a thousand sheep. The difference between them is so slight that it is of
no practical consequence. But the farmer selects the male sheep out of
the thousand that has the best quality of wool, and the corresponding
female. He crosses the two. Their young have wool of a slightly improved
quality, and he picks out the best amongst them once more for crossing.
He continues this through several generations. At last, with his
continuous selection and crossing, the quality of the wool increases so
much that any one can recognise it at once, and it has a distinct
cultural value. In this way improved races of animals and large numbers
of fine flowers have been produced by breeders: by artificial selection
of the fittest to reproduce in each generation. This was done by man—not
by God, not by nature in remote times, but under our very eyes, by man.
Now for an analogous process without man. Let our sheep live wild in any
country. No human breeder has any interest in them: God does not seem to
interfere with them. They live on and on, for thousands of years,
generation after generation. Here again, in the wild state, we find the
same slight variations in the quality of the wool. One sheep has a
thicker coat than another. For thousands of years the fact is without
significance. Then occurs a slow change of the environment. The climate
becomes colder. Perhaps an ice-age sets in, such as our earth seems to
have passed through many times. There are two alternatives. A very hard
winter may set in at once and all the sheep perish, because their woolly
coat is too thin in all cases. That would mean the extinction of a whole
species. But the severe cold may come on gradually. The winters are more
trying. So many sheep perish in the first winters; but so many others
survive. Which will survive? Naturally, those that happened to have the
thicker coats. Those alone live on to the spring, and reproduce. The
following year the coat is thicker all round, as the lambs all came from
relatively thick-coated parents. The winter decimates them again, and
the thickest coated survive once more, and so on. The pressure of
external conditions, the “struggle for life,” selects just as man does.
Only the best adapted individuals survive and reproduce.
The whole earth is a vast field of splendid adaptations. The tree-frogs
are green because only green frogs are preserved; all the others are
destroyed. The arctic hare is white on the snow, the desert-fox yellow.
For a thousand reasons in the course of the earth’s development these
backgrounds—white, yellow, green; snow, desert, forest, &c.—have
themselves been constantly changing under the action of Lyell’s changes
in the crust of the earth. Hence constantly fresh adaptations, with a
certain percentage of complete extinctions. In these ceaseless new
adaptations we see a picture of an eternal progressive development.
Always a finer selection: always better material: natural things always
selecting and being selected. Man is superfluous in this world-old,
eternal process. And God, too, is superfluous.
That was Darwin’s last and decisive thought. Divine action was excluded
from the whole province of animal and plant species. It does not matter
whether or no the shrewd idea of natural selection solves the whole
problem. Why speak of “whole,” when all problems are really
unfathomable? He left open the question of the origin of the first
slight variations, the first increase in the fineness or thickness of
the sheep’s wool, for instance. He left open the question of the inner
nature of the process—and a good deal more. But these things did not
affect the great issue.
What Darwin did was to show for the first time how we might conceive the
natural evolution of species; to suggest that the miracle of the
purposive adaptation of organisms to their environment could be
explained by purely natural causes without introducing teleological and
supernatural agencies to bring the disharmony into harmony. The older
mind and logic had seen the action of God everywhere; the new thought
and logic were gradually restricting his sphere. Darwin took away a
whole province from the teleologist when he merely set up the idea of
selection. He towered above himself in that moment. Natural philosophy
wrested zoology and botany from the hands of Linné and Cuvier. It
destroyed the old idea of a design in the interest of natural law and
the general unity of nature. “Allah need create no more.” We cannot
emphasise it too much: it was the conceivability that settled the
question. Darwin had shown that “it might have been so,” and this
possibility stood for the first time in zoology and botany opposed, with
all the weight of logic, to the other theory, which was no more
understood, but was supplied by imagination to fill a gap—the idea of a
special creation of each animal species, the idea that the green
tree-frog, had been created amongst the foliage just as he was. The
feebler fancy gave way to the better. In this concession lay whole
sciences that would have to be entirely transformed on the strength of
Darwin’s achievement.
Narrow-minded folk have tried to make light of the mere “possibility,”
creating a distinction between truth and logical theory. As if all truth
were not solely in the human mind! 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 no use raising up against it
the figment of “absolute truth.” The main point was that Darwin raised
the conceivability of a natural origin of species by the modification of
older forms, which were driven ceaselessly to new adaptations under the
stress of the struggle for life, to such a pitch that the older
possibility of a creation of each species and its deliberate adaptation
by supernatural action sank lower and lower. It was a pure conflict of
ideas; the greater overcame the smaller—_now_ smaller.
Darwin’s work, the _Origin of Species_, was published on November 24,
1859, after twenty-five years of study. He kept the theory of selection
to himself for more than twenty years. The whole of the young generation
from the beginning of the thirties, to which Haeckel belonged, grew up
without any suspicion of it. Apart from the constant ill-health that
hindered his work, Darwin was tortured with anxiety lest he should be
treated as an imaginative _dilettante_ with his heretical ideas. In the
scientific circles of the middle of the century one was apt to be
disdainfully put down as a windy “natural philosopher” if one spoke of
“the evolution of animal and plant species” and the like. The word had
become the scarecrow of the exact, professional scientific workers; much
as when commercial men exclaim, “Dear me, the man’s a poet.” Hence
Darwin wanted to provide a most solid foundation of research for his
work, and then to smuggle it into the house like a goblin in a jar.
He took his task so seriously that, as Lyell afterwards wrote to him, he
might have worked on until his hundredth year without ever being ready
in the sense he wished. Chance had to intervene, and bring forward one
of the younger men, who almost robbed him of the title of discoverer.
Wallace arrived independently at the idea of selection, and he was
within a hair’s breadth of being the first to publish it. The aged
scholar at Down had to come forward. Then the great book was published,
and Wallace disappeared in its shadow.
In Darwin’s opinion it was only a preliminary extract, and he added many
supplementary volumes as time went on. As a fact it was so severely
elaborated that even the thoughtful layman, possibly with a sympathy for
the idea, was almost, if not wholly, unable to digest the proofs. It had
to be “translated” for the majority of Darwin’s educated countrymen. On
the other hand, this mass of facts was partly strange and new to the
professional biologists. What did so many of the museum-zoologists know,
for instance, of the results and problems of the practical breeder?
“That belongs to the province of my colleague who teaches agriculture,
not to mine.” His proofs were taken indiscriminately from zoology,
botany, and geology. But at that time it was woe to the man that mixed
up the various branches of research. The professor of zoology could not
control the botanical material, and _vice versâ_. There was, in
addition, the general dislike of the natural-philosophical nucleus. It
was impossible to suppose that this very individual book, transgressing
every rule, should at once meet with wide encouragement, or even
ordinary appreciation.
In England Darwin’s repute as a traveller and geologist, and the
personal respect felt for him, had some effect. Then came a small circle
of friends, Hooker, Huxley, even, to some extent, the aged Lyell, who
had seen the manuscript before publication, and had at once started a
more or less brisk propaganda. In the first six months three editions of
the work were sold, so that it was read by a few thousand men. As a rule
there was at that time less dread of “natural philosophy” in England
than elsewhere. But pious minds were alarmed at the “struggle against
God” that was based on the exact data of zoology, botany, and geology.
Darwin had made that the salient point, as a glance at the work shows,
since he closes with a reference to the Deity. He said it was a “grand”
view of the Creator to suppose that he had created only the first forms
of life on the earth, and then left it to natural laws to develop these
germs into the various species of animals and plants. It was prudent to
restrict the theistic conflict. God was merely excluded from the origin
of species. Natural selection did not apply to the further problem of
the origin of the primitive life-forms and of life itself. Theism could
retain them. There was something soothing psychologically in the phrase,
which was often attacked subsequently, and did not represent Darwin’s
later views. It was characteristic of Darwin’s gentle disposition.
He did not start out from the position that God does not exist, and that
we must, at all costs, seek natural causes for the origin of things. He
had not abandoned the idea of the clerical profession because he had
lost belief in God, but because he had more attraction for catching
butterflies and shooting birds. Still a firm theist, he had been
convinced, as a candid geologist, by Lyell’s demonstration that God had
had nothing to do with the moulding of hill and valley or the
distribution of land and water. As a candid zoologist and botanist he
had then convinced himself that the analogous changes in the animal and
plant worlds had needed no divine intervention.
As yet, however, he saw no reason to draw more radical conclusions. He
sought, as far as honour permitted, a certain peace of thought by asking
whether this indirect action of the personal Ruler over such vast
provinces did not enhance the idea of him instead of detracting from it.
Goethe would have been prepared, on his principles, to recognise the
step taken in the direction of natural law as a victory for our
increasing knowledge of and reverence for the Deity. For him a natural
law was the will of God; if natural selection created species, he would
have seen merely the will of God in selection. But Darwin had not yet
advanced so far, and still less could this be expected in his pious
readers.
However, we find a curious confession a few paragraphs before the
theistic conclusion of the book. It runs: “Light will be thrown on the
origin and history of humanity.” Light, that is to say, from the theory
of the transformation of species by natural selection. The words
contained the promise of a new twilight of the gods. In the innocent
days, when the Creator stood in person behind each species of animal and
plant, Linné had seen no great innovation in his defining man as a
definite species, the highest species of mammal. God had created the
polar bear and the hippopotamus, _Genesis_ said, as well as man. That
man had transgressed the command in Paradise, fallen into sin, needed
salvation, and so on, was another matter altogether. With Darwin the
innovation was incalculably important.
On his theory the various species of animals had been developed from
each other, without a new creative act. If man was an animal species in
this sense, he also must have originated from other animals; and that
would be bitter. The phrase shows that Darwin already saw clearly, and
had abandoned his belief in a special creation of man. But this point
was bound to make more bad blood than all the rest put together. God,
now restricted to the direct production of the first living things, had
lost man as well as the animals. Moreover, whatever interpretation was
put upon the Mosaic narrative, the very source of theistic belief, the
Bible, was called into question. How had we come to know of this story
of divine creations? By the Bible, the vehicle of revelation. But this
Bible was the work of man, and man was now well within the bounds of
nature, from which God had been excluded. How could he learn anything
from revelation? The biblical writers had clearly only made conjectures.
Some of them—with regard to Adam, for instance—were certainly incorrect.
There was nothing in the Bible about evolution by means of selection.
Indeed, was not the whole picture of a creating Deity an error? These
thoughts were bound to press upon the religious mind with all their
logical force. When they did so, the very foundations of theology became
insecure, to a far more serious extent than Darwin’s moderate conclusion
suggested. When the book fell on this contentious ground, it was bound,
even if it were only read in the last two pages, to provoke vast waves
of hostility against its heretical zoology and botany, especially in
England.
* * * * *
Haeckel was in Italy when the work—the work of _his_ life, too, as the
sequel shows—was published. We have seen where he was: in sight of the
blue sea, penetrating for the first time into a special section of
zoology, the radiolaria, and making it his own. He was far from
theorising, for the first years of reality were upon him. He returned to
Berlin at the beginning of May, 1860, bringing his study of the
radiolaria, and resolved to publish it in comprehensive form. Here he
learned for the first time that a “mad” work by Darwin had appeared,
that denied the venerable Linnean dogma of the immutability of species.
German official science was now invaded from two sides at once. Haeckel
had returned like a new man from the freshness of Italy; and Darwin’s
work, translated by Bronn, was bringing some slight extract of the
English student’s thoughts, like a draught of old golden wine. They were
bound to meet this time.
The aged Bronn, a German naturalist of distinction and merit, had found
the _Origin of Species_ interesting enough, at least, to deserve the
trouble of translation. But his interest in it was very restricted. He
was one of the thoughtful students of the days following Cuvier, and was
not of the kind to pin his faith to one man. The appearance of the plant
and animal species in the various terrestrial periods, so sharply
separated by Cuvier himself, showed unmistakably an ascent from lower to
higher forms. The fish is placed lower in the system than the mammal. At
a certain period there were fishes living, but no mammals as yet. At
another period the only plants on the earth were of the decidedly lower
group of the cryptogams (ferns, shore-grasses, club-mosses), and these
were succeeded by pines and palm-ferns, and finally by the true palms
and foliage-trees. Cuvier’s theory of creation had to take account of
this. Agassiz, who held firmly to the fresh creation of species in each
new epoch, conceived the Creator as an artist who improved in his work
in the course of time. Each new achievement was better than the
preceding. It was rather a curious idea of the Creator!
[Illustration:
PHOTOGRAPH OF MARBLE BUST BY G. HEROLD.
]
Others, who did not venture to use the idea of Deity quite so naïvely as
Agassiz in zoology and botany, conceived a “law of development” within
life itself. It was a time when belief in a “vital force” was universal.
Living things had their peculiar force, which was not found in lifeless
things. The life-principle might be at work in the law of development.
It would raise living things higher and higher in the succeeding
geological epochs. It was a vague theory, though it purported to cover
not only the fact but the machinery of development. In the course of
ages it brought about the appearance of new species. Those who held this
idea of an immanent law of evolution rejected the older notion of a
personal Deity, putting in an appearance suddenly at the beginning of
the secondary period and creating the ichthyosauri “out of nothing.”
They looked upon Cuvier’s catastrophes, to which Agassiz still clung,
with a touch of Lyell’s scepticism. The “law of evolution” had been the
_deus ex machina_ of the long procession of life-forms. One day a fish
ceased to give birth to little fishes in the manner of its parents. The
“law of evolution” was at work in its ova, and suddenly little
ichthyosauri were developed from them. Thus, again, a lizard was
believed to have engendered young mammals one day. One student would
hold that the transition was quite abrupt in this sense. Another would
think it more gradual, and approach the idea of a slow transformation of
a fish into a lizard, and a lizard into a mammal, or a tree-fern into a
palm-fern, and this into a true palm. At the bottom they were all agreed
that the whole inner law of evolution had nothing whatever in common
with the other laws of nature and was not subordinate to them. They did
not hold an evolution in harmony with the great mechanism of natural
laws. Their principle got astride of natural laws at certain points,
like a little man, and turned them in this or that direction.
Very little philosophic reflection was needed to show that they had
merely replaced the Creator with a word. The older Dualism remained. 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. The God that acted from
without was banished, but the “impulse from within,” reduced to a mere
skeleton in substance, was put upon the throne.
The advocates of the law of evolution had assuredly done much in
preparing the way for Darwin, as they had insisted that certain advances
in detail were undeniable and built up theories from the chaotic
material provided by special research—especially seeing that some of the
ablest naturalists of the time were amongst them, who determined to
retain speculation in zoology and botany. But, on the other hand, it
cannot be questioned that the confused nature of their fundamental idea,
which, in fact, was not far removed from the theological notion of the
vital force, gave the rigid and “exact” academic workers an apparent
right to reject _all_ speculation on the possibility of an evolution of
species as an unscientific dream. The aged Bronn was in 1860 one of the
most prudent and sober of the advocates of the inner principle of
evolution. 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. The
fine old worker, with an age of indefatigable labour behind him, though
he had not got beyond the idea of a “law of evolution,” looked on Darwin
with a mixture of fear and admiration as he cut into the very heart of
these problems. He added amiable notes to the work to the effect that
one would like to go so far, but the distance was intimidating. In fact,
he omitted altogether from his translation the very important phrase
that “light would be thrown on the origin of man.” It would be a
terrible affair, he thought, if the discussion were at once turned on
this. Man himself owing his origin neither to God nor the finger of God,
but to natural selection in the ordinary course of natural laws! It was
not to be thought of. Hence the phrase was struck out, as quite too
extravagant, in his otherwise admirable work.
Bronn had himself become something of a revolutionary amongst his
colleagues by the translation. The rigidly “exact” workers crossed
themselves before the Germanised work. Most of the “evolutionists” in
the older sense had by no means the _bonhomie_ to speak even of a
“possibility” like the patriarch Bronn. From the first Darwin
was—Haeckel was the first to experience it—branded with the anathemas of
the two opposite schools of science in Germany. On the one hand the
rigorous and exact workers declared that his teaching was pure
metaphysics, because it sought to prove evolution and contemplated vast
ideal connections. On the other hand the Dualist metaphysicians
denounced him as an empiric of the worst character, who sought to
replace the great ideal elements in the world by a few miserable natural
necessities. It is significant to find that Schopenhauer, the brilliant
thinker, regarded the _Origin of Species_ as one of the empirical
soapsud or barber books produced by exact investigation, which he
thoroughly despised from his metaphysical point of view. And there were
already (there are more to-day) whole schools of zoology and botany that
looked upon Darwin’s theoretical explanations as unscientific
“mysticism,” “metaphysics,” and “philosophy in the worst sense of the
word.”
Haeckel read the dangerous book at Berlin in May, 1860. “It profoundly
moved me,” he writes to me, “at the first reading. But as _all_ the
Berlin magnates (with the single exception of Alexander Braun) were
against it, I could make no headway in my defence of it. I did not
breathe freely until I visited Gegenbaur at Jena (June, 1860); my long
conversations with him finally confirmed my conviction of the truth of
Darwinism or transformism.”
It was, therefore, in the critical days immediately before or during the
negotiations with Gegenbaur which led to his setting up as a private
teacher at Jena. The names of Darwin and Jena unite chronologically in
Haeckel’s life—two great names that were to bear him into the very
depths of his career, and that have their roots in the same hour.
We may ask what it was in the book that “profoundly moved” the young
student of the radiolaria. The name of Braun only partly explains the
matter, as Braun was an evolutionist of the same type as Bronn. He was
amiably disposed to meet it, but did not openly enter on the new path.
We must go deeper. We then understand it clearly enough, if we recollect
Haeckel’s bent in the last few years.
He had no longer any scruples with regard to religion. The God of
tradition had been entirely replaced in him by Goethe’s God, who did not
stand outside of, but was one with, nature. “There is nothing within,
nothing without: for what is within is without.” There was not a kernel,
God, and a shell, Nature. “Nature has neither kernel nor shell: it is
both together.”
The years spent in southern Italy had certainly helped to bring out as
strongly as possible the contrast between Goethe’s conception and the
conventional idea of God as an extramundane Creator. No surroundings are
more apt to do this than the Romance peoples of the Mediterranean. In
the northern, Protestant countries the ecclesiastical tradition of Deity
has always a spiritual element, a kind of vague resolution into moral
laws, that in some measure approach natural law, though one made by man.
There is no trace of this in Naples and Sicily. The supernatural there
is the saint, the madonna; they penetrate unceasingly into the natural
reality, in every little detail of life and conduct. The antithesis of
the poor cosmic machinery and the ever-present heavenly help and
supersession of it is raised to a supreme height in the popular belief.
Miracles are not relegated to earlier days and ancient books. They are
expected, affirmed, and believed every day. The saint fills the net of
the fisherman as he chases the edible cuttle-fishes by torchlight. The
saint makes the storm that threatens the boat—makes it suddenly out of
nothing. The madonna can arrest in a second the glowing stream of lava
that rolls towards the village from Vesuvius, and if hundreds of them
unite in ardent prayer and the making of vows, she will be appeased and
do it. 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. If he is to
follow Goethe, this ancient extramundane, ever-interfering Deity must be
given up without the least attempt at compromise.
Thus Haeckel’s position was incomparably more radical than Darwin’s from
the very first. He no longer believed in a Creator, either in whole or
part.
He asked himself, therefore, how he could now explain certain things in
nature. He had learned from the great Johannes Müller that species were
unchangeable, and it was impossible to conceive the spontaneous
generation of the living from the dead. The essence, the predominant
element of the living thing was the mysterious, purposive “vital force.”
The first of these three ideas of the master’s to be surrendered
entirely by him was the vital force. Even in Müller’s lifetime, and in
his own laboratory, so to say, his pupil, Du Bois-Reymond, made the
first great breach in the doctrine with his famous study of animal
electricity, a really pioneer piece of work, especially as regards
method, at that time. It was now more than ever probable that there was
no more a special vital force besides the simple natural forces than
there was a God distinct from nature. The animal or the plant was a
wonderful outcome of the same laws that had built the crystal or the
globe. The sharp distinction between living and dead matter fell into
the waste-basket, where so many other Dualistic tags lay, cut off by the
shears of science.
But if one of Müller’s theses was abandoned, another was retained as a
real blessing with all the more tenacity by his pupils—the thesis that
even the scientific investigator shall always “think”—nay, even
“philosophise.” Müller called it “using one’s imagination,” in his
desire to emphasise it. Now it was certainly a fair philosophic
deduction from Du Bois-Reymond’s discoveries that one ought no longer to
be so rigid as regards the possibility of spontaneous generation. If the
same natural forces are at work in the organic and the inorganic, the
living and the dead, it is no longer inconceivable theoretically that
life and inorganic matter only differ in degree, not in kind. The
distinction might become so slender—either now, or at least in past
times—that an apparent “spontaneous generation” might really take place.
Here again, it is plain, Haeckel had a greater freedom than Darwin.
Working gradually from above, Darwin desisted when he came to
spontaneous generation, and left room for God. Haeckel came into an open
field, believing that there was no eternal Deity and that spontaneous
generation itself was by no means a forbidding conception. The problem
for him was merely, how he could work upward through the plants and
animals of all geological periods until he reached man. He was bound to
seek to dispense even here with the historical vital force, and explain
everything by the great natural laws of the cosmos.
It was in this frame of mind that he received Darwin’s book. Can it be
in the least surprising that it “profoundly moved” him. It opened out to
him the whole way, just as he desired it. Müller’s third thesis, the
immutability of species, broke down. But what did it matter? It was now
possible for the first time to construct a philosophical zoology and
botany in Müller’s sense, without any vital force and without God.
At the same time this rapid and impulsive acceptance of Darwin’s theory
was not merely a decisive moment in Haeckel’s intellectual development;
it was bound to be, even externally, a most important step in his
career. The theistic controversy was forced on his attention. It passed
out of the province of his inmost life, that had hitherto only been
discussed in conversation with intimate friends, into the professional
work of his most serious and public occupation—into zoology, into the
radiolaria at which he had been working for years.
We must realise clearly what it must have meant at that time for a young
zoologist, who wanted to do rigorous professional work and had quickly
decided to settle at Jena in order to begin his career as an official
teacher, to become “a Darwinian” in conviction and open confession. It
might cost him both his official position and his scientific future; and
this at the very moment when he had just secured them, or was in a
better position to secure them. We have here for the first time the open
manifestation of a principle in Haeckel’s life that he had hitherto only
used inwardly, in application to himself. The truth must be told,
whatever it cost. Shoot me dead, morally, materially, or bodily, as you
will: but you will have to shoot the law first.
Darwin’s ominous book had been available in Bronn’s translation for two
years. The German professional zoologists, botanists, and geologists
almost all regarded it as absolute nonsense. Agassiz, Giebel,
Keferstein, and so many others, laughed until they were red in the face,
like a riotous first-night public that has made up its mind as to the
absurdity of the play from the first act, and torment the author as the
cat torments a mouse. Then Haeckel gave to the world his long-prepared
_Monograph on the Radiolaria_ (1862), the work with which he endeavours
to establish—in fact, must establish—his position as an exact
investigator, even amongst the academic scholars of the opposite camp.
All goes very smoothly for many pages of the work. A few traces of
heresy may be detected about page 100. The passage deals with the
relation of organ to individual, in connection with the social species
of radiolaria that live in communities. It is a subject that Haeckel
took up with great vigour later on, as we shall see. Here it affords him
an opportunity to say a word about the general fusion of things in the
world of life, in opposition to our rigid divisions in classification.
Organ and individual pass into each other without any fixed limit. That,
he says, is only a repetition of the relation of the plant to the
animal. We cannot establish any fixed limitations between them. What we
set up as such are only man’s abstractions. In nature itself we never
find these subjective abstract ideas of limitation “incorporated purely,
but always fading away in gradual transitions; here, again, the scale of
organisation rises gradually from the simplest to the most complex, in a
continuous development.” However, these are words that might have been
written by Schleiden or Unger or Bronn before Darwin’s time.
Yet there is something in the work that would have been a jet of
ice-cold water to the Agassizs and Giebels. This brilliant new
“Extraordinary Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoological
Museum at Jena University,” as it says on the title-page, accepts Darwin
in a certain unambiguous passage late in the text.
It is necessary to bring to light once more this passage, buried in a
work that is not easily accessible, an expensive technical work
separated from us by four decades now. It is worth doing so, not only on
account of the courage it displayed at the time, but also as a document
relating to the great controversy of the nineteenth century. It is found
on pages 231 and 232, partly in the text, but for the most part in a
note. Immediately after giving the table of classification Haeckel goes
on to say: “I cannot leave this general account of the relationship of
the various families of the radiolaria without drawing special attention
to the numerous transitional forms that most intimately connect the
different groups and make it difficult to separate them in
classification, to some extent.” It is interesting to note that in spite
of our very defective knowledge of the radiolaria it is nevertheless
possible to arrange “a fairly continuous chain of related forms.” He
would like to draw particular attention to this, because “the great
theories that Charles Darwin has lately put forward, in his _Origin of
Species in the Plant and Animal World by Natural Selection, or The
Preservation of the Improved Races in the Struggle for Life_, and which
have opened out a new epoch for systematic biology, have given such
importance to the question of the affinities of organisms and to proofs
of continuous concatenation that even the smallest contribution towards
the further solution of these problems must be welcome.” He then
endeavours in the text, without any more theoretical observations,
practically to construct a “genealogical tree of the radiolaria,” the
first of a large number of such trees in the future. He takes as the
primitive radiolarian a simple trellis-worked globule with centrifugal
radiating needles, embodied in the _Heliosphæra_. “At the same time,” he
says, characteristically, “this does not imply in the least that all the
radiolaria must have descended from this primitive form; I merely show
that, as a matter of fact, all these very varied forms may be derived
from such a common fundamental type.” In other words, once more, it is
_conceivable_—a golden word even long afterwards. The first
“genealogical tree,” a “table of the related families, sub-families, and
genera of the radiolaria,” arranged in order from the higher forms down,
and connected with lines and brackets, comes next. The text deals
thoroughly with the possibility of descent. This closes the first and
general part of the monograph. But there is a long note at this point in
the text, where Darwin’s title is cited, that gives us his first
appreciation of Darwin in detail. It begins: “I cannot refrain from
expressing here the great admiration with which Darwin’s able theory of
the origin of species has inspired me. Especially as this epoch-making
work has for the most part been unfavourably received by our German
professors of science, and seems in some cases to have been entirely
misunderstood. Darwin himself desires his theory to be submitted to
every possible test, and ‘looks confidently to the young workers who
will be prepared to examine both sides of the question impartially.
Whoever leans to the view that species are changeable will do a service
to science by a conscientious statement of his conviction; only in that
way can we get rid of the mountain of prejudice that at present covers
the subject.’ I share this view entirely,” Haeckel continues, “and on
that account feel that I must express here my belief in the mutability
of species and the real genealogical relation of all organisms. Although
I hesitate to accept Darwin’s views and hypotheses to the full and to
endorse the whole of his argument, I cannot but admire the earnest,
scientific attempt made in his work to explain all the phenomena of
organic nature on broad and consistent principles and to substitute an
intelligible natural law for unintelligible miracles. 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. This is the first great
attempt to construct a scientific, physiological theory of the
development of organic life and to prove that the physiological laws and
the chemical and physical forces that rule in nature to-day must also
have been at work in the world of yesterday.” Haeckel then refers to
Bronn, the translator of the book. With Bronn he calls Darwin’s theory
the fertilised egg from which the truth will gradually develop; the pupa
from which the long-sought natural law will emerge. And he concludes:
“The chief defect of the Darwinian theory is that it throws no light on
the origin of the primitive organism—probably a simple cell—from which
all the others have descended. When Darwin assumes a special creative
act for this first species, he is not consistent and, I think, not quite
sincere. However, apart from these and other defects, Darwin’s theory
has the undying merit of bringing sense and reason into the whole
subject of the relations of living things. When we remember how every
great reform, every important advance, meets with a resistance in
proportion to the depth of the prejudices and dogmas it assails, we
shall not be surprised that Darwin’s able theory has as yet met with
little but hostility instead of its well-merited appreciation and test.”
There is yet no question of man and his origin. But what he says is very
bold for the time; and before a year is out we shall find him drawing
the most dangerous conclusion of all. And it is found, not in a late
page and note in a stout technical volume, but in the pitiless glare of
the sunlight, in the most prominent position that could then be given to
it in German scientific culture.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER V
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863
In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Oken had inspired the
formation of large public gatherings of German naturalists and
physicians. Oken was one of the advanced thinkers who felt that all
technical science was in the end only preparatory to the great work of
educating the people. In his opinion the naturalist, even if he spent
his whole life in investigating the filaments of plants or the limbs of
insects, was a pioneer of culture. In any case these gatherings were a
very good practical move at the time. In a time of terrible reaction on
all sides a feeling came at last even to the recluse of science that,
besides the technical value of his work, it ought to do something
towards lifting his fellows out of the rut they were falling into. They
felt that if all ideals were going to be lost, the ultimate aim of
special research would perish with them. Oken took up a position of
democratic opposition. He was soon joined by Alexander von Humboldt,
who, with the same feeling at heart, gave the work a certain polish of
scientific and impartial dignity. There are features of his work that
amuse us to-day, but those were evil days, and every particle of
goodwill had to be appreciated. However, there was a serious difficulty.
The bolder elements met in congresses, and encouraged each other in the
pursuit of their ideal. But it at once became clear in their public
discussions that some of their purely scientific discoveries were
dangerous and heretical in such a period of reaction. This or that had
hitherto been buried innocently in scientific monographs, quite unknown
to the crowd, and the author might be a royal councillor, receive
decorations, and almost be an elder of the Church. Suddenly, by means of
these assemblies, the sinfulness of all this lore about snails or
insects or vertebrates was brought to light and put before the profane
public, and there was much anger. The whole of scientific research was
full of secret plots, heresies, and bombs—against God.
There was a most appalling illustration of this in the Scientific
Congress, held in September, 1863. Nothing is more amusing to-day than
to run through the yellow and almost unknown papers of the Congress.
They are illuminating to some extent. An idea that belongs to humanity
is openly brought into the debate for the first time. Ages lie behind
this hour. We must grant all that savours of human comedy, of triviality
even, in such an assembly, but after all we must see in it the swell and
clash of great waves. Haeckel spoke for the first time on Darwin’s
theory, at a spot from which the waves were bound to spread through the
whole scientific culture of the land. Virchow, afterwards his bitter
opponent, supported him. All the deepest questions and consequences of
Darwinism were mooted with the first vibrant accents. It was a great and
unforgettable hour.
The first speaker at the Congress on the Sunday evening, September 19,
1863, was Haeckel. We must remember the charm that attached to his
person even outwardly, the direct charm that did not need any allusion
to his growing repute in zoology. It was the charm that had been felt by
the simple folk of uncultured Italy, who had never heard even the name
of the science. Darwin was never a handsome man from the æsthetic point
of view. When he wanted to sail with FitzRoy, it was a very near
question whether the splenetic captain would not reject him because he
did not like his nose. His forehead had so striking a curve that
Lombroso, the expert, could put him down as having “the
idiot-physiognomy” in his _Genius and Insanity_. At the time when he
wrote the _Origin of Species_ he had not the patriarchal beard that is
inseparable from his image in our minds; he was bald, and his chin clean
shaved. The prematurely bent form of the invalid could never have had
much effect in such a place, no matter what respect was felt for him.
Haeckel, young and handsome, was an embodiment of the _mens sana in
corpore sano_. He rose above the grey heads of science, as the type of
the young, fresh, brilliant generation. It was an opponent at this
Congress, who sharply attacked the new ideas, that spoke of the
“colleague in the freshness of youth” who had brought forward the
subject. He brought with him the highest thing that a new idea can
associate with: the breath of a new generation, of a youth that greets
all new ideas with a smiling courage. Behind this was the thought of
Darwin himself, a wave that swept away all dams.
The speech was as clear as crystal, and is still useful as an
introduction to the Darwinian question. He at once strikes the greatest
and the dominant note. Darwin means a new philosophy. All organisms
descend from a few primitive forms, possibly from one; and man is one of
these organisms. What Darwin had merely hinted in his concluding
passage, what the aged Bronn had excluded altogether from his
translation as too dangerous, was now set forth emphatically in the very
beginning of his speech. “As regards man himself, if we are consistent
we must recognise his immediate ancestors in ape-like mammals; earlier
still in kangaroo-like marsupials; beyond these, in the secondary
period, in lizard-like reptiles; and finally, at a yet earlier stage,
the primary period, in lowly organised fishes.”
There is something monumental in this passage, as in the previous
confession of Darwinism in the _Monograph on the Radiolaria_. Others may
have come to similar conclusions at the time on reading Darwin’s work.
Here we have the profession made at the psychological moment, a
trumpet-blast that sent its thrilling alarm from the threshold of a new
age, for friend or foe to hear. The speech gives a slightly exaggerated
account of the struggle that already existed. All was in confusion.
Science was breaking up into two camps. On the one side evolution and
progress, on the other the creation and immutability of species. Already
there are distinguished leaders of science in favour of evolution. It is
time to discuss the matter in full publicity—and the thing is done.
There was, let me say parenthetically, on the Continent at least no
question at that time of this clear division, or even of a serious
agitation. It was partly this speech, together with Haeckel’s next work,
that was to bring it about. To the highest authorities the subject
seemed to be below the level of discussion. We must recall a passage
that the Professor of Zoology at Göttingen, Keferstein, had written a
year before in the _Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeiger_. “It gives great
satisfaction to the earnest scientific worker,” we read, “to see a man
like Agassiz, with an authority based on the finest zoological works,
reject unreservedly a theory [Darwin’s] that would discredit the whole
work of classifiers for a century, and to see that the views built up by
several generations and the general consent of humanity hold a stronger
position than the views of a single individual, however eloquently they
may be stated.” There is no idea in this of two regular camps of
scientists. Humanity is adduced as the one party; against it stands the
anarchist, trying to blow up the work of centuries, Darwin. But that
gave no concern to the young orator; he saw a whole decade of success in
the first attack.
He rolled off geology. Cuvier’s theory of catastrophes, Linné’s belief
in the immutability of species—all a purely theological cosmogony. The
“philosophical theory of evolution” rises behind it like a Mene Tekel
Pharshim.
All living things, including those of past geological epochs, form one
great _genealogical tree_. The word, the new leading word for zoology
and botany, comes out with a flash. What is the system that has been
awaited so long? It is the genealogical tree of life on our planet. Its
roots lie deep in the remote past. “The thousands of green leaves on the
tree that clothe the younger and fresher twigs, and differ in their
height and breadth from the trunk, correspond to the living species of
animals and plants; these are the more advanced, the further they are
removed from the primeval stem. The withered and faded leaves, that we
see on the older and dead twigs, represent the many extinct species that
dwelt on the earth in earlier geological ages, and come closer to the
primeval simple stem-form, the more remote they are from us.”
This was the great new idea for science to work upon. Paleontology, the
science of past life, found at last a common task with botany and
zoology. Haeckel’s own programme for decades was unfolded. This phrase,
too, was a birth-hour. In all the struggle that has followed as to the
“how” of evolution this figure of the tree with the verdant branches as
the new field of zoological and botanical work, and the withered
branches for the paleontologist, has never been abandoned. A symbol from
the living world itself, the branching tree, had at last taken a
decisive place in the science and the classification of living things.
With splendid clearness the speech then enumerates the Darwinian
principles: variation, heredity, the struggle for life, selection, and
adaptation. A vast duration is claimed for the geological epochs in the
sense of Lyell; and it is pointed out that there is a progressive
advance of forms throughout these periods. Special stress is laid on the
ever-advancing, ever-uplifting element in evolution. Man is again
introduced into the subject. He has “evolved” from the brutality of the
animal. Language itself has been naturally “developed.” (What a shrewd
perspective in such a brief phrase! How the philologists would stare!)
So the “law of advance” traverses the whole field of culture. A fiery
passage follows: “Reaction in political, social, moral, and scientific
life, such as the selfish efforts of priests and despots have brought
about at every period of history,” cannot permanently hinder this
advance. The “advance” is “a law of nature,” and “neither the weapons of
the tyrant nor the anathemas of the priest can ever suppress it.” We
hear again the older Sethe thundering his intrepid reply: “You will have
to shoot the law first.”
At the close he glances briefly at the difficulties the theory presents.
We must regard even the first beginnings of life as the outcome of
“evolution.” Naturally. Darwin’s God has no use for this prophet. But
how shall we conceive it? Was the thing that first developed from the
inorganic “a simple cell, such a being as those that now exist in such
numbers as independent beings on the ambiguous frontier of the animal
and vegetal worlds?” Or was it a particle of plasm merely, “like certain
amœboid organisms that do not seem to have attained yet the organisation
of a cell”? Again the simple question contained a whole programme.
Schleiden had first shown in 1838 that the body of any plant can be
dissolved into tiny living corpuscles, which he called “cells,” because
they often had the appearance of a filled honeycomb. A year later
Schwann proved, in Johannes Müller’s laboratory, that the higher animal
also is a product of these cells. The cell was recognised as the living
unit that composed the oak and the rose, the elephant and the worm. Man
himself, in fine, was but a pyramid of these cells—or, to speak more
accurately (as each cell has its own life), an immense community of
cells, a cell-state.
Virchow had, as we saw, laid the greatest stress on this last and most
important deduction from the cell-theory a short time before. 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. The
genealogical tree of the animals and plants must at once be drawn up in
the form of a genealogical tree of the cell. The cells had combined to
form higher and higher communities, and each higher species of animal or
plant was in reality one of these social constructions. But this
complexity was only found in the upper branches. The lower we descend,
the simpler we find organisms. The lowest forms of life represent
cruder, simpler, and more primitive cell-structures. And the final
conclusion was that all the cell-communities or states must have been
evolved from unattached individuals whose whole body consisted of a
single cell. We cannot strictly call these lowest forms of life either
animals or plants; they can only be likened to the single cell. Though
Haeckel himself did not know it at the time, all his pretty radiolaria
at Messina belonged to this category. The whole swarm of bacilli and
bacteria fell into this world of the “unicellulars.” Haeckel’s words
threw a brilliant light on the question. Not only the simplest forms of
life are unicellulars; the primitive forms also were. 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.
The conclusion of the speech greets Darwin as the Newton of the organic
world, a phrase that has often been repeated since.
* * * * *
Let us turn over a few pages more in the faded record of the sitting.
Fourteen years later he would speak again at a scientific congress, and
speak on Darwinism. He would then put it forward no longer as a hope but
a fulfilment, of which he showed one glittering facet. And no other than
Rudolf Virchow, his former teacher, would oppose him and deliver his
famous speech on the freedom of science in the modern State and its
abuse by Darwin’s followers. This was at Munich in 1877. The least of
his hearers would remember that Virchow had spoken, like Haeckel, at
Stettin fourteen years previously. But we must understand the
thirty-sixth speech if we are to understand the thirty-seventh.
It was the second sitting, on September 22nd. Virchow spoke on “the
alleged materialism of modern science.” The subject was not provoked by
Haeckel, but by Schleiden, the botanist, the parent of the cell-theory.
The controversy over materialism had raged furiously for many years. We
need only mention Büchner (whose _Force and Matter_ appeared in 1855)
and Carl Vogt. There was an element of necessity, but a good deal of
superficiality in the controversy, as it was then conducted. Friedrich
Albert Lange has given us a masterly history of it. At this moment it
was particularly instructive to point out the difference between general
philosophical skirmishing with words and a really able piece of work
that, though it had a technical look, suddenly added a new province to
philosophy on which every doubting Thomas could lay his hands. However,
Schleiden had not advanced. Curiously enough, he, the first discoverer
of the cell, attacked Virchow’s theory of man as a cell-state as a
typical materialist extravagance.
He had published a heated essay, and Virchow defended himself. He gave
such a remarkable and characteristic expression of his inmost feelings
that it is worth while disinterring it. It is a very rare thing for a
thoughtful man to give a natural-philosophical speech that begins with
crystalline clearness of logic and then makes a most curious _salto
mortale_ at the critical point.
[Illustration:
ERNST HAECKEL, 1880.
_Reproduced from the Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte._
]
He opens with a vigorous protest that there can be no quarrel about
the materialism of science with the “spiritual” and the
“privately-orthodox.” Such people must regard all investigation of
“this world” as aimless. The only thing of value for them is “the next
world”; the best attitude towards _this_ life is as crass an ignorance
as possible, and so all science is worthless. The words are so sharp
that he was interrupted and had to explain that he was not attacking
anybody personally. He was only speaking “with the candour of a
scientific worker, who is in the habit of calling things by their
proper names.” (At this point there was some applause.) Hence he is
not speaking of materialism, he says, on that account, but because of
certain objections from men of science, who said that philosophic
speculation led us out of our way. Schleiden had branded the theory of
man as a cell-state, the conception of man as, not an absolute, but a
federal unity, as materialism. But this conception is not a
philosophical theory at all; it is a fact. It is a piece of scientific
truth, like the law of gravitation. He recurred to the old and
often-quoted definition: the kind of research that brings such facts
to light has nothing whatever to do with philosophy. On the other
hand, “materialism,” in so far as it expresses a general theory of the
world, is a philosophy. Hence the simple investigation of facts as
such can neither be dubbed materialistic nor said to have a
philosophic tinge.
There are many objections to this strict delimitation of the provinces
of the human mind, as Virchow lays it down in the old style. It is true
that materialism is a real philosophy, especially in the form current at
the time and given to it by Vogt and Büchner. But it is a question
whether we see, observe, or investigate at all, if we completely exclude
philosophy; whether the philosophic thought can be really pumped out of
even the most rigorous and exact “observation of facts,” like air in the
air-pump; whether there are any such things as purely objective “facts”
in this sense in any human brain. And it is also a question whether the
facts, however objectively we regard them, do not arrange themselves,
when they are numerous, in logical series, which force us to draw
conclusions as to the unknown by the very laws of probability; in other
words, whether they do not always produce a “philosophy” in the long
run. However, these questions are all well within the pure atmosphere of
science. It is Virchow’s practical conclusions that are interesting; and
he goes on to draw them freely.
The man of science gives us no dogmatic philosophy of any kind, but
facts. But for these facts and for the research that leads to them he
must have an _absolutely free_ path. No power can legitimately stand in
his way that does not offer him more of what he regards as his
palladium—facts. And, curiously enough, when we think of later events,
the illustration that Virchow takes in 1863 to enforce this is—the
Darwinism that Haeckel had just put before them.
Haeckel and Virchow were friendly colleagues at the time. We have
already said that Haeckel was Virchow’s assistant at Würtzburg. Not only
as a man, but especially as a scientist, Virchow was then (and long
afterwards) greatly admired by him. The idea of the cell-state got into
his blood; it was one of the bases on which he built up the Darwinian
theory. Though he had never recognised this distinction between the mere
investigation of facts and philosophic reflection on them, he respected
Virchow as a master of methodological education. What was “method” at
the bottom but philosophy! Was not the method that expressly excluded
“miracles,” that sought always the natural law and the causal connection
and the continuous series, a “philosophy”? This was the only method
taught under Virchow as long as Haeckel worked with him. At the time the
divergence of their ideas was not shown more openly. The one called
“philosophy” what the other said was “the purely objective method of
investigating the truth.” The figure of Pilate rises up behind the
dilemma with his question: “What is truth?”
However, Virchow takes Darwinism by way of an example of which he
approves, a point that seems to be established in the province of pure
facts. In the Munich speech of 1877 there are polite references to “Herr
Haeckel.” “As Herr Haeckel says.” “As Herr Haeckel supposes.” At Stettin
we find Herr Haeckel described as “my friend Haeckel,” with whom “I
quite agree,” &c. Haeckel himself, by the way, was still convinced—in
his essay _On the Generation of Waves in Living Particles_—two years
before the schismatic Council of 1877 that Virchow had had a decisive
influence on his own Darwinian career. “If I have contributed anything
myself in an elementary way to the building-up of the idea of evolution,
I owe it for the most part to the cellular-biological views with which
Virchow’s teaching penetrated me twenty years ago.” “As Herr Haeckel
supposes,” was the cool repayment of this sincere expression of
gratitude. However, that is another matter. Let us return to Stettin. We
read, where “my friend Haeckel” comes in, that he has shown how
scientific research (the pure investigation of facts without the least
tincture of philosophy) has gone on to deal with “the great question of
the creation of man.” It is merely conceded that there are still certain
small outstanding difficulties, as, for instance, at the root of the
genealogical tree. According to Darwin it is conceivable that there were
four or five primitive forms of life. Haeckel is inclined to restrict
them to a single stem-cell. It seems to him (Virchow) that there may
have been a number of different beginnings of life. We have here the
opening of the controversy as to the monophyletic (from one root only)
or polyphyletic (from several roots) development of life, which is still
unsettled as far as the commencement of life is concerned, but a very
secondary question. It would be well if there had never been any more
serious difference between Haeckel and Virchow. The speaker himself
thinks it an unimportant matter beside the great question of freedom for
scientific inquiry. One thing is as clear to him as it is to Haeckel.
The biblical dogma of creation has broken down. It is impossible to take
seriously any longer the breathing of the breath of life into a lump of
clay, if these Darwinian ideas are sound. Once it is fully proved that
man descends from the ape, “no tradition in the world will ever suppress
the fact.” Scientific inquiry alone can correct itself. And what it
holds to be established must be respected beyond its frontiers as well.
What does he mean by “beyond its frontiers”? He means, as he makes it
clear here, the same as Haeckel himself. “Church and State,” he says,
must “reconcile themselves to the fact that with the advance of science
certain changes are bound to take place in the general ideas and beliefs
from which we build up our highest conceptions, and that no impediment
must be put in the way of these changes; in fact, the far-seeing
Government and the open-minded Church will always assimilate these
advancing and developing ideas and make them fruitful.” What more do we
want?
If this were the conclusion of Virchow’s speech, it would be merely a
confirmation of Haeckel’s—the kind of support that the older worker can
give to ardent youth, though on different grounds. But the cloven foot
has still to peep out. I believe that, in the pure struggle of ideas, we
can determine here, in 1863, precisely the point where Virchow
falls—falls into a line that has nothing in common with the ideal
struggle of the really free and liberating thought of humanity. We come
to the great _salto mortale_, which one must see from 1863 onward in
order to understand the Virchow of 1877.
The passage is the more interesting as it refers to one of the chief
stages in the development of Haeckel’s mind. The conception of man as a
cell-state, established by Virchow in so masterly a fashion, involved a
very curious conclusion. This conclusion, however we take it, came so
close to the roots of every philosophy that it justified Schleiden to
some extent when he protested that the whole cell-state theory was a
philosophical element.
If the human body is composed of millions of cells; if all the processes
and functions, the whole life of the body in Virchow’s sense, are merely
the sum of the vital processes and functions of these millions of
individual cells; is not what we call “the soul” really the product of
the millions upon millions of separate souls of these cells? Is not
man’s soul merely the state-soul, the general spirit of this gigantic
complex of tiny cell-souls? The lowest living things we spoke of, which
consist of a single cell, showed unmistakable signs of having a psychic
life. There was nothing to prevent us from thinking that in the
combination of these various cells into communities each of them brought
with it its little psychic individuality. And just as the individual
bodies of the cells combined externally to form the new individual of
the human body, so the cell-souls would enter into a spiritual
combination to form the new psychic individuality of the human mind. I
say there was nothing to prevent us from thinking this, in the line of
deductions from the plain principles of the cell-state theory which
Virchow claimed to be a naked “fact.” Philosophically, however, an
immense number of questions, problems, doubts, and hopes lurked behind
it. The whole conception of individuality took on a new aspect. First,
in the material sense; the individual human being seemed to be, bodily,
only the connecting bracket, as it were, of countless deeper
individuals, the cells. But it was more significant on the spiritual
side. The individual human soul could be analysed into millions of
smaller psychic individualities, the cell-souls, of which it was the
sum. The unified ego, the consciousness of self and unity of the psychic
clamp, “man,” remained as the connection of all the cell-souls. A ray of
light was thrown on the deep mystery of the _origin_ of individualities,
material and spiritual. Haeckel devoted himself afterwards to the
question with all his energy. But at the time it was Virchow who,
unconsciously enough, started the great wave that welled up from the
depths of his theory.
He had marked out his path very clearly in the first part of his speech.
Scientific research collects facts. It puts them before us without any
reference to philosophy. The less philosophy there is in the
investigation of facts the better. But the other side of the matter is
that no power in heaven or on earth has anything to say as regards its
work on things that it holds to be facts. The only possible logical
conclusion from this, with reference to the question of the cell-soul,
was for the investigator of facts to say: Even in respect of the psychic
life we go our way and look neither to right nor left, whatever
conclusions and assumptions the philosopher makes. Virchow acted very
differently.
He first grants that this dissolution of man into a federal unity of
countless cells _must_ somehow affect the “unified soul.” We are
compelled “to set up a plurality even in the psychic life.” He has
reached the limit of his radicalism. We expect him to continue: Hence,
as in the case of the Mosaic story of creation, of Darwinism, of the
cell-theory as a whole, so here we men of science go our way unmoved;
even if the whole of the teaching that has hitherto prevailed in
philosophy and theology in regard to the soul breaks down, we simply go
our way, and do not ask anybody’s permission. This he does not do. Take
one step further, he says, and we “can easily believe that it is
necessary to split up our whole psychic life in this way and ascribe a
soul to each individual cell.” Haeckel believed a little later that this
_was_ necessary; that the most rigorous logic compelled us to do it.
But, says Virchow suddenly, we must protest most vigorously against
this. This deduction from the cell-state theory reaches a point where
“science is incompetent,” namely, “the facts of consciousness.” Taboo!
The path of the scientific inquirer is barricaded. What follows rests on
no scientific grounds, but is a sort of confession. Up to the present
natural science has not been able to say anything as to the real nature,
the locality, and the ground of consciousness. “Hence I have always said
that it is wrong to refuse to recognise the peculiar character of these
facts of consciousness that dominate our whole higher life, and to yield
to the personal craving to bring these facts of consciousness into
accord with an independent soul, a spiritual force, and let the
individual formulate his religious feeling according to his conscience
and disposition. That is, I think, the point where science makes its
compromise with the Churches, recognising that this is a province that
each can survey as he will, either putting his own interpretation on it
or accepting the traditional ideas; and it must be sacred to others.”
The direction of the logic is clear enough. The application of the
cell-state theory to psychic life must lead to the problem of
consciousness. But we must not follow it, because science has never yet
penetrated into this province. It is the province of peaceful compromise
with “the Church,” and we must respect it.
It seems to me that the explanation is clear. The whole field of
conflict that Haeckel found _within_ the science of his time is opened
out, though Virchow was by no means disposed at that time to take
Darwinism as an example of the thing to be avoided, as he did at Munich
fourteen years afterwards. The kind of scientific inquiry that Virchow
advocated is what was called “exact” at a later period. It kept clear of
all philosophical speculation, and repeated over and over again that it
was only concerned with facts. It had, however, another card to
play—peace with “the Churches.”
Philosophy was shunned in order to leave a free field for the Churches
to build in. Then the exact scientist took his hat and said, I am afraid
I am incompetent, and the philosopher is incompetent, to do anything
here; let the Church take the vacant chair, with my compliments. No
philosophy: on this we will make war to the knife. This is “a point
where science makes its compromise with the Churches.” No one can
understand Haeckel’s career who does not grasp this antithesis. The
contrast between Haeckel and Virchow, known to all the world since 1877,
is clearly indicated. Virchow’s speech in 1877 is obscure. We must go
back to 1863 to get behind the veil—the veil that hides Virchow, that is
to say, the most prominent representative of the hostility to Haeckel.
We cannot understand otherwise how this yawning gulf came about between
Haeckel’s ideas and a school that professed to follow “exact” research.
Haeckel was building up a natural philosophy which, starting from the
solid foundation of scientific research and its results, went on to
further, and greater, and more far-reaching issues, that could not be
seen, but could be reached philosophically by more or less happy
deductions from the scientific data. It might or might not have lasting
value in points of detail. He was subject to the law of evolution. He
worked with analogy, and the things he compared thereto were ever
changing. It was all the same to him. In any case the dawning glimmer of
the perfect light broadened out and lit up vague outlines even in the
cloud-wreathed unknown. The others worked in such a way as to leave
beside them provinces of a virgin whiteness, untouched by thought or
logic. At times they slipped into these provinces, and celebrated their
reconciliation-festival with “the Churches.” The layman continued to
think that the Churches wielded an absolute authority; that the
scientist, abandoning his natural philosophy, came to pay them tribute.
This situation has done infinite mischief, more than the wildest and
even obviously perverse philosophy ever did. It put the scientist in the
position of a tolerated vassal in the world of thought—the world that
the Churches had held in chains for ages. Woe to the man who ventured to
discuss “consciousness”! Not because science had but the slender
proportions of a pioneer in that field, and because there was a danger
of it making great mistakes with its natural philosophy. No, but because
the white neutral field began here that we had agreed to respect—we
“exact” scientists and “the Churches.” This was the real reason why
Virchow and so many others who advocated the strict investigation of
facts had forfeited the right to oppose Haeckel’s bolder natural
philosophy and its conclusion—will have forfeited the right, at least,
in the judgment of a future and more impartial generation. They did not
oppose him on the lines of an equal zeal for the truth, but on much
lower and reactionary lines. Their concern was not for the absolute
triumph of truth, but for a compromise with certain forces in public
life whose supremacy was not grounded on logic but on inherited external
power. It required a certain amount of diplomatic shrewdness to enter
into this compromise, in view of the practical power of those forces.
Haeckel never had this “shrewdness.” We grant that. 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.
The darkest cloud that hung menacingly on the horizon of Darwinism came
from this quarter. At the moment we are dealing with it did not cause
much concern. This early Darwinism thrilled with optimism as with the
magic of spring. Haeckel had to speak once more in the course of the
Congress. The geologist, Otto Volger, made a polite but energetic
protest against the new theory in the final sitting. It was a curious
connection of things that brought Volger into such a position.
Volger is the man who saved for Germany the venerable Goethe-house at
Frankfort-on-the-Main. The Free German Chapter received it from him as a
gift. The action has nothing to do with geology, but it stands in the
annals of culture. Thus the shadow of Goethe came to Stettin, to be
present at the open birth of German Darwinism—Goethe, who had once stood
on the very brink of the evolutionary ideas. And the man who brought him
was a geologist who felt moved to attack the ideas of Darwin and
Haeckel!
No part of science became in the succeeding decades so fruitful for
Darwinistic purposes as geology. It might very well be called a
continuous argument for Darwin; from the little slab of Solenhofen
Jurassic schist that yielded, in 1861, the first impression of the
archeopteryx, the real connecting link between the lizard and the bird,
to the incomparable discoveries of Othniel Marsh, Cope, and Ameghino in
America, which put whole sections of the genealogical tree of the
mammals before us, on to the skull and thighbone of the ape-man
(pithecanthropus) of Java, found by Eugen Dubois, which brings so
vividly home to us the transition from the gibbon to man. But, as if it
had been scared away by the new idea of evolution and its demand for
proof, the most and the best of this material was not forthcoming until
after Darwin was pretty firmly established everywhere. At the earlier
date we are dealing with it was quite possible for a geologist to play
the sceptic with a shadow of justification. We need not go into the
point to-day. It is ancient history. But there is an incidental point in
Volger’s criticism and the reply it provoked from Haeckel that calls for
notice.
Volger declared that Darwinism in general was an unsupported hypothesis,
but he made a concession. The species of animals and plants need not be
absolutely unchangeable. The only thing that is impossible is a
continuous upward direction in evolution. All the groups of living
things, even the highest, may have been present together from the
earliest days. Local changes in the distribution of land and water, &c.,
must have brought about a certain amount of variation in life-forms. But
after brief divergences all would return to the original type. The
proper symbol of the story of life is the wave that rises out of the sea
and sinks back into it. There was no such thing as a steady advance, a
wave that never sank back into the water. The real image of human life
is the analogy of its obvious development: youth, maturity, then old age
and back once more. The speaker urged in plausible terms that this
conception retained the idea of an “eternal becoming,” which is better
than a rigid fulfilment. As if an eternally advancing evolution did not
include this “eternal becoming.” Haeckel spoke immediately after Volger.
He not only attacked the weak points of the geologist, but went on to
the deeper philosophic question. The notion of a “perennial circular
movement” is “inconsistent with all the facts of human history.” “If we
appeal to sentiment, I must say that this circular theory has no
attraction for me, whereas the Darwinian idea of a progressive evolution
seems the only one consistent with the nature of man.” The story of the
animals and plants is subject to “the law of progress” just as much as
human history.
In these words of Haeckel’s we have a clear indication of the optimistic
temper of Darwinism at the time. They touch a question of fundamental
importance for the value of the new theory: the question whether, in
spite of all it destroyed, in spite of its disseverance from the idea of
God, it brought with it a new ground of conciliation, a conviction of
the ever-advancing growth of the world and ever greater achievements?
God was replaced by natural law. There was no longer any “design” beyond
the simple and unchanging course of natural laws. Well, what were these
natural laws going to do for us? Were they giving us a world that would
become more and more harmonious, that was on the whole an advancing
organism, that would be an increasing embodiment of God—the God within
nature, not without, God at the end of things, after æons of worlds that
seemed to break up like the individual in the struggle for existence,
yet were eternal in the mighty essence that was tossed on from world to
world like a grain of dust and was made the starting-point of infinitely
new and more complex movements? Or—was the work of these natural laws
but a ceaseless poking and thrusting and bubble-blowing without any
inner meaning? Was it the play of waves that rise and fall, and rise and
fall again, in the ocean, an eternal melting into smoke and nothingness?
Was the whole of “evolution” an absolutely meaningless play of
innumerable tendencies, not one of which would ever come to anything?
This note also was found in the first melody. Something would have been
lacking if it had not been struck. Here again there could be a parting
of ways, not only in the crowd, but amongst the thoughtful. The whole
struggle of optimism and pessimism might be dragged in. At all events,
the problem was bound to be pointed out from the start.
When Volger, not a bad opponent at the bottom, and Haeckel had made
their speeches, indicating at once certain lasting antitheses within the
subtle philosophy of Darwinism, Virchow closes the debates and the
Congress with a most dangerous blessing. In essentials he is once more
on the side of Haeckel. He suggests that geology should be allowed to
mature a little before final judgment is passed. The strongest evidence
for evolution is found in embryology (the science of the embryonic forms
and uterine development of living species of animals). The prophecy was
fulfilled, if ever prophecy was, and in Haeckel’s own most particular
field of work. But, in fine—he returns to his point—the main thing is
the “pursuit of truth.” And since “the most earnest ecclesiastical
teachers” declared that “God is truth,” he could not do better than
close with a reminder (I quote him _verbatim_) of “the compromise that
may be effected between science and the Church.” Translated into plain
language, that means: My dear children, fight it out as you will, but
respect the Church always as the main thing, and you will do well,
however much you differ. Thus closed this remarkable Scientific
Congress—as quietly as a bomb that smokes noiselessly, like a whiff from
a tobacco pipe. But one day it will burst.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VI
THE “GENERAL MORPHOLOGY”
The speech at the Scientific Congress in 1863 was the first open
confession that Haeckel felt bound to make. But the real work for the
new ideas began on his return to Jena. Nothing was further from
Haeckel’s thoughts at that time than the idea of becoming merely the
populariser of Darwinism in Germany. He has often been spoken of since
in lay circles as such. It is entirely wrong. He had the courage to
recognise his debt whenever he contracted one; and certainly Darwin
supplied the groundwork of his colour-scheme. But he was much too
independent and individual in his nature not to take the axe in his own
hand at once and begin to hew away himself.
Darwin had strengthened his book with a large amount of the best
material that zoology and botany could supply. But there was something
else to be done: a theoretical treatment of a general character with
cleverly grouped illustrations from the facts already provided by two
sciences, and to reconstruct these sciences from their foundations on
the basis of the new theory. At that time Haeckel was doing an
incredible amount of work, with body and mind. He had an iron
constitution. In the year of the Stettin speech he won a laurel crown at
the Leipsic athletic festival for the long jump, with a leap of twenty
feet. His physical strength seemed so inexhaustible that his host,
Engelmann, put a pair of heavy iron dumb-bells in his bed, in case he
should want to take exercise during the night. He had a proportionate
strength of mind. Everything seemed to promise very well for the next
few years, so that he could devote his whole health and strength to the
great task of his life. His teaching did not give him very much trouble
in a small university like Jena, that was only just beginning to have a
scientific name. The happiness of his home life, with a highly gifted
woman who shared all his ideas with the freshness of youth, began to
chain the restless wanderer with pleasant bonds to his place. He, of
course, expected to have his sea-holiday in the old way for the study of
his little marine treasures, but otherwise he remained quietly in the
valley of the Saale. The warmth of genial and most stimulating
friendships gathered about his life. With his comfortable material
position he set to work on his great task under the best auspices.
He would have had at the start material enough to work upon without
Darwin. From Müller’s time he still had another special class of
material, similar to the radiolaria, the medusæ.
The ship cuts through the ocean. It rises like a lofty fortress from the
illimitable blue plain, with the white clouds on the far horizon. No
land has been in sight for days. Yesterday a poor wind-borne butterfly
rested on the deck. To-day it is gone, and all is sea. Then they
suddenly appear silently in the blue mirror: mysterious discs, red as
the anemones on a Roman meadow in spring, golden as the autumn leaves on
a dark pond in the park, then blue, like a lighter blue floating on the
general azure. They are the medusæ. At one time the ship sails through a
whole swarm of them—thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, a
veritable milky way of coloured stars. On the next day they have all
gone. No inhabitant of the ocean seems to be so close to it as this
creature. The whole animal is only a shade more substantial than the
water. You take it out, and try to catch hold of it. It stings your hand
like a nettle: that is its one weapon. But it is already destroyed,
melted away, a formless nothing. You put it on a piece of
blotting-paper, and it dries up into the spectral outline of a shadow, a
tiny “fat-spot,” summary of its whole existence.
Yet this soap-bubble of the water is a real animal. Its transparent body
is shaped like a bell, and moves through the water by regular
contraction and expansion, like the lung in breathing. Where the clapper
of the bell should be, we find a stomach, with a mouth for eating,
hanging down from the curved upper part. At the edge of the curved
surface are many long fibrils that close on the approaching prey and
paralyse it by their sting. Then it thrusts it into its mouth and
swallows the object into the stomach. The medusa is, of course, a very
lowly creature, but it is much more advanced in organisation than the
tiny radiolarian. The radiolarian consists of a single cell. The medusa
is a cell-state, a community of countless cells with a division of
labour amongst them. Some of the cells form the wall of the bell, some
the stinging threads, some the devouring and digesting stomach. In this
the medusa comes nearer to man than the radiolarian. Some of the cells
see to the reproduction of the medusa. Ova and spermatozoa are detached
from the cell-community of the medusa’s body, blend together, and thus
form the germ of a new medusa. In most cases the process is curious
enough. From the germ-cell we get at first, not a real medusa, but a
polyp that attaches itself to the ground, a little creature that may be
remotely compared to the pretty water-lilies that meet the eye in an
aquarium. Then the polyp produces something like a plant that grows
buds, the real medusæ; it may produce these out of its substance as
buds, and they then float away like detached flowers, or (in other
species) it may gradually change itself into a chain of medusæ, of which
the uppermost is detached first, then the next, and so on.
Since this peculiar method of reproduction became known, in the thirties
or forties, the medusæ were regarded as amongst the most interesting
objects in the whole of zoology. They offered an extremely difficult
task to the investigator who would care to take up the study of them.
When Haeckel was with Johannes Müller in Heligoland in 1854 he made
acquaintance with them for the first time. His artistic eye was caught
with their beauty, as it was afterwards with the radiolaria. “Never
shall I forget,” he says, “the delight with which, as a student of
twenty years I gazed on the first _Tiara_ and _Irene_ [species of
medusæ], and the first _Chrysaora_ and _Cyanea_, and endeavoured to
reproduce their beautiful forms and colours.” His predilection for the
medusæ never disappeared. At Nice in 1856 he met them again in the
Mediterranean. Gegenbaur’s _Sketch of a Classification of the Medusæ_
provided his studies with a starting-point, just as Müller’s writings
did afterwards for the radiolaria. At Naples and Messina he completed
his mastery of them. When he had done with the radiolaria for the time
after publishing the great monograph of 1862, the next task that loomed
up on his horizon was the need for a “monograph on the medusæ.” It would
be a long time, however, before he could complete the work in any
fulness. A work of Agassiz that purported to do it, but, in his opinion,
only confused the subject—he disliked both the Agassizs, father and son,
and the father became one of his bitterest opponents on the Darwinian
question—gave him a negative impulse to the study. He thought it would
be best to deal with one family of the medusæ after another in separate
monographs, as time permitted. The first of these essays appeared in
1864 and 1865, and dealt with what are known as the “snouted-medusæ”
(_geryonidæ_). The first volume of the complete work was not published
until fourteen years afterwards. If Haeckel had decided to work as a
specialist he would have had material enough here to occupy him fully
throughout the whole of the sixties, and even longer. The keen student
of the radiolaria would be succeeded by the equally keen student of the
medusæ. More folio volumes would have accumulated, with beautiful
plates, such as only the technical student of zoology ever takes out of
the library. His name, like that of his friend Gegenbaur almost, would
never have reached the crowd.
It was the influence of Darwin that prevented this. His attention was
turned in another direction, and we begin to realise the full greatness
of his power when we remember that he nevertheless continued with
unfailing quality to publish such detailed studies as those on the
medusæ.
Darwinian ideas were fermenting intensely in his mind at that time. The
most audacious practical and theoretical problems arose from the
fundamental theory, and forced themselves on him at every moment. A
great deal was sketched in outline in the Stettin speech, but the
serious scientific work would have to be begun on his return to Jena, in
his view. First, he thought, two features of Darwin’s system must be
given a completely new and original complexion. Firstly, the bottom of
the tree, where life begins. Secondly, the crown of all terrestrial
evolution: the manner in which man is connected with the tree. It was
his philosophic vein that settled both points, the philosophy of unity
that sought to replace God by natural development, both below and above,
in regard to the primitive cell and in regard to man. But the way in
which he set about it was very far removed from all conventional
philosophy. The whole rigour of his professional zoology found
expression in it. And that was really the novelty of it. The same
conclusions might have been drawn by any dozen ordinary philosophers,
once they got on the right track. Even they could see that, if two and
two are four, one and one are two, and three times three nine. Haeckel
went very differently, and much more profoundly, to work.
[Illustration:
ERNST HAECKEL, 1890.
_From a relief-portrait modelled by Kopf, of Rome._
]
As an old pupil of Virchow’s he applies the cell-theory to Darwinism—in
the lower stage. The first living things, the roots of the great tree of
life, consisted of a single cell. The logic of the cell-theory itself
went as far as this. But is the individual cell the simplest of all
living forms? Here there was a long-standing controversy as to
definitions. At first the cell was regarded literally as a kind of
chamber, like the cell in the honeycomb. Then it was found that the
jelly-like, mobile matter within the cell-chamber was the essential
element, the vehicle of life. Finally, it was possible to conceive this
slimy substance without any firm membrane, without a chamber. Inside it,
however, there was always (it was then thought) a thick and hard
substance, the nucleus. If that was the fundamental and only really
essential form, the Darwinian primitive and initial type of all
terrestrial life must have been a similar drop of living matter with a
solid central nucleus, a nucleated individual cell.
How could we pass from this primitive cell to the “inorganic,” the
“lifeless,” the “dead,” the ordinary matter of stone, metal, and
crystal? Haeckel believed that it was possible to make a step in that
direction—not theoretically and philosophically, but practically—by
showing that there were still living things on the earth that did not
come up to the definition of a true cell, things that had not yet a
nucleus in their soft gelatinous body. He discovered a number of tiny
creatures that had a homogeneous particle of living matter for body, and
showed no trace of a nucleus. The nucleus seemed to be the first
beginning of an organ. It was altogether wanting in them.
To these most primitive of all living things he gave the name of
_monera_, or the absolutely “simple.”
In these investigations it is very difficult to determine whether one of
these tiny drops of plasm has a more or less transparent nucleus or not.
It has often been affirmed in later years that these monera of Haeckel’s
did not correspond to their description as living things without a
nucleus, or creatures that were below the level of the true cell. It is,
at all events, certain that there are to-day large numbers of the
unicellular beings known as the bacteria in which no nucleus has yet
been discovered by the most sceptical Thomas with the most powerful
microscopes and best technical appliances of our time. It is the same
with the chromacea (chroococci, oscillaria, nostoc-algæ), very lowly
primitive plants whose whole body consists of a globule or granule of
living plasm. However, here again the question is no longer of the first
importance, now that evolution is entirely and generally accepted. At
the time we are discussing the method chosen was all-important. Haeckel
drew no conclusions without a solid basis. He believed he could give
ocular proof of the existence of beings that were below the level of the
cell. It was clear, at all events, that research in this department was
only in its beginning, and could pour out wonder after wonder before the
world recovered from its first fright over Darwinism.
Then there was the other end of the system—man. Here again it was not
merely a question of concluding on philosophic grounds that man _must_
have descended from the lower animals. Huxley had dealt in England with
the question of man and the ape on the strict lines of zoology. He came
to the important conclusion that man differs _less_ zoologically from
the highest apes, the gorilla and chimpanzee, than they do from the
lowest apes. He proved his point by a technical study of skulls and
brains, not from abstract philosophical principles. It could be
demonstrated in the museum or zoological institute to any student with
some knowledge of anatomy as easily as the existence and position of any
particular bone in the skeleton. Haeckel went even further.
He constructed a genealogical tree stretching far below the apes. Next
to them came the lemurs. The lemur, the ghostly nocturnal inhabitant of
Madagascar, came from the Australian marsupial (kangaroo, &c.). The
marsupial came from the duck-bill; the duck-bill from the lizard; the
lizard from the salamander; the salamander from the dipneust or
mud-fish; this from the sturgeon or the shark, and the shark from the
lamprey. Below the lamprey, at the lowest limit of the vertebrate
kingdom, was the amphioxus (or lancelet). This must have come from the
worm—it was not at all clear how, at that time. And so the series ran on
down to the unicellular protozoa, the amœbæ and the monera.
The construction of this tree would have been impossible for one who had
not already done gigantic work. The whole of the new system of animals
and plants, conceived in the form of a genealogical tree, had first to
be sketched in outline. Then the narrower thread that led up to man, the
Ariadne-thread of God-Nature, would gradually come to light.
Both ends of the system, the lower one in the monera, the upper one in
man, were first thoroughly treated by him in 1865, and in part somewhat
later. His exhaustive _Monograph on the Monera_ was not published until
1868. Man’s genealogical tree was privately circulated at Jena in two
essays in October and November 1865. They were published in the
Virchow-Holtzendorff collection in 1868 (“The Origin and Genealogical
Tree of the Human Race”). But in both cases the substance of the work,
as an accumulation of facts, is much older. And this work was, of
course, only possible in connection with a number of further
conclusions: in regard to spontaneous generation, life and death, the
crystal and the cell, the mathematical form of organisms, the nature and
limits of individuality, the method of research, the new natural
philosophy, God, and so on.
It was an enormous programme, with a Paradisaic freshness. Everything
was new and great; and all came from one brain. There was only one man
with whom he discussed his ideas as they formed, Carl Gegenbaur, who has
undoubtedly had a great, if unconscious, influence on them. Haeckel’s
grateful recognition of Gegenbaur’s help in later years was endless and
touching. “Thou it was,” he writes to him a little later, “that led me
to begin my academic teaching at our beloved Jena six years ago, at the
Thuringian university in the heart of Germany, that has, like a beating
heart, sent out its living waves of freedom and alertness of mind over
Germany for three hundred years. At this nursery of German philosophy
and science, under the protection of a free State whose princely rulers
ever gave a refuge to free speech and have linked their names for ever
with the reform movement, the golden age of German poetry, I was able to
work in association with thee. Here we built up our common structure of
science in the happiest division of labour, teaching and learning
cordially from each other, in the very rooms in which Goethe began his
studies of ‘the morphology of organisms’ a half-century before, and
partly with the same scientific means, the germs of comparative and
philosophic science that he had scattered. We have shared with each
other as brothers the happiness and the sorrow that came in the hard
struggle for life, and our scientific efforts have been so intimately
blended and so mutually helpful, through our daily working and talking
together, that it would have been impossible for either of us to
determine the particular share of each in our spiritual communism. I can
only say in a general way that the little my restless and impulsive
youth could offer thee here and there is out of all proportion to the
enormous amount I have received from thee, eight years my senior, a more
experienced and mature man.”
Goethe stood behind the friends as the quiet _genius loci_, giving his
blessing to all who worked in his spirit on the old spot. Nor was the
place itself without influence. “Much,” Haeckel writes, “may have been
even the outcome of the common uplifting enjoyment of nature that was
afforded us by the artistic lines of the Jena hills, as they brought
before us once more at sunset the magic of the Calabrian mountains by
the colour-harmony of their purple and gold banks of cloud and their
violet shadows.”
“What are the hopes, what are the plans, that man, the creature of a
day, builds up?”
The words were written by a poet, in his fatal illness, at the spot
where the two strong spirits now worked. In the midst of all his hopes
and plans Haeckel was struck by a Niobe-shaft. On February 16th, 1864,
just on his thirtieth birthday, his wife, only in her twenty-ninth year,
in the full force of mind and of love, succumbed to blood-poisoning.
I turn to the thick volume of Haeckel’s _Monograph on the Medusæ_. Part
I.: “System of the Medusæ:” with an atlas of forty beautiful plates:
published by Gustav Fischer, of Jena, in 1879. Few people except
zoologists with a technical interest in it have ever opened this
voluminous work—why should they? It is a heavy work, with dry diagnoses.
The author seems to be far away from all general questions, if ever he
was, in the utter stillness of his study. This pure accumulation of
matter for truth’s sake does not reach the ear of the world. It lays up
material for remote days, before which the individual fades away; it is
merely catalogued material of the most technical character. Yet, as I
turn over the pages, I seem to see a little image from time to time that
is almost like the rose-red or golden-brown medusæ in the sterile,
illimitable ocean. In truth neither ocean nor book is sterile; but they
are grey and broad. And just as the swimming medusa gladdens me in the
one, so a little personal trait of the author does in the other. It is
in the choice of the Latin names. A little crown is woven that unites
æsthetics and science. I find splendid names, invented by the Professor,
on all sides. But I notice that his heart was in these things. He has
discovered new species of medusæ, and must christen them. As he turns
over his Latin or Greek lexicon a ray of humanity steals into the most
severe scientific soul at such moments. I read that a disco-medusa is
called the _Nausicaa phæacum_: “I observed the _Nausicaa phæacum_ in
April, 1877, at Corfu, on the shore of Phæaca, in the heart of the
Nausicaa.” A cyaneid is given the fine name of the _Melusina formosa_.
It is noted, with great regret, that “so fine and classic a name for a
medusa” as _Oceania_ must be struck out on scientific grounds. Amongst
descriptions of species in a severe scientific tongue that unnerves the
timid reader, amongst gonods, styles, perradial bundles of tentacles,
and ocellar bulbs, we find, _apropos_ of the medusa, _Lizzia
Elisabethæ_: “As Forbes dedicated the pretty genus _Lizzia blondina_ to
a ‘blond Elizabeth,’ I do the same, and wish to honour, not only St.
Elizabeth of Thuringia, but also the ‘blond Elizabeth’ of Immermann and
my own dear daughter Elizabeth.”
Then, in the middle of the large volume, we find the following passage
on page 189. A medusa is given the name of _Mitrocoma Annæ_. The name
was given at Villefranche, near Nice, in April, 1864 This medusa had “a
fairy-like appearance” to its discoverer; its tentacles hung down “like
a mass of blond hair!” A note to the name tells us that it was given “in
memory of my dear, never-to-be-forgotten wife, Anna Sethe. If it is
given to me to do something during my earthly pilgrimage for science and
humanity, I owe it for the most part to the blessed influence of my
gifted wife, who was torn from me by a premature end in 1864.” In the
_Art-forms in Nature_, Haeckel’s work of 1899, we find a medusa
_Desmonema Annasethe_ similarly—after thirty-five years—apostrophised:
“The specific name of this pretty disco-medusa, one of the most
beautiful and interesting of all the medusaæ, immortalises the memory of
Anna Sethe, the gifted and refined wife (born 1835, died 1864) to whom
the author of this work owes the happiest years of his life.”
If one would fathom the depths of human emotion one must reflect what
these words, in such a context, contain; it is the last gentle vibration
of a most deep inner experience breaking out into this prosaic,
scientific material. A medusa is a trivial, possibly a funny thing, to
the layman. The man of science looks deeper into it, and sees a
wonderful revelation of nature; the eye of Goethe’s God shines on him
from it. But when he has devoted years to the most careful study of it,
it assumes also a naïve individual interest for him, as the companion of
his solitary hours of observation in the heart of nature, far from all
the whirl and bustle of the world. Only the deepest and most intimate
feelings break out in such moments. And here they have left their
monument—in a Latin name that science will go on coldly entering in its
catalogues for ages to come. It seems to me that this simple fact tells
us more of the character of this true-hearted man, in whom nothing human
was lacking, than long narratives could.
* * * * *
When the aged Sethe saw the break-up in 1806 of the State of Prussia, in
the invulnerability of which he had believed as a gospel, he sought
refuge in the comfort of work. “I succeeded in benumbing my mind: I
experienced in myself that hard work is a soothing balsam, co-operating
with our tardy healing force.” The grandson, wounded in a more terrible
way and cut to the very heart, tried the same remedy.
Thirty years afterwards, when crowns were prepared and speeches
delivered in honour of Haeckel’s sixtieth birthday, when the whole of
Jena fêted him as their own, and the veil fell from his marble bust in
the Zoological Institute, to which seven hundred of the best known names
in German and foreign science had contributed, the hero of it all went
back to that dark hour. “I thought at the time that I could not survive
the blow, thought my life was closed, and purposed to bring together all
the new ideas that Darwin’s theory of evolution had evoked in me in a
last great work. That was the origin, amid bitter struggles, of the
_Generelle Morphologie_. It was written and printed in less than a year.
I lived the life of a hermit, gave myself barely three or four hours
sleep a day, and worked all day and half the night. My habits were so
ascetic that I really wonder I am alive and well before you to-day.”
In his hour of collapse Haeckel sat down and wrote “the book of his
life.” There were only two alternatives for a book written in such
circumstances. It would be either very bad or very good. When a young
man in his thirties throws himself into a great effort of this kind and
writes a work that he conceives as a testament—a work in which he will
speak for the last time, but will say everything—it is a desperate test
of all that he has done in his three decades of life and is about to
give to the world. In this case the test succeeded beyond all
expectation.
The _General Morphology of Organisms_[2] was published in 1866, with the
sub-title: “General elements of the science of organic forms,
mechanically grounded on the theory of descent as reformed by Charles
Darwin.” It consists of two thick volumes of small print, containing
more than 1,200 pages. The preface is dated September 14, 1866. It is
now one of the most important works in the whole mental output of the
second half of the nineteenth century. In respect of method of
scientific research it is a landmark by which we may characterise and
appraise the whole half-century. For general biological classification
it inaugurates a new epoch, as had been done fifty years before by
Cuvier, and again fifty years earlier by Linné. What it did for zoology
in the narrow sense was thirty years afterwards summed up in one phrase
by a writer of acknowledged competence, Richard Hertwig: “Few works have
done as much towards raising the intellectual level of zoology.” Among
Haeckel’s own achievements, great and varied as they are, this work
occupies the highest place. Setting aside certain special pieces of
research, and regarding him mainly as a man of great ideas, we find his
whole programme in this work. The _History of Creation_, that has taken
his name far and wide over the globe beyond the frontiers of zoology, is
only an extract from this work. He put his heart in it. The others are
only the improved blood-vessels of his system of ideas, partly
duplications, partly simplifications. I do not say this either in blind
admiration or in criticism, but as the expression of a plain fact.
Posterity will turn to this work when, either in hostility or in
sympathy, it wishes to appreciate Haeckel.[3]
Footnote 2:
This work of Professor Haeckel’s has not been translated into English.
[Trans.]
Footnote 3:
Professor Huxley described the _General Morphology_ as “one of the
greatest scientific works ever published.” [Trans.]
His contemporaries did not accept the work without difficulty. It came
out without noise, exerted a tremendous influence in a quiet way, and at
last disappeared altogether from the bookshops. It is still attacked,
but has never been refuted. At libraries one finds, as I know from
experience, that it is always “out,” and therefore must be read
continually. It is found occasionally at second-hand booksellers; an
antiquarian price running to five pounds and more is put on it, after
forty years’ active production on the part of its author. At present you
could count on your fingers the German works that have this distinction
of being highly priced and out of print. One such is Vischer’s
_Æsthetics_, and another is the first edition of Gottfried Keller’s
_Green Henry_. Keller had threatened any one who ever attempted to
republish this first edition (afterwards modified but not improved by
him) that their hand would not rest quietly in the grave. But the price
of the work went up amongst antiquarians. I feel, in speaking of
Haeckel’s _General Morphology_, that I am describing a book which has
become so rare that one must treat it as something new, a codex that is
only accessible to a few. It is certainly not known to the general
reader.
Let me endeavour in a few words to give a general idea of the chief
contents of the work.
All the intellectual forces that had had any influence upon Haeckel now
concentrated for a supreme achievement. First of these was Goethe, who
supplied the title, “Morphology.” In its simplest signification
morphology is merely “the science of forms.” If I take houses,
furniture, statues, fishes, flowers, crystals, &c., and only regard and
describe their forms, I am a morphologist in the literal sense of the
word. But when Goethe invented the term he sought to give it a more
restricted application, writing in the style of earlier days, but
clearly enough, at Jena in 1807. We have, he says, natural objects
before us, especially living objects. We try to penetrate the secrets of
their nature and their action. We are not merely observers, but
philosophers. It is from this point of view that we approach the
subject. It appears to us that the best way to proceed is to separate
the various parts. Such a procedure seems calculated to take us very
far. Chemistry and anatomy are instances of this analytic kind of
research, and both are greatly esteemed and successful. But this method
has its limitations. “We can easily break up the living thing into its
elements, but we cannot put these together again and restore them to
life. We cannot do this in the case of many inorganic, to say nothing of
organic, bodies.” What are we to do? “Hence,” Goethe continues, “even
scientific men have at all times had an impulse to recognise living
things as such, to grasp connectedly their external visible and tangible
parts, and take these as indications of the inner life, and thus in a
sense to compass the whole in one glance.” “Hence we find at the
threshold of art and knowledge and science a number of attempts to
establish and elaborate a science that we may call _morphology_.”
Perhaps Goethe’s meaning can be realised best if one takes a great work
of art—say, the Venus of Milo—and imagines how these different kinds of
knowledge would deal with it. Purely analytic anatomy would dissolve the
superb artistic form into a rubbish-heap of bits of marble. Chemistry
would still further break up these bits of marble into the chemical
elements of which every block of marble is ultimately composed. The
“form” would disappear altogether. But in this case the form means—the
Venus of Milo. We see at once that we need another branch of science and
investigation besides anatomy and chemistry: we need a morphology, or
science of the complete form in which the block of marble is moulded
into the Venus of Milo. In the case of our work of art, morphology would
be identical with æsthetics, or at least with a branch of it. There can
be no doubt that the first and most imperative need for the
establishment of a special science of morphology arises from artistic
and æsthetic feelings. It is not without significance that it was
founded by the poet Goethe, and elaborated with such great success in
the nineteenth century by the born artist Haeckel. However, that does
not prevent the analogy of the Venus of Milo, which happens to be a
creation of human art, being applied equally to every individualised
form in nature, to every crystal, plant, and animal. Goethe himself
immediately transferred his morphology into the province of botany with
such vigour that the term is still regarded, in its narrower sense, as a
technical botanical expression. It extends, however, to the whole world
in so far as its contents come before us in “forms.” When Haeckel
adopted the term he deliberately restricted it, in harmony with the
general definition, by calling his work the “Morphology of Organisms,”
or the science of the forms of animals and plants.
But there was one danger in the conception of a morphology of animals
and plants, namely, the danger of taking it to mean a purely external
description: so many thousand species of plants, soberly described,
labelled, and numbered, a huge cabinet of stuffed skins, a herbarium of
hay. A whole scientific school had really taken it in this sense since
Goethe’s time; much as if one were to think æsthetics consisted simply
in forming an illustrated catalogue of all the art-treasures in the
world, a realistic catalogue in which the marble statues from the
Parthenon and the Moses of Michael Angelo would simply be given as
number so-and-so in class so-and-so.
Haeckel was preserved from this school by his more immediate masters, as
well as by Goethe himself; firstly by Johannes Müller, then by the
botanist Schleiden, finally by the influence of Gegenbaur. There was at
the time enough, and more than enough, of this external
museum-morphology. It was far from Haeckel’s intention to produce a new
compendium, in several volumes, of this kind of science of plants and
animals. His morphology was to be “general,” to have a broader range, be
a programme. As Richard Hertwig said very happily at a later date, he
saw his science, not as it then was, but as it _ought_ to be, in his
opinion.
The science of forms was to be in the fullest sense a “philosophy of
forms.” “Zoological philosophy” was the name given by the hapless
Lamarck, in France a century ago, to a work that appeared in the year
that Darwin was born, and anticipated his most advanced thoughts.
Haeckel, also, gave a new “philosophy of zoology and botany.” The title
embodies the magic formula that gave him courage to take up resolutely
once more the proscribed word, that seemed to have been scalded and
spoiled for ever in the witches’ cauldron of “natural philosophy”; it
spoke of the “theory of descent as reformed by Charles Darwin.” Two
sub-titles divided the work into two sections from the start. The first
part was, the critical elements of the mechanical science of the
developed forms of organisms (animal and plant); the second part was,
the same elements of the mechanical science of the developing forms of
organisms.
In these titles we see the decisive advance beyond Johannes Müller. 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. But the question now was: which laws were detected, and in which
category of thought were they to be found? Müller had the theory, but
was weak on the practical side. There were the “forms” of animals and
plants. What was it that really connected them? What was the reality
that corresponded to the philosophic craving of the intelligence?
Müller’s next school, the generation immediately preceding Haeckel, that
of Du Bois-Reymond, Virchow, and many others, had apparently indicated
the solution. They had replaced Müller’s vague general conception of the
laws of morphology and life, which was undermined by older influences,
by a single great demand. We want to grasp nature as a unity. At one
point in nature we have reached deep and apparently fundamental
factors—in physics and chemistry and their plain natural laws or forces.
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. Shall these few green or other-coloured things
that lie at the limit of the air, water, and rocks, a small minority in
nature, the things we call animals and plants, alone in the whole world
be exempt from the action of these laws? It is immaterial that Müller’s
best pupils, Du Bois in his later years and Virchow at an early date,
departed more or less from this consistent position of theirs into
philosophic and other sidepaths. The younger generation, to which
Haeckel belongs, that only came into direct touch with Müller in his
last years, heard no other gospel. What further advance was to be made?
In chemistry and physics they had before them the deep stratum that
yielded good mechanical laws. The first stage of physiology after
Müller, as we find it, for instance, under Du Bois-Reymond, yielded some
good indications for the organic. But was the whole of morphology to be
remodelled? Was the vast labyrinth of the thousands and thousands of
animal and plant forms in the museum to be reduced to mechanical laws,
corresponding to those of physics and chemistry, and be explained by
them?
Darwin brought salvation. Now that he had appeared, Haeckel felt that he
could begin to work. The hour and the man were come.
Darwin made it possible for him to raise morphology to a penetrative
science, equal to physics and chemistry, and so to make a step towards
the unity of our knowledge of a unified world. Hitherto the morphology
of the animals and plants had been in confusion. God, imagined in the
form of a higher man, had deliberately created the organic forms, the
palm, the moss, the turtle, and the man. He had constructed them on a
definite plan, as a man makes machines. Now, it appeared, the deeper
stratum was peeping out even here. Laws that had built the heavens and
the earth reached, by way of the Darwinian theories of selection and
adaptation, to the moss and palm, the turtle and man.
It was Haeckel’s peculiar distinction to take up this path as the right
one. It was then altogether new; to-day, even in the eyes of an
opponent, it has at least the solid and consistent support of a
considerable party. In later years, apart from open deserters from the
free and uncompromising pursuit of truth like Virchow, a school of
zoologists and botanists has been formed that will not recognise in
Darwinism a reduction of vital phenomena to the simple chemico-physical
laws of the rest of nature. They look upon it partly as inaccurate in
its allegations of fact, partly as a nebulous confusion, if not, as I
have already said, as a false mysticism or metaphysic. In the opinion of
these critics, whose own confused ideas very often leave little to be
desired in point of nebulosity, and who frequently try to drive out the
devil by means of the devil’s grandmother (a matter we cannot go into
here), Haeckel had made a great mistake in thinking that Darwinism would
solve the Du Bois-Virchow problem of reducing all living things to the
laws of lifeless matter. Even these, however, must candidly acknowledge
that in doing so he was the victim of his consistent and honourable
inquiry. At all events he must logically have seen the correct line at
that time as it is recognised to-day by this anti-Darwinian but
professedly mechanical school. His individual error can only have been
that he was deceived as to the true course of the line, and so clung to
Darwinism. However, we have said enough on this point.
Haeckel himself, at the time he was producing his greatest work, saw in
Darwin the absolute “open Sesame” to all the doors of philosophic
morphology. With this Sesame came an entirely new impulse, namely, to
write the natural history of the animal and plant form. It was just the
same as when æsthetics perceives a new world, a world that alone is
worthy of it, the moment it passes from the making of a mere catalogue
of the world’s art-treasures to the knowledge of even one single law of
artistic creation, in virtue of which one single work of art has been
actually built up.
It is impossible to begin with more general considerations than this
book does. The method of scientific research generally is explained in
order to give an idea of the new Darwinian morphology. With a calmness
that must have made most of the contemporary zoologists and botanists
shiver, the discredited idea of natural philosophy is restored from the
lumber-room. “All true science is philosophy, and all true philosophy is
science. And in this sense all true science is natural philosophy.”
The various periods in the development of morphology are coolly
schematised. These epochs are characterised by the vicissitudes of the
struggle between the simple description of forms in the animal and plant
worlds and the philosophic exposition of the laws that lie behind these
forms. In the eighteenth century, under Linné, there is a period of
purely external description and classification. It is succeeded in the
first third of the nineteenth century by a triumph of the philosophic
treatment of animal and plant forms. This increases with Goethe and
Lamarck, and grows into the older (and now generally abused) imaginative
natural philosophy. Then there is a general reaction; with Cuvier comes
the least philosophical of methods, though at the time it is a real
advance. While Linné only gave an external description of forms and
catalogued them, Cuvier’s epoch penetrated to the inner structure, the
inner world of forms, and thus rendered great service. The last and
greatest workers of the period, Müller, Schleiden, &c., give the signal
for a reaction in the hour of its chief triumph. Haeckel now follows
this up as “the element of fact in their ideas.” With Darwin he
inaugurates the fourth epoch, the triumph of natural philosophy for the
second time. But it is now far deeper and clearer; it embodies all the
good that preceded, all that Cuvier and his followers have done, without
the irresolution of earlier days. Now that we have studied the living
form in its innermost structure, as was never done before, in the
earliest stages of embryonic development in the ovum and womb, in the
past geological periods of the earth’s history, we will _think_ over
this form, think with all the means at our command, reason,
synthesis—even _imagination_, when it is necessary to press on to the
great final conclusion, a new synthesis of the defective positive data.
What does Johannes Müller say? “Imagination is an indispensable servant;
it is by means of it we make the combinations that lead to important
discoveries. The man of science needs, in harmonious co-operation, the
discriminating force of the analytic intelligence and the generalising
force of the synthetic imagination.” That is spoken from the depths of
Haeckel’s heart, and he drives it home.
Nothing is more amusing than to find Haeckel’s later opponents saying,
_apropos_ of any particular question, that his statement springs from
his “imagination,” as if it were something wholly unscientific that the
naturalist must shun like the pest; or again, that Haeckel here or there
falls a victim to the deadly enemy of all scientific research, natural
philosophy. It is pointed out to him as a great discovery which he must
approach in a proper penitential spirit—to him who has discussed these
matters so unequivocally in his first theoretical work.
As a fact, these methodological chapters in the first volume are as
clear as crystal. The titles will seem strange to the man who thinks he
can do without any philosophical instruction in zoology and botany, and
wants to hear only of cells, tissues, stalks, leaves, bones, scales, and
so on, in a general morphology. One chapter has the heading: “Empiricism
and Philosophy (Experience and Knowledge).” Another heading runs:
“Analysis and Synthesis.” Then there are: “Induction and Deduction,”
“Dogmatism and Criticism,” “Teleology and Causality (Vitalism and
Mechanism),” “Dualism and Monism.” The last three antithetic headings
are united under a general title as “Critique of Scientific Methods that
are Mutually Exclusive.” Such a title illumines the whole situation like
a flash of lightning. Many years afterwards Haeckel himself said of his
_General Morphology_ that it was a comprehensive and difficult work that
had found few readers. At least the whole of this first and most
difficult part of the book must be defended against the criticism of its
parent. If it is far from adequately appreciated to-day, especially by
professional philosophers, that is certainly not due to its style, which
is a model of clearness in the eyes of any one with the least
philosophical culture. The real evil was that people did not look to it
for instruction from the philosophical side. The title, “Morphology of
Organisms,” had a technical sound. The empty space between professional
philosophy and professional zoology is wide enough to-day, but it was
far wider thirty-four years ago. Books like Büchner’s superficial and
popular _Force and Matter_, or Haeckel’s own later work, the _History of
Creation_, that can only be regarded as a brief and incomplete popular
extract in comparison with the _General Morphology_, with all its
peculiar literary charm, stole into the philosophy of the time like
foxes with burning straw tied to their tails. Professional philosophers
have written whole libraries on them. The matter recalls a fundamental
defect in academic philosophy: it has little or no sympathy with real
scientific work; in fact, it studiously avoids such sympathy in the
consciousness of its own weakness. Hence it has, like every other layman
with general interests, to wait for attempts to popularise scientific
work before it can know what is going on in the serious camp. The man
who wants to-day to criticise the mechanical conception of nature should
first make himself acquainted with these chapters of the _Morphology_.
How many know the mere title of the work? How many even of those who
evince great hostility whenever Haeckel’s name is mentioned?
The book contains much more than the methodological introduction. This
only takes up the first hundred pages, but it contains the whole
programme. We start off, therefore, under full sail for a new epoch of
thought, for natural philosophy; but we must keep an alert mind. The
deeper task, that Darwin only gave the means of accomplishing, was to
reduce all living things, animal or vegetal, to the inorganic. The laws
of life must be merely certain complications of the simple laws that are
encountered directly in chemistry and physics, and rule throughout
nature. It must be one of the first aims of a general philosophic
morphology to open out a path in this direction.
The living and what is called the “dead” must be compared. Linné’s three
rigid kingdoms—animal, plant, and mineral—needed definitions in harmony
with the new ideas. Haeckel himself had discovered the “monera,” the
living particles of plasm that did not seem to have reached the stage of
the true cell. Here, clearly, was the lowest level of the living. At the
same time we reach the most complex specimen of the inorganic from the
morphological point of view—that is to say, the most interesting in its
individual form—the crystal. The differences begin to give way. What
marvellously similar functions! From the dead mother-water is built up,
purely by chemico-physical laws, the beautiful structure of the crystal.
From the lowest living particle of plasm without any special organs, as
we see in the radiolaria, are formed the beautiful siliceous frames that
Haeckel had collected in such quantities at Messina. Is it more than a
hair’s breadth to pass from one to the other? The deeper we go in the
study of living things, the slighter become the differences that
separate them from “dead matter.” On the other hand, the higher we go in
the structure of crystals, the more striking is the resemblance to the
living thing. Two chains of thought seem to be started. What we call
“dead” is really alive: what we call living is really subject to the
same laws as the “dead.” The solution is found in complete Monism.
Living and dead are not antithetic. Nature is one; though we see it in
different stages of development. We call one of them the crystal,
another the cell, or the moneron, or the protozoon; another the plant,
another the animal. Historically it all hangs together. The same laws
hold sway throughout. In framing my arbitrary definitions I can say
either that the dead is living, or that the living does not differ
essentially from the dead. In the chain of living things man comes from
the primitive cell, the moneron. This in its turn has developed from
something earlier—“naturally” developed. The very idea of life forces us
to seek the predecessors of the monera. Hence we speak of “spontaneous
generation,” as what was dead according to our ordinary use of language
has begun to live. In point of fact it is merely development of a
unified whole. There is no gap, no leap, no act that is not natural. The
dead and the living never were really antithetic.
The insistent statement that not only does the living approach the
inorganic, but the inorganic approaches the living, is quite
“Haeckelian.” The study of the “life” of crystals is one of the best
parts of the book. Later generations will appreciate it. We are much too
narrow to-day when we merely reflect that life, even the life of man,
can be traced by evolution down to what we call dead matter. We forget
that this “matter” is already high, since it potentially contains life,
and even man, the crown of life. Many people imagine that the derivation
of man from “dead matter” is equal to turning a king into a beggar. They
do not reflect that, on the other hand, a beggar is turned into a king.
When I say that life arose one day out of the inorganic, or that a
crystal was turned into a cell, my statement really involves the
complementary truth that the inorganic potentially contains life in
itself. Otherwise we have the old miracle over again of something being
produced out of nothing, in spite of our spontaneous generation. Haeckel
has always been clear on this point. His later studies of the soul of
the atom and the plastidule only carry out the absolutely logical
treatment of the question that we find in these chapters of the first
volume of the _Morphology_.
Incidentally the question is raised whether the plant or the animal was
evolved first. Animal and plant are, of course, not rigidly distinct
from each other. They are only the two great branches of the Darwinian
evolution of living forms, and are united at the bottom, however much
they diverge above. Gegenbaur had represented this years before (1860)
in a figure that Haeckel quotes in his _Monograph on the Radiolaria_ in
1862. The whole kingdom of living things must be conceived “as a
connected series, within which we find two lines diverging from a common
centre and representing a gradual differentiation and development of
organisation.” The terminal points of these lines (the highest plant and
the highest animal) are very different from each other, but the
difference gradually disappears as we go back towards the common centre,
and the lowest stages in each kingdom can hardly be distinguished from
each other. For these lowest stages Haeckel now carries out a plan that
very quickly forced itself on him.
He forms them into a new kingdom of life. To the animal and plant
kingdoms he adds the primitive realm of the beings that showed
unequivocal signs of the possession of life, yet were neither animals
nor plants. He gives them the name of “Protists.” To botany and zoology
is now added protistology.
The name “protists” (from _protiston_, the very first) is familiar to
every one in biology to-day. If protistology has not yet been securely
established as a special branch of science, that is due to the
circumstance that a strict limit cannot be determined on either the
plant or the animal side, so that the botanist encroaches on the
province at one point and the zoologist at another. But when we remember
that Haeckel’s protists include the well-known bacilli, on which whole
libraries are accumulating to-day, it is clear that the province must be
definitely marked off at some date in the near future, whether one
accepts Darwinism or no.
These important innovations in technical biology show very clearly how
sound and fruitful the new “natural philosophy” was. We have to go back
to the untenable and utterly impracticable systems of Hegel, Schelling,
and Steffen, which were immediately rejected as the trifling of
_dilettanti_, or even to much that the admirable Oken did on the
scientific side, if we would measure the whole distance between what
people understood in the sixties by “natural philosophy” and the real
reformed philosophy that Haeckel gave to the world. This becomes clearer
at every step we take in his work.
The first book has determined the method that leads to morphology, the
science of forms. The second has ranged the organic forms—protists,
plants, and animals—over against the inorganic or “dead” forms, as far
as this is possible from the new evolutionary point of view. We feel
that the third book will pass on to Darwin, and explain the world of
organic forms by the Darwinian laws of evolution. Then the programme
would be carried out in its main features.
But Haeckel writes two whole books before he comes to this, and they
are, perhaps, the most characteristic in the work. He only “adopted” the
theory of evolution in the sense that he applied it far more thoroughly
than Darwin to practical problems. In these two books he is entirely
himself. They are, at the same time, the most difficult in the work.
Even to-day they place him on a lofty and lonely height apart from the
great and strenuous controversy over Darwinism. I believe that the time
will yet come that will fully appreciate these books. Through them
Haeckel will play a part in philosophy of which we have at present no
prevision.
There is a word that is inseparable from the word “form”—individuality.
Morphology, which does not analyse, but studies the form-unities as a
whole in the sense of Goethe’s definition, comes from the nature of
things to deal with the individual. In our artistic illustration the
Venus of Milo, as a form-unity, is an æsthetic individuality. When its
form is destroyed, its individuality perishes.
Let us apply this to any one of the higher plants or animals. Take a
turtle, for instance. A definite individual embodies the definite form
to which I give the name. This form as such is entirely lost if I cut up
the turtle until it is unrecognisable. The limit of morphological study
seems to be, just as in the case of the Venus of Milo, the integrity of
the individual turtle. Yet in the living turtle we find an enormous
difference.
If I grind the Venus of Milo into dust, I am at once in a totally
different world with this dust. I am amongst the raw material of nature,
untouched by æsthetic influence. From this calcareous powder I can, in
reality or imagination, pass on to the world of crystals, molecules, and
atoms. In that case I shall have done with æsthetic morphology. I come
to the morphology of the inorganic, a very different branch. What do we
find in the case of the living turtle?
It is true that I can break up the turtle into simple chemical
substances. In that case I make the same transition; I abandon organic
morphology, and pass, with the same _salto mortale_ as in the case of
the Venus of Milo, to the lower science of inorganic morphology.
But when I examine the structure of the living individual turtle before
me I notice a special feature. Let us suppose that I break up the Venus
of Milo only to a certain degree; or, with less vandalism, I do not
break it up, but light up its inner structure to some extent by a sort
of Röntgen-ray apparatus. And suppose I found that this one æsthetic
individuality is made up of millions of much smaller and æsthetically
finer and more unified images. I do not mean of millions of repetitions
of the large Venus in miniature, but of real and unmistakable little
works of art, each of which, regarded separately and without any injury
to its narrower individuality, might be just as excellent a subject for
æsthetic examination as the whole Venus.
This is, of course, nonsense as regards the Venus of Milo. There is
nothing of the kind in it. I have given the paradoxical supposition
merely for the purpose of showing what we really find in the case of the
turtle.
When the organic individual turtle is closely studied it breaks up first
into so many _simpler_ organic individuals, which undoubtedly belong as
such to the province of organic morphology. They are the _cells_. The
theory of Schleiden, Schwann, and Virchow here comes into direct touch
with morphology. Every higher animal or plant has its own individuality;
and within this individuality there is a conglomerate, a community, or a
state, of individuals of a lower order, that have their own life and
their corresponding individual life-form. Man himself, the highest of
animals, is a cell-state. So Virchow taught. Each one of us is an
individual, and as such an object of morphology. The cell, each single
cell in each of us, is also an individual, and as such is equally an
object of morphology. Hence it is the task of the morphology of
organisms, not only to describe these higher individualities as such,
but also to look on them as glass-houses, as it were, with so many
shelves, divisions, and smaller houses within of a lower rank. These
internal arrangements have to be described, piece by piece, with the
same fidelity.
This will probably suffice to convey a general idea of the subject.
Clearly, the great work that ought to form the general part of
morphology at this point was the precise determination of all these
various layers of individuality that are found in the animals, plants,
and protists, and, as we rise upward, enter into more and more complex
relations to each other.
The difference between, say, a turtle or a man and the cell which
combines in its millions to form them is not the only one. Between them
we seemed to find individualised, or almost individualised, links. Think
of the idea of an organ. What is my heart? It is made of a number of
cell-individuals, like my whole frame. But these cells form a sort of
intermediate individuality in me. We may go further. What is a segment
of a worm? What is an arm of a star-fish? They have so much independence
that they can continue to live, rapidly producing new cells and forming
a new worm or star-fish of the higher individual type, if they are cut
off. The arrangement is still more difficult in the case of the plant.
Where in their case shall we find the stages of individuality that
correspond to the animal-human? The cells are distinct in both cases.
The individual plant-cell corresponds to the individual animal-cell. But
what is there in the plant that corresponds to _me_, as the animal-human
multicellular individual? Does the oak-tree, for instance? Certainly,
the oak is an individual. But it seems that it is the single sprout of
it that corresponds to what I am. What is the relation of the tree to
this sprout?
Here our ideas grow dim and confused. We human individuals unite to form
certain higher communities. The word “social” reminds us of the fact:
then we have the nation, the race, humanity. At least the earlier of
these stages certainly perform various combined functions, and are
understood to form, or wish to form, new individuals. We speak of the
social organism, the body of the people, the soul of the people, and so
on.
We see that still more clearly in the case of the animals about us.
Individuals, that correspond to our conception of an individual man,
combine and form stocks and colonies, with division of labour. We find
this in the medusæ, corals, anemones, tunicates, and vermalians. One of
these animal stocks, to which our human social combinations only
correspond in a much wider sense, gives us a stage that is represented
by the tree in the plant-world. Infinite perspectives open out, and also
infinite complications. Infinite problems spring up for morphology to
deal with; it must make its way through the labyrinth of these
complicated types of individualisation.
The matter is still more intricate if I begin at the bottom of the
biological series and proceed upwards. I, man, am an individual of a
certain stage in my own collective activity. It is true that I am made
up of millions of cell-individuals, but when we look at the whole these
are merely elementary units. But take a being from the protist-world
that is too lowly to be either animal or plant. In respect of its whole
activity it is an individual just as much as I am, and therefore in this
regard at the same stage as I. At the same time it consists of a single
cell. The distinction in me between unit and whole does not exist in it.
Its unit is the whole. It would seem a Sisyphean task to reduce all this
to a system.
Yet that is just what Haeckel has done.
With crystalline clearness he separates and reunites and arranges
everything, from the primitive organic individual, that is not yet a
true cell—the monera he had himself discovered—upward. Organic
morphology begins with them as its first object, the first complete
individuality, the first “form.” All that lies below it is beyond the
province of morphology. The last conceivable organic individuality is,
perhaps, the atom; and that is not the concern of morphology. We start
from the organic. Above the pre-cellular individuals and the true cells
the next form-unities are the organs. Above the organs, after a few
subtle intermediate stages, are the “persons.” Thus a new word is given
to what we have hitherto conventionally called an “individual,” when we
wanted to denote a turtle, a bird, a man, or an higher animal as a
whole. To this corresponds in the plant the sprout. The stage above the
“person” is the “stock.” We might also call it the social individual; in
the plant-world it is the tree, in the coral the coral-stock, in the
human case the social combination of a number of men for common action.
We are reminded of Virchow’s speech, and how “consciousness” was dragged
into the debate on the cell-state. What psychological perspectives are
opened out by this doctrine of individuality! Each form-unity, each
single individuality in the series, with a soul! Souls combining for
common action, and forming higher psychic unities! There is no detail in
Haeckel’s whole life-work in which he speaks more boldly and freely and
philosophically than he does here. His lucid treatment raises to a
higher stage a philosophic question that has occupied thinkers for ages.
That is the third book. The fourth takes up a different subject. Let us
adopt in organic morphology this wonderful theory of individuality, the
theory of stages within the form. Then let us turn to consider
impartially the vast multitude of living forms. How can we now arrange
this infinite confusion by merely looking at it? Artificial
classification has attempted it a hundred times, and always without
success. On this side there is only one way to proceed—the mathematical.
I study them with strictly mathematical figures. I determine their axes,
and the mathematical aspects of their forms. Possibly that will give a
practical result; the only kind of artificial system that can be
accommodated with the Darwinian theory, and perhaps render it assistance
by the sharpness of its lines. Does it answer? Take a crystal, a
specimen from inorganic morphology. The description of it is susceptible
of a strictly mathematical form. Now take a star-fish, a worm, a human
being. We find that even these organic structures have a mysterious
relation at bottom to certain mathematical, stereometric forms. We might
almost say, to certain forms of human thought. Everything in the organic
world is in a state of flux. But through the whole moving stream we can
trace the outline of one stable element, something like a mathematical
idea. A sort of Platonism of the living forms vaguely takes shape.
Haeckel speaks of lines, axes, circles, radii, and all kinds of rhythmic
structures. It does seem that the countless individual forms of living
things fit into a scheme of a limited number of mathematical forms.
Strictly speaking this is not a real morphology of living things. We
only find these clear and rigid forms schematically in the wild
profusion of forms of the protists, plants, and animals. They are only a
reminiscence of the laws of the purely inorganic, which the eye of the
observer just detects as the lowest stratum. Hence Haeckel calls this
section the “promorphology” of organisms.
It is true that this section, which essays to compress all living things
into a very simple scheme, is the hardest to read in the whole work. A
number of strange and difficult words have to be invented for this
stereometric scheme to which he would reduce the animal and plant forms.
Haeckel himself declared, twenty years afterwards (in the second part of
the _Monograph on the Radiolaria_), that this stereometry of organic
forms had found little favour in biology “especially on account of the
difficult and complicated nomenclature.” But he had complete confidence
as to the substance of it, even after so great a lapse of time.
In point of fact we have here, it seems to me, a gigantic preparatory
work, not so much for the strict purpose of classification, as for a
real philosophy of botany and zoology that will be founded some day.
This recurrence of sharp stereometric structures, not only in the
crystal, but also, if less clearly, in the biological world, will one
day prove an important source of knowledge, in a sense that is not even
clear in Haeckel himself.
We are already entering upon a period that has a glimpse of the truth
that the deepest power of Beethoven’s music, or Goethe’s poetry, or
Raphael’s painting, or Michael Angelo’s sculpture is a mysterious
revelation of the most subtle mathematical relations and
effects—produced without conscious perception of these relations, though
a human mind is at work in them. In spite of all our “consciousness,”
the obscure intuitive power at work in these human artistic achievements
differs very little from the curious force with which a radiolarian
builds up its little house in the deep-sea or a caseworm fits on its
fine, rhythmic, snail-like coat. In both we have the same profound,
crystal-like constructive power that brought forth the wings of the
butterfly, the feathers of the bird, the bodily frame of all the animals
and plants, that harmonises so well with strict mathematical forms. In
Beethoven and Raphael it is not more conscious or unconscious, not
clearer or vaguer, not more mystical or more natural, than in the
poorest worm or the microscopically small radiolarian. The æsthetics of
the twentieth century will take up these ideas.
* * * * *
[Illustration:
HAECKEL’S VILLA AT JENA.
]
It is a great work. How few there are in the whole of the nineteenth
century that show the wealth of ideas we find in the first volume
alone.[4] And this is only one volume. We have as yet said nothing of
the idea that is of the greatest consequence in connection with
Haeckel’s own development. He was a Darwinian from 1862 onwards. After
1866 and the publication of the _General Morphology_ we find him
dominated in all his work by one single idea from the Darwinian group.
He brought this idea so effectively to the front, improved and developed
it so assiduously, and applied it in so many ways, that it has come to
be regarded as his own most characteristic work. It is inseparable from
his name. Whatever the future may be, wherever Haeckel’s name is uttered
people will add the phrase that was made peculiarly his after 1866, that
colours and pervades all his works—technical, popular, polemical, or
philosophical—as much as the word “Monism.” It is the phrase: the
biogenetic law.
Footnote 4:
The reader may be interested to know that Haeckel gives a popular
summary of his early work on individuality and on the mathematical
types of organisms in a more recent work. This has been translated
into English with the title _The Wonders of Life_. The two chapters
that deal with these questions are omitted from the abridged cheap
edition. [Trans.]
Here and there even in the first volume of the _Morphology_ a note is
struck that the reader cannot clearly understand. It increases in the
second volume until it dominates the whole book.
The phrase is known far and wide to-day. This is partly due to Haeckel’s
own insistence on it, but perhaps still more to the real value of the
idea itself. It crops up in a hundred different fields—psychology,
ethics, philosophy, even in art and æsthetics. I have been able to trace
it even into modern mysticism. For the moment I will only point out that
it has been attacked and misstated with real fanaticism, in spite of the
splendid and perfectly clear account of it that Haeckel has given.
The proper place to read of it is, as I said, the second volume of the
_Morphology_. This volume has to give an account of the evolution of
organic forms. What is given rather casually, almost Socratically, in
Darwin is now developed into a number of strict laws. This method of
expounding more or less hypothetical, new, and insecure ideas in the
form of laws has since been frequently attacked. Some have been led by
it to take the ideas as so many dogmas, and even to learn the laws by
heart as if they were texts in Scripture. Others have then laid the
blame of this dogmatic interpretation on Haeckel himself. It is quite
true that there was the possibility of a misunderstanding. People do not
always think for themselves, and the statement of a proposition in the
form of a law may prove a pitfall for them. The blind learning of them
by heart is always mischievous. On the other hand, it might be urged
that the statement of the ideas in this bald way affords the best
opportunity for a thorough and rational criticism of them, precisely
because they give such pregnant expression to the writer’s meaning. I do
not find that order and strict logical definitions have ever done any
harm of themselves, whatever it is that is put in order and defined. On
the contrary. People must confuse order sometimes with real dogmatism.
Of this there is not a word in the whole book, while at an important
juncture the reader is actually warned to be on his guard against undue
pressure. “In this,” we read in the twentieth chapter, “we do not wish
to draw up a body of laws of organic morphology, but to give hints and
suggestions for drawing them up. A science that is yet only in its
cradle, like the morphology of organisms, will have many important
changes to undergo before it can venture to claim for its general
propositions the rank of absolute and unexceptionable natural laws.”
However that may be, it was in this provisional definition of laws that
the famous biogenetic law first took shape, and with it a spirit entered
into Darwinism in the narrower sense that was never again detached from
its master, Haeckel.
Let us once more take a simple illustration from facts. Take a green
aquatic frog and a fish, say a pike.
Both of them have a solid vertebral column in their frames, and
therefore both must be classed amongst the vertebrates. But within the
limits of this group they differ very considerably from each other. The
frog has four well-developed legs, its body terminates in a tail, and it
breathes by means of lungs, like a bird, a dog, or a human being. The
fish has fins, it swims in the water by means of these fins and its long
rudder-like tail, and it breathes the air contained in the water by
means of gills. When we arrange the vertebrates in a series, with man at
their head, it is perfectly clear that the frog stands higher than the
fish in regard to its whole structure. It is lower than the lizard, the
bird, or the mammal, but at the same time it is a little nearer to these
three than the fish is. That was recognised long ago by Linné, who
assigned them a corresponding rank. The fishes are the lowest group of
the vertebrates; the frogs belong to the group immediately above them.
Now let us see how one of these frogs is developed to-day. The frogs are
oviparous (egg-laying) animals. The mother frog lays her eggs in the
water, and in the ordinary course of nature a new little frog develops
from each of these eggs. But the object that develops from them is
altogether different from the adult frog.
This object is the familiar tadpole. At first it has no legs, but it has
a long oar-like tail, with which it can make its way briskly in the
water. It breathes in the water by means of gills just like a fish. It
is only when the tadpole grows four legs, loses its tail, closes up the
gills at its throat, and begins to breathe by the mouth and lungs
instead, that it becomes a real frog. There can be no doubt whatever
that the tadpole is very much more like the fish in all the most
important particulars than the frog. Between the frog-egg and the frog
itself we have a stage of development in each individual case of which
we might almost say that the young frog has first to turn into a fish
before it can become a frog.
How are we to explain this?
At first people supposed something like the following: All beings in
nature are admirably adapted to their environment and their
life-conditions. Whatever be the explanation of it, it is a simple fact.
Now, the frog lays its eggs in the water. The young ones develop from
these eggs, and find themselves in the water. The most practical
adaptation for them is to swim about by means of a tail and breathe by
means of gills like the fish. They do not reach land until later, and
they creep on to it and have an equipment of the opposite character,
with legs and lungs.
But this explanation throws no light on the question why the frog lays
its eggs in the water. However, there might be some utility or other,
some need for protection, for instance, in that. Let us take a few other
cases.
There are several species of tree-frogs, and toads, and closely related
amphibia like the salamanders, that do not lay their eggs in the water.
Some of them bury them in folds of their own external skin, others (such
as the Alpine salamander) retain them within the mother’s body, as the
mammals do. The young animals develop there from the eggs. Even there,
however, where there is no question of aquatic life, the young frogs,
toads, and salamanders first assume the fish-form. The young frogs and
toads have fin-like tails, and all of them have gills. There seems to be
some _internal_ law of development that forces the frog and its
relatives to pass through the fish-stage in their individual evolution
even when there is no trace whatever of any external utility.
Now let us examine the matter as Darwinians and believers in evolution.
There are reasons on every hand for believing that the frogs and
salamanders, which now stand higher in classification than the fishes,
were developed from the fishes in earlier ages in the course of
progressive evolution. Once upon a time they were fishes. If that is so,
the curious phenomenon we have been considering really means that each
young frog resembles its _fish-ancestors_. In each case to-day the
frog’s egg first produces the earlier or ancestral stage, the fish. It
then develops rapidly into a frog. In other words, the individual
development recapitulates an important chapter of the earlier history of
the whole race of frogs. Putting this in the form of a law, it runs:
each new individual must, in its development, pass rapidly through the
form of its parents’ ancestors before it assumes the parent form itself.
If a new individual frog is to be developed, and if the ancestors of the
whole frog-stem were fishes, the first thing to develop from the frog’s
egg will be a fish, and it will only later assume the form of a frog.
That is a simple and pictorial outline of what we mean when we speak of
“the biogenetic law.” We need, of course, much more than the one
frog-fish fact before we can erect it into a law. But we have only to
look round us, and we find similar phenomena as common as pebbles.
Let us bear in mind that evolution proceeded from certain amphibia to
the lizards, and from these to the birds and mammals. That is a long
journey, but we have no alternative. If the amphibia (such as the frog
and the salamander) descend from the fishes, all the higher classes up
to man himself must also have done so. Hence the law must have
transmitted even to ourselves this ancestral form of the gill-breathing
fish.
What a mad idea, many will say; that man should at one time be a tadpole
like the frog! And yet—there’s no help in prayer, as Falstaff said—even
the human germ or embryo passes through a stage in the womb at which it
shows the outline of gills on the throat just like a fish. It is the
same with the dog, the horse, the kangaroo, the duck-mole, the bird, the
crocodile, the turtle, the lizard; they all have the same structure. Nor
is this an isolated fact. From the fish was evolved the amphibian; from
this came the lizard; from the lizard, on Darwinian principles, the
bird. The lizard has solid teeth in its mouth; the bird has no teeth in
its beak. That is to say, it has none _to-day_; but it had when it was a
lizard. Here, then, we have an intermediate stage between the fish and
the bird. We must expect that the bird-embryo in the egg will show some
trace of it. As a matter of fact it does so. When we examine young
parrots in the egg we find that they have teeth in their mouths before
the bill is formed. When the fact was first discovered, the real
intermediate form between the lizard and the bird was not known. It was
afterwards discovered at Solenhofen in a fossil impression from the
Jurassic period. This was the archeopteryx, which had feathers like a
real bird, and yet had teeth in its mouth like the lizard when it lived
on earth. The instance is instructive in two ways. In the first place it
shows that we were quite justified in drawing our conclusions as to the
past from the bird’s embryonic form, even if the true transitional form
between the lizard and the bird were never discovered at all. In the
second place, we see in the young bird in the egg the reproduction of
two consecutive ancestral stages: one in the fish-gills, the other in
the lizard-like teeth. Once the law is admitted, there can be nothing
strange in this. 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? We are now in
a position to see the whole bearing of Haeckel’s idea, and at the same
time to appreciate his careful restrictions of it.
First, let us see a little of the history of the matter. In the first
third of the nineteenth century a number of pre-Darwinian ideas of
evolution flitted about like ghosts in natural philosophy, as I have
already said. The evolutionary ideas of Goethe and Lamarck are well
known to-day. Another thinker of great influence was Lorentz Oken, who
established the custom of holding scientific congresses. Oken had been
constantly occupied with embryology, the science of the development of
the individual organism. He was at all events acquainted with all that
was known at the time on the subject. I open an old volume, wretchedly
printed on blotting-paper, of Oken’s _General Natural History for all
Readers_ (1833), and turn to a passage in the fourth volume (the first
to be issued) on page 470.
We read that the caterpillar of the butterfly resembles the animal form
at a stage of development that lies below the insect—the worm. Oken
says: “There is no doubt that we have here a striking resemblance, and
one that justifies us in thinking that the development in the ovum is
merely a repetition of the story of the creation of the animal groups.”
Oken was quite aware that the chick in the egg had gill-slits like the
fish. He bases his idea on that fact. He was very close indeed to the
theory that Haeckel has so wonderfully elaborated. However, he was
greeted with laughter. His theory was treated as an absurdity from 1833
to 1866. It cannot be denied that he was himself partly to blame for
this. Oken made two serious mistakes. On both points Haeckel is
perfectly clear and sound. Moreover, the theory of natural evolution
that made it possible for us to speak of “ancestors” was still a
Cinderella in the days of Oken. No sooner was it rehabilitated than the
principle of the old theory of embryonic forms returned once more.
Darwin himself at once appealed to it, but it was reserved for Haeckel
to develop its full importance. He corrected it in two particulars. Oken
and his admirers had made an unfortunate mistake. They believed in a
genealogical tree of all living things, but they conceived it on the
lines of the old classification. Linné had enumerated in succession:
mammals, birds, amphibia, fishes, insects, and worms. He put them in one
straight line, which is certainly the best arrangement for general
purposes. But when Oken came with the idea of natural evolution, he at
once took this series as the outline of a genealogical tree. The mammals
descended from the birds; the fishes from the insects; and so on. If
that were really the case, the highest animals would be expected to
reproduce all the animal and plant stages in the course of their
embryonic development, on the lines of the theory. The human being would
have to be, successively, not only a lizard and a fish, but even a bird,
a beetle, a crab, and so on. This was by no means borne out by the
facts, and so the theory seemed to be discredited.
Now let us glance at Haeckel’s genealogical tables. We find eight of
them, artistically drawn, at the end of the second volume. The
“genealogical tree” is given in the form of a branching tree, or as a
huge forest-like growth of stems some of which only meet in the ultimate
roots. There is no trace in Haeckel’s designs of the sort of
Eiffel-Tower arrangement that the Linnean system involved. At the bottom
we find the protists, the most primitive forms of life. From this point
two parallel stems diverge, that of the animals and that of the plants;
they never touch each other after this point, and so cannot be expected
to be reproduced in the embryonic forms. Then the animal stem is split
up almost at the root into at least five independent branches, each of
which pursues its separate line of development. One culminates in the
insects, above the worms and the crustacea. A totally independent stem
issues in the vertebrates, and this in turn breaks into many different
branches. Beyond the lizards, for instance, we find the development of
the mammals and birds, which run on as separate and parallel lines. It
was mere nonsense to expect a mammal in its embryonic development to
assume the form of a bird, or a crab, or a beetle, or a mussel, or a
medusa, even if the biogenetic law were established ten times over.
The second mistake made by Oken was to declare that, whatever it cost,
the law must be observed everywhere. He examined the butterfly. It
passed through two curious embryonic stages: first the caterpillar, then
the pupa. The caterpillar corresponded to the worm; that might be
plausibly contended. But the pupa also must stand for something. Between
the worm and the insect in classification was the crustacean. It had a
hard shell: so had the pupa. Consequently, the pupa is a reproduction of
the crustacea-stage. Such were the bold chess-moves of the older
theorist.
Haeckel first established that there was such a thing as the biogenetic
law. There is a fundamental norm, which is made clear to us in
embryology and can at the same time (remember the instance of the
lizard-like teeth in the bird-embryo) give us most wonderful suggestions
as to the line of ancestral development. But it has certain limitations,
as we will now show.
The adaptations in the sense of the Darwinian laws have affected the
animal’s embryonic life more and more, the higher the tree of life grew.
The long recapitulation of the ancestral stages often came into conflict
with the young individual’s need for protection. The result was that the
biogenetic law found itself restricted by the Darwinian laws of
adaptation. The too lengthy succession of ancestral portraits was
abbreviated and compressed. Whole stages of embryonic or larval
development were interpolated that had nothing to do with these
ancestral portraits, but were destined for the protection of the fœtus.
The butterfly-pupa is really an instructive instance of this
description. It does not reproduce a crab-stage, nor has there been any
stage in the ancestry of the butterfly when they lived throughout life
in pupa-houses. The pupa is simply a later adaptation in the development
of the butterfly, a protective stage in which it accomplishes the
transition from the caterpillar-form in much the same way as the young
bird develops under the protection of the hard egg-shell. Thus only a
faint and shadowy trace has been left of the real ancestral forms,
though this trace is an extremely instructive one. But we must not
expect the impossible from it. In this way our naked and crude
biogenetic law assumes a more finished and scientific form: the
embryonic development of the individual is a condensed, abbreviated, and
to some extent modified epitome of the evolutionary history of its
ancestors. That is more modest, but it is a correct expression of the
facts. The essential point of the older idea was not in itself wrong;
all that was done was to explain the gaps, and leaps, and contradictions
in it.
Now that Oken’s share in the theory has been properly appreciated, we
may notice another little historical detail. In the period immediately
after his time these ideas were ridiculed by men of science, great and
small, but they were not exactly “done to death.” Agassiz, the most
pronounced creationist and dualist of all the nineteenth-century
zoologists, expounded them occasionally as a curious instance of the
divine action. In fact, he looked upon the whole of zoology as a mystic
cabinet of curiosities—the more curious the better. Thus he came to play
with this idea and confirm it, but merely took it at first as a fine
figure of speech. Agassiz is a tragical form. He survived Darwin, much
in the same way that many an elegant _mot-de-salon_ on the rights of man
survived the French Revolution. Suddenly the whole structure of his
ideas seemed to fall about him. Where he had played with roses, he now
found torches. He reeled like a smitten man, and cried out against the
horrid monsters that brought him pain and bitterness. His anxiety began
with Darwin, even as regarded the question of the embryo. But there was
another, a man far away in South America, that increased it—Fritz
Müller.
Born in 1822, one of the finest pioneers in zoological work, Fritz
Müller had wished to become a higher teacher, but had abandoned his plan
on account of the oath that had to be taken by every servant of the
State. In 1849 he wrote to the Ministry requesting that he might be
allowed to dispense with the formula “So help me God, through Jesus
Christ.” Meeting with a refusal, he went to South America, and began a
solitary life as a student in the primitive forest, and sought to
accumulate valuable zoological material. Darwin called him “the king of
observers.” In 1864 he published an essay of ninety-four pages with the
title _For Darwin_. He revived and improved the old idea of Oken’s and
made fresh contributions to the natural history of the crustacea that
were literally stupefying. We may say that the point that he believed he
had established, in virtue of the law, in regard to the genealogical
tree of the crustacea, was afterwards, with apparent justice, called
into question, even by supporters of the law such as Arnold Lang. That,
however, did not diminish the extent of his influence at the time.
Haeckel has generously acknowledged how strongly he felt that influence
himself. Nevertheless all that has been said about Haeckel’s priority in
fully applying and shaping the law, and in its final formulation, is
perfectly correct.
When Haeckel had massed his material he had first to create the
necessary terms for arranging it distinctly. In the language of the old
legend, he called the day day, and the night. To the story of ancestral
development, or the evolution of the stem, he gave the name of
_phylogeny_, or stem-history (_phylon_ = stem). The word circulates very
widely to-day. The story of the development of the individual until it
reaches maturity was then called _ontogeny_ (_on_ = being), which
coincides generally with embryology (though it may also include the
growth of the child). The law then ran: Ontogeny is an abbreviated and
frequently disarranged epitome of phylogeny. Special attention was drawn
to the qualifications “abbreviated” and “disarranged.”
Here again two fresh names were invented. In so far as the embryonic
development is a true recapitulation of the stem-history, it is called
_palingenesis_, or repetition of the ancestral traits. When the
development is altered by new adaptations it is called _cenogenesis_,
“foreign” or “disturbing” development.
It has been objected by small-minded critics that Haeckel forces nature
to mar its own work. The real meaning is quite clear if we bear in mind
the blunder of Oken. In this case “disturbed development” is merely an
expression of the fact that the laws we invent are ideal forms, and not
always convenient realities. We learn by heart that the earth is a
globe, and its orbit is an ellipse. Neither of the two propositions is
strictly accurate; no mathematical figure even has objective reality. By
the sheer attraction of the water of the ocean to the continents the
earth has an irregularity of shape that it is barely possible to express
in words. To call the path of the earth round the sun, constantly
altering as it does, and still further complicated by the sun’s own
movement, a real ellipse is the greatest nonsense conceivable.
In this sense every natural law is subject to disturbances, though these
in turn are the outcome of natural laws. If we do not cavil over the
name, we find that the idea it stands for is of the greatest consequence
for any further use of the biogenetic law. Unless it is borne in mind,
the law, especially in the hands of the inexpert, falls into hopeless
confusion. We read so often that the ancestral history is identical with
the embryonic development. The one is a recapitulation of the other.
This supposed law is then applied in psychology, æsthetics, and many
other directions. If it succeeds, there is jubilation. If it does not
succeed (as it does not in a thousand cases), the whole blame is thrown
on Haeckel. People discover that “the biogenetic law breaks down here,”
and they throw over Darwinism altogether.
The second volume of the _Morphology_ is the standing palladium against
all this nonsense. It marks off the real readers and followers of
Haeckel from the superficial talkers who run after him because he is
famous, and will leave him unscrupulously for any other celebrity of the
hour.
The book must be read. Even in this second volume an incredible amount
of matter is compressed. An introduction, consisting of a hundred and
sixty pages of small type, gives us an idea of the new system. This is
the first scheme of a real “natural classification” of living things.
From this we pass to special morphology. But this fearless sketch of the
specialised genealogical tree, according to the new ideas, puts general
morphology in its true light. We are made to feel that it is not all
mere theory. To-morrow—nay, to-day—the whole practice of zoology and
botany will have to be remodelled on the new principles. Off with the
roof of the ark! The whole museum must be cleared out. We want new
divisions, new labels. The old controversy between the Nominalists and
the Realists seemed to have come to life once more. How students had
played with the word “affinity” as a symbol. The lemurs were “related”
to the apes, and to other groups of mammals. The star-fishes were
related to the sea-urchins, to the encrinites. The word had, in fact,
led to a certain amount of arrangement; the stuffed or dried or
preserved specimens in the museum were placed side by side. Suddenly the
whole thing became a reality. The things that were “related” to each
other had really been connected historically in earlier ages. The lemurs
were the progenitors of the apes. Behind them were a series of other
mammals. Star-fishes, sea-urchins, and encrinites, formed a definite
branch of the great tree, and were historically connected; not
symbolically, but in a real extinct common ancestor.
It was a vast work. A single man had at first the whole kingdom in his
hands, had to reject the old lines of demarcation and create new ones.
There was a certain advantage at the time. Since Cuvier’s time an
immense quantity of new discoveries had accumulated for the construction
of a system of living things. Müller, Siebold, Leuckart, Vogt, and many
others, had done a great deal of preparatory work. All this was of great
assistance to the man who now came forward with courage and a talent for
organisation. Nevertheless it needed real genius, together with almost
boundless knowledge, to accomplish the task. We must remember how
reactionary (even apart from the question of evolution) was the
systematic work of distinguished and assuredly learned zoologists like
Giebel at that time; they worked on in a humdrum way as if the more
advanced students did not exist. How different it has all become since
Haeckel’s thorough reform of classification! We are astounded to-day at
the skill with which he drew lines in his very first sketch that were so
near to the permanent truth. I need only point to the new scheme of the
classification of the vertebrates. A good deal of his work was, of
course, bound to be defective, because the facts were not yet known; for
instance, in fixing the point at which the vertebrates may have evolved
from the invertebrates. It was not until a year later that the discovery
of the embryonic development of the ascidia by Kowalewsky threw light on
this. Again, there was the solution of the problem of the ultimate
root-connection of the great parallel animal stems. In this matter
Haeckel himself brought illumination by his gastræa-theory.
On the whole this systematic introduction to the second volume would
have sufficed of itself to secure for Haeckel a prominent position in
the history of zoology and botany. He himself was chiefly proud of the
fact that it was the first natural-philosophical system on the new lines
to meet the rigorous demands of academic science, and indeed to
revolutionise academic science. This enhances his complete triumph in
the last two books of the volume. First man is introduced, with absolute
clearness and decisiveness, into the system of evolved natural beings,
as crown of the animal world, but subject to the same laws as the
animal: a vertebrate, a mammal, whose nearest relatives are the
anthropoid apes. Thus at last the “system of nature” was complete. 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. A supreme Being to whom we ascribe omnipresence could not
possibly be confined within the narrow limits of this vertebrate and
mammal organisation. When we try to do so we fall into unshapely
conceptions that are wholly unworthy of the most exalted of all words,
ideas, and beings. It is in this connection that Haeckel uses for the
first time the phrase “gaseous vertebrate,” that has so often been
quoted and attacked since. He means to say that we are driven to such
debasing and senseless definitions if we do not recognise in God the
essence of the whole system of things; if we form our idea of him
arbitrarily on any particular property of things within the system. We
must beware—as he expressly says—of such confused and unworthy
comparisons.
“Our philosophy,” Haeckel continues, “knows only one God, and this
Almighty God dominates the whole of nature without exception. We see his
activity in all phenomena without exception. The whole of the inorganic
world is subject to him just as much as the organic. If a body falls
fifteen feet in the first second in empty space, if three atoms of
oxygen unite with one atom of sulphur to form sulphuric acid, if the
angle that is formed by the contiguous surfaces of a column of
rock-crystal is always 120 degrees, these phenomena are just as truly
the direct action of God as the flowering of the plant, the movement of
the animal, or the thought of man. We all exist ‘by the grace of God,’
the stone as well as the water, the radiolarian as well as the pine, the
gorilla as well as the Emperor of China. 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 cult of nature passes into that service of God of which
Goethe says: ‘Assuredly there is no nobler reverence for God than that
springs up in our heart from conversation with nature.’ God is almighty:
he is the sole sustainer and cause of all things. 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. In grounding all the phenomena of organic or inorganic nature
on the universal law of causality, and exhibiting them as the outcome of
‘efficient causes,’ Monism proves that God is the necessary cause of all
things and the law itself. In recognising none but divine forces in
nature, in proclaiming all natural laws to be divine, Monism rises to
the greatest and most lofty conception of which man, the most perfect of
all things, is capable, the conception of the unity of God and nature.”
The book closes with these words and a quotation from Goethe. It had
opened with a quotation from Goethe. Goethe runs through the whole of
the two energetic volumes like an old and venerable anthem. The stalwart
fighter not only traces his whole Monistic philosophy to Goethe: not
only owes to him the very idea of morphology. In front of the second and
more strictly Darwinistic volume he has a dedication “to the founders of
the theory of evolution,” and between Darwin and Lamarck we find the
name of Goethe. It was Haeckel’s firm conviction that Goethe not only
believed in the unity of God and nature, but literally in the natural
evolution of the various species of animals and plants from each other.
In this conviction, which claims Goethe explicitly for Darwin, he has
never been shaken, although his own friends and convinced evolutionists
(Oscar Schmidt, for instance) have often opposed him on the point.
Much has been written since the days of the _General Morphology_ both
for and against this Goethe-Darwin theory, but I cannot see that we have
got much further with it. I still find that a candid study of some of
Goethe’s smaller writings, such as the _History of my Botanical_
_Studies_, the criticism of D’Alton’s _Sloths and Pachyderms_ (which is
very important), and several others, compels us to think that Goethe
really believed, in a strikingly Darwinian way, in a slow transformation
and evolution of animal and plant species in virtue of purely natural
laws; and that he always laid great stress on this idea of his as an
original notion, far in advance of the professional science of his time.
We not only have several clear passages, but the whole point of his
argument really rests on this idea. Hence, apart altogether from the
pedantry that tries to make a cabalistic mystery out of Goethe’s works,
and always reads B for A and C for B, it does seem that there was truth
in Haeckel’s first view of the matter, in spite of all the ink that has
been shed over it and the vast amount of word-splitting exegesis.
Darwinism has, in a certain sense, its German side, even apart from all
that Haeckel has done for it.
* * * * *
This was the book, then, that the deeply afflicted author wrung from
himself as his “testament.” It was written and printed with
unprecedented speed. When the first copies were issued, the author had a
feeling that he had nearly “done for himself.” He could not sleep. The
state of his nerves gave great concern to his friends, who were watching
him most anxiously. With a stolid fatalism, as if nothing mattered now,
he yielded to their pressing advice, and decided to travel for a time.
Far away on the blue Atlantic, at the gate to all the glories of the
tropics, there is an island, Teneriffe, that was counted one of “the
isles of the blest” in the old Roman days. A huge volcano rises from it,
and on its flanks we find all the zones of the geography of plants, as
in a model collection. Humboldt has given us a splendid description of
it, as the first station of his voyage to the tropics. “The man who has
some feeling for the beauty of Nature,” he says, “will find a more
powerful restorative than climate on this lovely island. No place in the
world seems to me better calculated to banish sorrow and restore peace
to an embittered soul.” Haeckel went there.
It was not an expensive journey, but it came as a fresh greeting from
Nature. It was a new ocean after the long studies on the Mediterranean.
What might it not afford in the way of medusæ and other zoological
prizes when the general beauty of the landscape, that had enchanted
Humboldt, had been fully enjoyed. With a mingling of his overflowing
passion for Nature, and the gloomy fatalism that told him this would be
his “last voyage” after his “last book,” he asked permission to leave
Jena in the autumn of 1866, when the printing of the _Morphology_ was
completed, and set out. It was no more to be his last voyage than the
_Morphology_ to be his last testament. Although still subdued with
resignation in his inner life, he came home in the spring of 1867 with a
new elasticity of body and mind, restored by the influence of the palms
and bananas and spurge, and braced for the great struggle of his life
that was now to begin in earnest.
The voyage had really two aims. To see the volcano above a palm-clad
coast, with the Atlantic Ocean bringing its medusæ; and to work for
Darwin.
A personal connection between the two had already been formed as a
matter of course. Darwin, almost confined for years to his isolated home
at Down owing to his constant ill-health, had received a copy of the
_Radiolaria_, and the correspondence had begun. The work had as yet met
with little encouragement from the ranks of exact scientists. It cannot
have been a matter of indifference to Darwin personally that so
distinguished a work, a real model of professional research, had come
over to him. Proofs of the _Morphology_ were sent over to Down before
the book was ready for publication. Darwin read German with difficulty,
but in this case he was stimulated to make an unusual effort. At last
Haeckel himself made his appearance at the master’s home. It seemed as
though he had to visit him in person to receive his blessing. It was, at
all events, a happy moment in the history of Darwinism when the two men
first met whose names will be inseparable in literature.
This was in October, 1866; Darwin had sent his carriage to bring Haeckel
from the station. A sunny autumn morning smiled on the homely and
beautiful English landscape with its bright woods and golden broom and
red erica and evergreen oaks. Haeckel has described their first meeting.
“When the carriage drew up before Darwin’s house, with its ivy and its
shadowy elms, the great scientist stepped out of the shade of the
creeper-covered porch to meet me. He had a tall and venerable
appearance, with the broad shoulders of an Atlas that bore a world of
thought: a Jove-like forehead, as we see in Goethe, with a lofty and
broad vault, deeply furrowed by the plough of intellectual work. The
tender and friendly eyes were overshadowed by the great roof of the
prominent brows. The gentle mouth was framed in a long, silvery white
beard. The noble expression of the whole face, the easy and soft voice,
the slow and careful pronunciation, the natural and simple tenor of his
conversation, took my heart by storm in the first hour that we talked
together, just as his great work had taken my intelligence by storm at
the first reading. I seemed to have before me a venerable sage of
ancient Greece, a Socrates or an Aristotle.”
They were delighted to meet each other, for they were like natures, in
their best qualities. Darwin had more passion in him than he ever
expressed, and behind all Haeckel’s impetuosity there was the naïve and
yielding temper of the child. He poured out his anger against the
stubborn and bewigged professors who still held out against the luminous
truth of the theory of evolution. Darwin put his hand on his shoulder,
smiled, and said they were rather to be pitied than blamed, and that
they could not keep back permanently the stream of truth. At heart,
however, he was delighted with his fiery pupil. They were to fight their
battle shoulder to shoulder for seventeen years. During all those years
there was never the slightest disturbance of their friendship. Darwin
knew well what an auxiliary he had in Haeckel. It is true that he wrote
him a wonderful letter occasionally, in which he used the right of a
senior to warn Haeckel not to deal so violently with his opponents.
Violence only had the effect of making onlookers side with the party you
attacked. We must be careful not to be too hasty in setting things up as
positive truths, as we see every day people starting from the same
premises and coming to opposite conclusions. But he was generally at one
with Haeckel, and had the good spirit to acknowledge it openly. When
Haeckel’s _History of Creation_ raised up the most extreme parties, and
started the cry that a distinction must be drawn at once between
Darwin’s real scientific ideas and Haeckel’s desperate excursions into
natural philosophy, Darwin said, in the _Descent of Man_, which he had
begun much earlier, but did not publish for some time, that he would
never have written his book if he had then known Haeckel’s _History of
Creation_. Haeckel had anticipated so much that he wished to say. And
when Virchow attacked Haeckel in 1877, Darwin spoke very severely of the
opponents who would make the eternal freedom to teach the truth
dependent on the accidental conditions of a modern State. Haeckel
visited him twice at Down. On February 12, 1882, he sent Darwin his
congratulations on his seventy-third birthday from the summit of Adam’s
Peak in Ceylon. This was his last greeting. Darwin died two months
afterwards. There was a touch of romance in this last communication of
the two great warriors. On the summit of the mountain, almost as sharp
as a needle, and 2,500 yards above the Indian Ocean, a tiny temple of
Buddha hangs like a stork’s nest suspended by chains. Buddha is believed
to have left his footprints on the rocks here. The Mohammedan tradition,
however, says it was done by Adam as he stood on one foot and bemoaned
the loss of Paradise. In front of this holy trace, a depression in the
rock about a foot long, Haeckel made a speech to his travelling
companions, and they broke the neck of a bottle of Rhine wine to
Darwin’s health. It is no little stretch of humanity’s pilgrimage, from
Adam to Buddha and on to Darwin.
[Illustration:
ERNST HAECKEL AND HIS ASSISTANT MIKLUCHO-MACLAY
AT LANZAROTE, IN THE CANARIES, 1867.
]
In October, 1866, Haeckel had a companion in a teacher from Bonn,
Richard Greeff (afterwards professor of zoology at Marburg). They took
ship from London to Lisbon, where they were long detained for
quarantine, though the annoyance was somewhat relieved by the discovery
of an interesting medusa in the brackish water of the Tagus. They then
went to Madeira and Teneriffe, not right into the tropics, but where
they might get a breath of it, as it were. Two of Haeckel’s pupils, who
both became well known afterwards, Miklucho-Maclay and Fol, were with
them. Greeff has given a full account of the journey in a whole volume
(published at Bonn, 1868), and Haeckel has written of it in two
articles, one of which (in the fifth volume of the _Zeitschrift der
Gesellschaft für Erdkunde_, Berlin, 1870) is a perfect masterpiece of
narrative and description of scenery. After a long search they chose as
the best station for studying marine animals, especially the medusæ, the
little island of Lanzarote, instead of one of the chief islands. Here
they fished and drew, in the manner taught by Johannes Müller, for three
months, from December, 1866, to February, 1867. It is not exactly an
ideal place. “Imagine yourself dumped down on the moor!” Haeckel said
afterwards in his description of it. A piece of arid land that looked
like a strip of the Sahara in the middle of the ocean. There is hardly
any water, and the vegetation is correspondingly meagre. Across the
middle of the island stretches a chain of volcanic craters, and old
lava-fields run down from them as far as the coast. Everything of
zoological interest in the place was to be found in the sea. There they
found abundance. As in Messina, certain local currents drove the rich
animal plancton together until there were literally rivers or streets of
tiny animals. One had only to dip in one’s nets and glasses, and bring
up whole shoals with every drop of water.
Haeckel had come chiefly to study the medusæ. But this led him on much
further to a great zoological problem. In his _General Morphology_ he
had expounded his brilliant ideas on the subject of individuality, and
now he encountered in the flesh one of the greatest marvels of animal
individuality. He had shown how the higher individual is always made up
of a community, a kind of state, of lower individuals. In the simplest
instance there are the cells. Each of them is an individual. Millions of
these individuals, banded together with division of labour for great
collective operations, make up the human frame, and therefore the human
“individual.” In the same way others form a beetle, a snail, or a single
medusa. Sometimes, however, these higher individuals enter in turn into
social combinations to form still higher communities. Human beings form
social commonwealths, with division of labour among the individuals.
Bees and ants form their communities in the same way. But in the latter
cases the texture of the community seems to be much looser than in the
preceding one. It is not so easy for the imagination to grasp a human
commonwealth or a colony of bees as a real “over-individual.” It is,
therefore, extremely instructive to find that at least one animal
community of this kind is of so firm a texture that even on the most
superficial examination it is recognised at once as an individual. This
is found in one of the groups of the medusæ, the siphonophores, or
social medusæ.
A number of single medusæ, each of which corresponds to what we regard
as the individual man, combine and form a new body, a social individual.
As citizens of this new state they have introduced the most rigid
division of labour. One medusa does nothing but eat, and it thus
provides nourishment for the rest, as they are all joined in one body.
Another accomplishes the swimming movement; another has been converted
entirely into a reproductive organ. In a word, the whole has become a
“unity” once more, equipped with its various organs like any large body.
Sometimes thousands of separate medusæ enter into the structure of one
of these wonders of the deep. And as each of the medusæ is generally a
very pretty, flower-like creature, the social groups with their charming
colours look like floating garlands of flowers made of transparent and
tinted crystal. Their beauty would soon fix Haeckel’s attention, but
their bearing on his theory of individuality would give them an even
greater value. For several years he had searched most attentively in the
animal world for these “over-individuals” of the highest class. In the
morphology he had had to be content with an old illustration of
something of the kind, the star-fish. It was supposed to be a
combination of vermalians. In this case the hypothesis has broken down,
though there was a good deal to be said for it at first, and it was
abandoned by him afterwards. But now, when he saw enormous numbers of
siphonophores in the animal streams at Lanzarote, he entered upon a
decisive study of the meaning of these real “social animals.” A social
medusa has so great an appearance of unity that those who discovered it
first did not believe it was a community, but a very complicated
individual medusa. Vogt (1847) and Leuckart (1851) had denied this, and
declared it to be a social group. But the controversy was still going
on, as there was much difference of opinion as to the meaning of
“social” and “state.” Haeckel now succeeded at Lanzarote in tracing for
the first time the development of one of these siphonophores from the
ovum. He was able to show that from the ovum only a single simple medusa
is developed. This, then, becomes the parent of the community; it
produces the rest of the members, not by a new sexual generation, but by
budding out from itself, until the whole garland of connected
individuals is ready to constitute the new over-individual, or the
community. These luminous investigations were published three years
afterwards (1869) in a work that was crowned by the Utrecht Society of
Art and Science (_The Embryology of the Siphonophoræ_, with fourteen
plates, published at Utrecht). But Haeckel returned time after time in
later years to this group of animals with such great philosophic and
zoological interest. When he had put before him in the eighties the
whole of the siphonophores brought home by the splendid _Challenger_
expedition, he combined the material with the results of his own studies
in a fine work, which was included (in English) in the publications of
the _Challenger_ series at London, as the 28th volume of the _Zoology of
the Challenger_, 1888. The voluminous work is illustrated with fifty
masterly plates, some of them coloured, by Haeckel himself. The most
important part of the text was also published in German at Jena, with
the title, _System of the Siphonophoræ_. There is a good popular account
of the siphonophore question in his lecture on “The Division of Labour
in Nature and in Human Life” (1869). A few of these beautiful forms are
also given on coloured plates in his illustrated work, _Art-forms in
Nature_. Every thoughtful man ought, whatever his position is as regards
Haeckel’s ideas, to glance at this material that he has so vigorously
and clearly presented.
While he was conducting this research into the embryonic development of
the siphonophores, Haeckel made certain experiments on phenomena that
have lately been made the subject of a special “experimental mechanical
embryology” by some of his pupils, particularly Professor Roux, of
Halle. He cut up siphonophore ova into several pieces at the
commencement of their development, and saw an incomplete social medusa
develop from each fragment.
[Illustration:
A SIPHONOPHORE
(_Disconalia gastroblasta._)
]
Thus the journey, like the earlier one to Messina, brought the
indefatigable student into touch once more with a “philosophical
animal.” This alone would have made it well worth the trouble. How many
more of the kind the future might still have in reserve for him! In the
quiet months at Puerto del Arrecise, on Lanzarote, he was gradually
restored to his spiritual balance. Nature had taken much from him, but
she offered him an inexhaustible return. His elasticity and vigour of
frame had been restored before he left Teneriffe. In a twenty-two hours’
tour, only interrupted by two hours’ sleep, he had climbed to the
highest summit of the Peak, in such an unfavourable season (in the
November snow) that the native guides would not go any further in the
end; all those who were with him except one stopped short a little way
from the top. The short rest at the summit (4,128 yards above the
sea-level, on the icy edge of the crater) was greatly enjoyed by him. He
could see over a distance of 5,700 square miles, as much as one-fourth
of the whole of Spain. “The extraordinary range and height of the
horizon gives one a vague idea of the infinity of space. The deep
unbroken silence and the consciousness that we have left all animal and
vegetal life far behind, produce a profound feeling of solitude. One
feels oneself, with a certain pride, master of the situation that has
been secured with so much trouble and risk. But the next moment one
feels what we really are—momentary waves in the infinite ocean of life,
transitory combinations of a comparatively small number of organic
cells, which, in the last resort, owe their origin and significance to
the peculiar chemical properties of carbon. How small and mean at such
moments do we find the little play of human passions that unfolds itself
far below in the haunts of civilisation! How great and exalted in
comparison does free Nature seem, as it unrolls before us, in one vast
picture, the whole majesty and splendour of its creative power!” Thus he
himself describes the moment. Something of that feeling of exalted
solitude entered into his life. He stood firm and undazed—come what
might.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VII
GROWTH OF IDEAS
At Easter, 1867, Haeckel returned to Jena through Morocco, Madrid,
and Paris. He spent a few of the pleasant spring weeks at the Strait
of Gibraltar and in the South of Spain. In the fine bay of Algeciras
(opposite to Gibraltar on the west) the current of the Strait
brought swarms of interesting medusæ, siphonophores, and other
“plancton-animals” into his net. In his solitary walks through the
mountain forests of Andalusia, in the incomparable Moorish palaces
and the cathedrals of Seville and Cordova, Granada and the Alhambra,
he gazed on that wealth of Spain in treasures of Nature and Art
which had excited his boyish imagination in the vivid pictures of
Washington Irving.
With his return home a crisis occurred in his career, from our
biographical point of view, such as we find at one point or other in the
lives of all great men. Up to the present the course of his life has
advanced steadily onward, so that the simple chronological order
afforded the most natural thread for our narrative. With this crisis his
activity broadens out more. His ideas, almost all of which are presented
in the _General Morphology_, form a great and continuous stem, which
throws out a large or a small flower on one side or other, according to
the stimulus received. His life crystallises about Jena; however many
journeys he makes, he always feels that he will return to his centre at
Jena. Nothing in his later career ever shook him from this ideal and
personal base.
In the summer after his return to Jena, 1867, he married Agnes Huschke,
daughter of the distinguished Jena anatomist. He shares the happiness of
this second marriage down to the present day. Of their three children,
the son is now a gifted artist at Munich; the elder daughter is the wife
of Professor Hans Meyer, proprietor of the Leipsic Bibliographical
Institute, who is particularly known in science by his ascent of the
Kilimandschars; the younger daughter is still at home with her parents.
He never leaves the University of Jena—and it never abandons him. It is
a kind of spiritual marriage. In 1865, when the sky was still free from
clouds, he was invited to take a position at Würtzburg, his old
school-place. He declined the invitation, and was then appointed
ordinary professor at Jena. Then the evil days came. The conclusions of
his _Morphology_ were popularised by himself, and went out far and wide
amongst the masses. People opened their eyes to find that this audacious
scientist was making “war upon God” out of his zoology. At length the
difficult question arises whether a mind of that type can be retained in
the honourable position of official professor. The Philistines are in
arms. The quiet, stubborn group, that has vegetated unchanged, like a
demoralised parasitic animal, from Abdern to Schilda, through thousands
of years of the free development of the mind, boycots the professor and
his family for a time. The Philistines appeal from their safe corner to
the authorities to intervene. Once, towards the close of the sixties,
the situation threatened to become really critical. The head of the
governing body of the university at the time was Seebeck, a
distinguished man who by no means shared Haeckel’s views, but had a just
feeling of Haeckel’s honourableness and mental power. In the middle of
the struggle Haeckel approaches him one day, and says that he is
prepared to resign his position, a sacrifice to his ideas. Seebeck
replied, “My dear Haeckel, you are still young, and you will come yet to
have more mature views of life. After all, you will do less harm here
than elsewhere, so you had better stop here.” At Jena they still tell a
similar story that happened on another occasion. A stern theologian
presented himself in person at the chateau of Karl Alexander, Grand Duke
of Weimar, and begged him to put an end to this scandal of the
professorship of Haeckel, the arch-heretic. The Grand Duke, educated in
the Weimar tradition of Goethe, asked, “Do you think he really believes
these things that he publishes?” “Most certainly he does,” was the
prompt reply. “Very good,” said the Grand Duke, “then the man simply
does the same as you do.”
Haeckel remained a professor at Jena; and when the current subsided a
little, he was not insensible of their liberality. He remained faithful
to Jena, though even Vienna, amongst other places, offered him a
position (1871). Under his guidance “zoological” Jena flourished like a
poor orphan that has suddenly been enriched. At one stroke the
university was lifted to the position of an intellectual metropolis for
the whole of the young scientific generation of the last quarter of the
century. The best of the younger men that fill the biological positions
in Germany to-day (and many others) were educated under Haeckel. Many of
these pupils became opponents of his eventually, but they all went
through his system. He had a further satisfaction. He not only attracted
the young men to Jena, but he conjured up as if by magic the financial
resources for improving the external advantages of the place for
teaching and working. His style of “zoology,” which was at the same time
“natural philosophy,” brought people to his assistance who would never
have been won by a narrowly technical zoologist, no matter how learned
he was. Twice men were induced “for his sake”—that is to say, induced by
the magnetic force of his charming personality—to leave large legacies
to be spent on the university under his direction; once it was the
Countess Bose, another time Paul von Ritter of Basle. Ritter alone gave
sufficient to found two professorships at Jena for the express purpose
of teaching the science of phylogeny that Haeckel had created.
All through the period of his long stay at Jena that followed we trace a
series of continual holiday journeys. In these journeys he used to
collect the best material for his professional research, following the
method he had learned from Müller at Heligoland, and had practised at
Messina and Lanzarote. At the same time these travels were, like the
earlier ones, the bath of eternal youth and health for “the other soul
in his breast”; the artist, the lusty wanderer, I might almost say the
inveterate Bohemian in him, was then allowed to have his spell of song
and gaiety. In Jena he took deeper and deeper root as time went on.
There was something in him in this respect of a Persephone impulse, an
alternation of winter and summer in his life. When the days of hard and
wearing work were past, he would have to rush away into the free air,
down to the blue sea, to far and happy Nature. “Here I am a man—dare be
a man.” The duty of the zoologist of Müller’s school to go down to the
sea to work came to his rich temperament, which included so much more
than mere “professional reasons,” with a splendid sense of
Persephone-life: half his time in the cold North studying animal
skeletons and dead bones by the burning lamp, the other half in the
glare of the sun of reality, in living nature at its best. I will only
quote summarily a few dates of these travels. In 1869 he spent the
autumn vacation in Scandinavia. In 1871 he was in the island of Lesina
in Dalmatia, where he, the arch-heretic, lived in a monastery with a
jolly abbot. From beautiful Ragusa he made an interesting excursion to
Cattaro and Montenegro. In 1873 he went to Egypt and Asia Minor,
visiting Athens, Constantinople, Brussa, and the Black Sea. The
culmination of this journey was a visit to the splendid coral banks of
Tur, in the Red Sea. The Khedive, Ismail Pacha, put a Government steamer
at his disposal for the journey. The excursion has been superbly
described by Haeckel himself in the little volume, _The Corals of
Arabia_ (1876). The same volume contains the first specimens of his
landscapes in water-colour. He spent the spring of 1875 in Corsica and
Sardinia. On that occasion Oscar Hertwig discovered, in his presence,
the process of fertilisation in the sea-urchin; his discoveries will
long remain a turning-point in the history of our knowledge of sexual
generation (one of the deepest mysteries in nature). In the autumn of
1876 he was at work on the coast of Great Britain, and reached as far as
Ireland. In the spring of 1877 he was at Ithaca and Corfu; in the autumn
we find him on the Riviera. In 1878 he went first to Fiume and Pola on
the Adriatic, and afterwards on an Atlantic excursion to Brittany,
Normandy, and Jersey. In the autumn of 1879 he was in Holland and
Scotland.
In 1881 he made the second longest journey of his life. He secured
permission to absent himself from the university for six months, and
went to Ceylon. He left Jena on the 8th of October, and did not return
until April 21, 1882. The traveller and æsthete in him revelled in this
first plunge into the tropics. How he was taken to the enchanted land of
India in the Lloyd steamer _Helios_, a pretty reminiscence of the
“heliozoa” (sun-plants), a name he had himself invented; how he greeted
his beloved medusæ in their beautiful tropical forms of the Indian
Ocean; how he lived in the execrable but thoroughly tropical and
interesting Whist-Bungalow at Colombo, where mysticism and an unholy joy
in card-playing occupied him until philosophic zoology came to crown and
redeem everything; how he set up his zoological laboratory far from the
world at the Cingalese village of Belligemma (which he interpreted
_bella gemma_, the “pretty jewel”), and fished with his Müller-net for
radiolaria, medusæ, and siphonophoræ, for six whole weeks, to the
intense bewilderment of the naked children of the palms; how he at last
penetrated into the wildest virgin forests of Ceylon, where one heard
the heavy tread of the elephant and the roar of the panther—all this he
has described in his _Visit to Ceylon_, the freshest expression of his
temperament, which belongs utterly to the free, artistic half of his
life, when Persephone has her summer days in the land of flowers.
He himself regarded this journey, happy and favoured to the very last
minute, as a crown and conclusion of his travels that could never be
surpassed. But many a long hour was to be spent in travel after that,
and he was to make one journey that left Ceylon far behind him in the
Indian Ocean. In the spring of 1887 he made a pilgrimage to the “Holy
Land,” Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, Damascus and Lebanon. On this journey
he spent a delightful month on the island of Rhodos. In 1889 he had a
pleasant time on the beautiful island of Elba. In 1890 he visited
Algiers, where his innocent sketches and his anatomical knife brought
suspicion on him; they arrested him and threatened to shoot him as a
spy. He has described the incident in his genial way in his _Algerian
Reminiscences_ which is, unfortunately, lost in a back number of some
magazine or other, like so many of the sketches of his travels. In 1897
he travelled over the whole of Russia, from Finland to the Caucasus, and
visited Tiflis, Colchis, and the Crimea. In the autumn of 1892 he
accompanied Sir John Murray, of the _Challenger_ expedition, on a small
deep-sea investigation on the coast of Scotland. In the spring of 1893
and 1897 he was at work once more in his beloved Messina, where he was
now honoured as a world-famous guest. In the autumn of 1899 he climbed
the Sabine and Corsican hills. As the second decade after his first
journey to the tropics came to an end, he seemed to regard all he had
done so far as a small payment on account. In his sixty-sixth year he
felt the “home-sickness” for the tropics once more with such intensity
that he quickly made up his mind to go as far as the equator. He left
Jena on August 21, 1900, and (after a brief visit to the exhibition at
Paris) took ship at Genoa, on September 4th, for Singapore. His beloved
Italy had provided part of the cost of the journey. In the previous year
the Royal Academy of Science at Turin had awarded him the Bressa prize
(consisting of 10,000 lire) on account of his _Systematic Phylogeny_.
Once more the tropics revived the great impression made on him in his
earlier visit. This time he spent only a few hours in Ceylon, and sailed
further south. He landed at Singapore on September 27th, and sixteen
days afterwards went on to Java, and thus crossed the equator at last.
He enjoyed to the full the charms of the landscape with its volcanoes
and virgin forests, during his stay with Treub at Buitenzorg, at
Tjibodas, and during his long journey across the greater part of the
island. At Tjibodas he celebrated the close of the nineteenth century
[German calculation] by painting a fine water-colour of the smoke-canopy
over the summit of the volcano Gedeh, touched and gilded by the east
rays of the sun on the last day of 1900. On January 23, 1901, he went
from Batavia to Sumatra, crossed the Sunda Strait in sight of the famous
volcanic ruins of Krakatoa, and spent six weeks in Padang on the
south-west coast of Sumatra. This delay was largely involuntary, and due
to an injury to his knee, caused by stumbling over a rail during a visit
to an engineering establishment; but the time was by no means lost in
the middle of such glories. On March 31st he landed in Europe (at
Naples) once more, after a safe voyage. The notes he made during his
journey yielded another charming work, _Letters from the East Indies and
Malaysia_ (1901). His spirit of enterprise is inexhaustible, and still
continues.
* * * * *
Within this frame of his career we have now to study a growth of ideas
and a continuance of research that tell of vigour, consistency, and
success in every line. It unfolds logically like a great work of art.
The _General Morphology_ stands at the parting of two ways. It afforded
a programme of an infinite amount of fresh technical research—the
elaboration of his studies in detail, of promorphology, of his theory of
individuality, and of the phylogenetic system of living things; and the
strengthening of the laws of evolution, especially the great biogenetic
law. On the other hand, there was the purely philosophic work to be
done: the gathering together of the general threads that ran through his
work, and the building of a new philosophy of life, based on a new story
of creation, from the atom to the moneron, from the moneron to man, and
the whole to be comprised and contained in God. In a word, he might
proceed in either of two ways from the _Morphology_: he might construct
academic zoology afresh, or he might write a work on the new God.
When he came home from Lanzarote, the two ways seemed to coincide in
front of him; his work had, indeed, opened them out as one. But external
circumstances intervened. As things are, it was only his academic
colleagues that had any right to the new biology. A new book on God and
creation would go out to “the publicans and sinners.” Interest must be
lit up amongst the people at large, where there was as yet only the
faintest spark. It appeared, moreover, that most of his academic
colleagues in 1867 had no wish to enter on the new path he had opened
out. A new generation would have to grow up first. The _Morphology_,
from which Haeckel on his travels had expected at least a revolution,
met at first with an icy silence. There was hardly any discussion of it,
and no excitement whatever. Haeckel quickly made up his mind. He must
turn in the other direction. Gegenbaur consoles him. He has given too
much—twenty dishes instead of one. He must serve up the best part of the
work on one dish, and it will be taken. Haeckel agrees with him to some
extent, but his heavy technical artillery cannot be simplified so easily
as that. The only possible thing to do is to give an extract of it,
which will make the broad lines of the system clear. But as soon as that
is done, he sees that the extract is still only the general
philosophical part of it, and will not appeal to the general public.
It was such reflections as these that led to the writing of his _History
of Creation_, a popular work.[5]
Footnote 5:
Translated into English with the above title. Literally, the title is:
_The Story of Natural Creation_.
The chapters of this work were first delivered orally to students, in
the form of lectures, and formed a kind of introduction to morphology.
The lectures, retaining their lighter form, were then combined to make
the book. It was published in 1868, a small volume in a very primitive
garb. The success of the work was unprecedented.
Zoology and botany were treated philosophically in the _Morphology_.
That did not suit the professional scientists, who (as I said) crossed
themselves when they saw “natural philosophy.” In the _History of
Creation_ the great problems of philosophy are dealt with successively
on Darwinian lines, from the zoological and botanical point of view. It
was like the sinking of a deep well amongst general thoughtful readers.
People felt at last what a power science had become. The old riddles of
life were studied in a new light with the aid of this book. There was no
predecessor in this field. Haeckel was absolutely the first to appeal to
the general reader in this way. It is true that what he gave them was,
strictly speaking, only an extract from his own _Morphology_, especially
the second volume. But as he now arranged his matter chronologically, he
converted his outline of a world-system into a “world-history”—a real
“history of natural creation.” In the “Pictures of Nature” in the first
volume of his _Cosmos_ Humboldt had tried to bring the natural world
before his readers as a great panorama, to be taken in at one glance.
But he strictly confined his study of nature to the things that actually
exist; how they came to exist was not, he intimated, a subject of
scientific inquiry. Haeckel proceeds to this further task. His panorama
of nature does not stand out rigidly before us; it develops, under the
eyes of the observer, from the formless nebula to the intelligent human
being. Even on the surface this was seen to be a prodigious advance.
Very plain, but very attractive, it makes its way by the force of its
convincing dialectic, and places no reliance on the fireworks of
rhetoric. The subtle power of it lies in the arrangement of the facts,
which suddenly assume the form of a logical chain instead of being a
shapeless chaos. Even if all the main ideas of the work were false, we
should be compelled to regard it as one of the cleverest works that was
ever written, from the dialectical point of view. But the essence of
this cleverness is the way in which the grouping of the facts is made to
yield the philosophic evolution, which is the thoughtful basis of the
work. As the world proceeds in its natural development from the nebular
cosmic raw material until it culminates in the ape and man, the reader
finds himself at the same time advancing along a series of general
philosophic conclusions with regard to God, the world, and man. If at
the end he has retained the whole series of what are to him more or less
new scientific details, he is bound to find himself caught in a strong
net of philosophic conclusions.
In view of all this we can easily understand the different reception
that the book met with from friend and foe. People who had already
assented to the main issues of the work on general grounds of
probability, were delighted to find these issues decisively established
by the plain facts of science. On the other hand, those who would have
none of Haeckel’s philosophy now felt compelled, in view of this
dreadful work, to call these alleged facts of science themselves into
question. In face of this hostility it was some disadvantage that the
_History of Creation_ contained a vast amount of technical material
(such as the genealogical trees, the Darwinian laws, the explanation of
the facts of embryology, &c.) that could only be presented summarily in
it, while the proper technical description and justification of them was
buried in the thick volumes of the _Morphology_. Haeckel said, over and
over again, that a certain thing had been so fully established by him
scientifically in the other work that he was now at liberty to take it
as a fact; and he accordingly built it up as such without prejudice into
the compact structure of the popular work. Readers who wanted to go
further into the discussion of these facts had to look up the relevant
passages in the larger book. But the great bulk of his opponents—amongst
whom we must count even many professional scientists—had never read the
two volumes of the _Morphology_. They merely took the brief statement in
the _History of Creation_, which was really little more than a
reference, and made a violent attack on the “fact” it was said to
convey.
This led to a great deal of confusion. As in this case a controversy
over some petty zoological detail was always a “struggle about God,” and
so agitated the opponent down to the most secret folds of his
philosophy, the usual consequences did not fail to put in an appearance.
Haeckel was branded and calumniated personally. There has never been any
apostle in the world that some sect or other has not decried as a rogue
and evil-doer, simply because he was an apostle. Wherever Haeckel has
made use of any material that did not seem to be absolutely sound in
every respect, he was not simply accused of making a mistake, not even
of ignorance, but the whole thing has been put down at once to
dishonesty and the worst type of bad faith.
One should bear in mind how very generally pioneer work of this kind is
liable to err. Further, in the _History of Creation_ there is the danger
involved in the popular presentation of the results of scientific
research. Any man who has written popular works, or delivered lectures
to the general public, knows what this means. There is little common
measure between them. The truths of science are in a state of constant
flux; it is of their essence to be so. To fish out a piece from this
stream, fix it, and magnify it for the public with a broad beam of
light, really amounts in principle to an alteration of it; it is putting
a certain pressure on things, and giving them an arbitrary shape. The
work of popularising truths is so holy a thing in its aim that this risk
has to be run. We must take things as they are. We have two
alternatives: either not to popularise at all, or to take the apparatus
with all its defects. We can diminish these according to our skill; but
there is a subjective limit to this skill in all of us.
The first edition of the _History of Creation_—Haeckel’s first attempt
at popularising—had a good deal of inequality in this respect. To begin
with, the book had the air of an extempore deliverance. Its success was
very largely due to its being cast in this form. But there was a good
deal that could be improved here and there, and was improved in the
later editions of the work. In the tenth edition, as we now have it, it
is a splendid work in regard to the illustrations, for instance. But the
first edition was merely provided with a few very crude woodcuts in
outline. Some of them were very clumsy. In comparing different
embryological objects the same blocks were used sometimes, and this
would give rise to misunderstanding in the mind of the reader. For
instance, there was question of demonstrating that certain objects, such
as the human ovum and the ovum of some of the related higher mammals,
were just the same in their external outlines. This fact is quite
correct and established to-day. If I draw the outline, and write
underneath it that as a type it is applicable to all known ova of the
higher mammals, including man, there is no possibility of
misunderstanding. But if I print the same illustration three times with
the suggestion that they are three different mammal-ova, the general
reader is easily apt to think, not only that they are identical in the
general scheme of this outline, but also in internal structure. He
imagines that the ova of man and the ape are just the same even in their
microscopic and chemical features. This leads to a contradiction between
the illustration and what Haeckel expressly says in the text. We read
that there is indeed an external resemblance in shape between these ova,
but that there is bound to be a great difference in internal structure,
since an ape is developed from the one and a human being developed from
the other. It would have been better if the general reader, who is not
familiar with these outline pictures, had been more emphatically
informed in the text below the illustration that even the outline is to
be taken as a general and ideal scheme. In this sense we must certainly
admit that the illustration was bad, since it would lead to a
misunderstanding of the clear words of the text. But what are we to say
when the opponents of Haeckel’s views viciously raise the cry of “bad
faith” on the ground of a few little slips like this, and suggest that
he deliberately tried to mislead his readers with false illustrations?
Amongst the general public, in so far as it was hostile to Haeckel, the
charge blossomed out into the most curious forms. Some declared that the
whole story of a resemblance between man’s ovum and embryo and those of
other animals was an invention of Professor Haeckel’s; others—we even
read it now and again in our own time—went so far as to say that the
human ovum and embryonic forms only existed in Haeckel’s imagination.
All these wild charges are of no avail. The human ovum, which
corresponds entirely in its general scheme to that of the other higher
mammals, was not discovered in 1868 by the wicked Haeckel, but in 1827
by the great master of embryological research, Carl Ernst von Baer. The
considerable external resemblance, at certain stages of development,
between the embryos of reptiles, birds, and mammals, including man, was
decisively established by the same great scientist. These really
remarkable stages in the development of the human embryo, during which,
in accordance with the biogenetic law, it shows clear traces of the
gill-slits of its fish-ancestors, and has a corresponding fin-like
structure of the four limbs and a very considerable tail, can be seen by
the general reader at any time in the illustrated works of His, Ecker,
and Kölliker (Haeckel’s chief opponents) or in any illustrated manual of
embryology, and their full force as evolutionary evidence can be
appreciated. Any man that constructs his philosophy in such a way that,
in his conviction, it stands or falls with the existence of these
embryonic phenomena, is in a very delicate position, apart altogether
from Haeckel. His philosophy will collapse, even if the _History of
Creation_ had never been written.
These curious discussions did not seriously interfere with the success
of the book. In thousands and thousands of minds, in 1868, this little
work proved the grain of seed that led on in time to serious thought.
From that time onward Haeckel knew that he had not only scientific
colleagues and academic pupils, but a crowd of followers. When he made
an excursion into the northern part of the Sahara, as far as the first
oasis, twenty-two years afterwards, he met an artist there. They talked
philosophy, and the man, not knowing Haeckel, naïvely recommended him to
study the _History of Creation_ as likely to give him most help. The
little incident shows us something of the great pioneer work done by the
volume, something of its spiritual circumnavigation of the globe.
* * * * *
Thus the spiritual nucleus of the _General Morphology_ is introduced,
with great ability, to a much wider circle than Haeckel had dreamed of
when he gave the _Morphology_ to his colleagues. But the agitation
gradually spread into academic circles. On the whole the Darwinian ideas
pressed in everywhere by their own irresistible weight. Haeckel’s more
particular concern, however, was to secure the recognition of one single
point in the larger group of ideas—the great biogenetic law. This was
for many years the pivot on which almost all the discussions with him
and about him turned.
He himself did not at first conceive his law as a matter of controversy,
but as a method that must be brought into a position of practical
utility. An opportunity to do this arose immediately.
While he was at Lanzarote he began to take an interest in a second group
of lowly animals besides the siphonophores, namely the sponges. When the
general reader hears the word “sponge” he must modify his ordinary ideas
a little. In the present instance he must not think of the plants,
belonging to the fungi-group, such as the morel and cognate forms, that
are often called “sponges” in common parlance. He must think rather of
the sponge he uses in his bath. The bath-sponge is a structure made up
of very tough, elastic, horny fibres. This structure is originally the
skeleton, as it were, of certain animals that are known as
“sponge-animals” or, briefly, sponges; they have nothing to do with the
spongy mushrooms I spoke of. At the same time these socially-living
sponges are such curious creatures that it was disputed for a long time
whether they were real animals or not. There was a second controversy in
regard to them as to where the “individual” began—what was a single
animal, and what a co-operative colony of animals. The latter point
alone would have been enough to direct Haeckel’s attention to this group
after he had, in the case of the siphonophores, gone so deeply into the
mystery of combined individuals, forming a new “state-individual.” His
own opinion eventually was that as a matter of fact in the majority of
cases the whole sponge is a stock or colony of separate sponge
individuals closely connected together. They had not, indeed, anything
like the ingenious method of division of labour that we find in the
social medusæ; in fact, the sponges are in all respects much more lowly
organised animals than the medusæ. But they were certainly true animals.
And in the middle of his efforts to prove this Haeckel travelled into an
entirely new field of research, lying far beyond the theory of
individuality.
As there is an enormous number of different sponges, he had confined his
studies from the first to a single group of them that might be taken as
typical. He chose the calcispongiæ (calcareous sponges), which had been
the least studied up to that time. As the name obviously implies, these
sponges form their internal framework or skeleton, not of elastic horny
fibres like the common bath-sponge, but of solid calcareous needles or
spines. They secrete these out of the soft substance of their bodies
just as the radiolaria do their pretty siliceous houses. Haeckel was
engaged for five years, from 1867 to 1872, in a profound and careful
study of the natural history of the calcispongiæ. Then he published the
results in his _Monograph on the Calcispongiæ_, consisting of two
volumes of text and an atlas of sixty fine plates.
The first result was that the calcispongiæ afforded a splendid proof of
the impossibility of drawing sharp limits between species in the
perpetually developing animal world. In their case the different
varieties passed constantly out of each other and back into each other
in a way that would have made a classifier of the old type distracted.
But Haeckel had travelled far beyond the position of his boyhood, when
he had timorously concealed the bad species that would not fit into the
system. He said humorously that in the case of the calcispongiæ you had
the choice of distinguishing one genus with three species, or three
genera with 239 species, or 113 genera with 591 species. All this
confusion was saved by the Darwinian idea of not setting up absolutely
rigid classes, families, genera, and species. But even this was not yet
the essential point.
[Illustration:
ERNST HAECKEL, 1874.
]
As he had done in the case of the siphonophores, Haeckel endeavoured to
derive as much information as possible from the “ontogeny,” or embryonic
development, of the calcispongiæ. He established in some cases, it
seemed to him, that a single calcisponge-individual at first and up to a
certain stage developed from the ovum in the same way as a medusa or a
coral or an anemone. The fertilised ovum, a single cell, divided into
two cells, then several, and at last formed a whole cluster of cells. In
this cluster the cells arranged themselves at the surface, and left a
hollow cavity within. Then two layers of cells were formed, like a
double skin, in the wall of this vesicle, and an opening was left at one
spot in the wall of it. Thus we got a free-swimming embryo, with a
mouth, an external skin, and an internal digestive skin or membrane.
Then the creature attaches itself to the floor of the sea and becomes a
real sponge, partly by developing along its characteristic lines, and
partly (in most cases) by producing other sponges from itself in the
form of buds, like the siphonophore, and so forming an elaborate colony,
to which we give collectively the title of “a sponge.” These facts led
to the following reflections.
This original development from the ovum, first into an embryo with the
form of a small globe or, more correctly, an oval body consisting of two
layers of cells and having a hole at one pole—in other words, a creature
with nothing but skin, stomach, and mouth—was found, curiously enough,
in other animals besides the medusæ, corals, and sponges. We have the
same course of development in representatives of the most varied groups
of animals. There are worms, star-fishes, crabs, and snails that develop
in the same way. In fact, it was proved in this very year (1867) that
the lowest of the vertebrates, the amphioxus (or lancelet), develops in
the same way. And this was not all. In the ontogeny of all the higher
animals right up to man (inclusive) we find a state of things that most
closely resembles the same development. At all events, the fertilised
ovum gives rise in all cases to a cluster of cells; this cluster forms
something like a flattened or elongated vesicle with a single-layered
wall; the single layer of cells is doubled, and in the building up of
the body one half makes the external coat or skin and the other half the
internal lining or membrane. Haeckel reflected on the whole of the
facts, and drew his conclusions. This very curious agreement in the
earlier embryonic forms must be interpreted in terms of the biogenetic
law. In the case of the higher animals the forms have been profoundly
modified by cenogenesis. In the lower animals they are almost or
altogether a pure recapitulation of the real primitive course of the
development of the animal kingdom. In the earliest times animals were
evolved in something like the following way. First, the primitive
unicellular protozoa came together and formed crude social bodies,
clusters of cells that kept together, but had no special division of
labour. As all the members in the cluster pressed to the surface, in
order to obtain their food, they came to form, not a solid mass of
cells, but a hollow vesicle with a wall of cells. Then the first
division of labour set in. Certain cells, those that were situated at
the anterior pole, and so were better placed to receive the floating
food as the animal moved along, became the eating-cells of the group;
they provided nourishment for the others, as the nutritious sap
circulated through all the cells in the cluster, as we find in the case
of the siphonophores. As these feeding-cells multiplied rapidly at the
fore part of the animal, a depression was formed at that pole of the
body. In the end the ball or vesicle was doubled in upon itself, until
it came to have the form of a cup with a double-layered wall. Externally
were the cells in the skin that effected movement and feeling, and
afforded protection; inside, forming the internal wall, were the eating-
or stomach-cells. An opening remained at the top—the opening of the cup
or vase-like body. The food entered by it: it was virtually the “mouth.”
Thus was formed a primitive multicellular animal with division of
labour. If we imagine it attaching itself to the bottom by its lower
pole, we can see that it would easily become a sponge of the simplest
kind, a polyp, a coral, or, detaching itself once more, a medusa. If we
imagine it swimming ahead in the water or creeping along the ground in
such a way as to assume a bilateral symmetrical structure, like a tube,
with right and left, back and belly, and an anus behind, we have a worm.
This worm developed, under the action of the Darwinian laws, into a
star-fish in one case, a crab or insect in another, a snail or mussel in
another, and lastly into the amphioxus, which led on through the
vertebrates to the human frame. But the mysterious series of forms
always remained in the development of the individual from the egg,
pointing more or less clearly to the earlier stages: ovum, cluster of
cells, ball, two cell-layers in a cup-shaped form, skin, stomach, and
mouth. All animals that exhibit this primitive scheme belong to one
great stem. It was not until this skin-stomach-mouth animal was formed
that the tree branched out—evolving into sessile, creeping, swimming,
and other forms. Let us give a name to this phylogenetic (ancestral)
form, which stands at the great parting of the ways in the animal world,
as embryology proves. Leaving aside its innumerable relatives in the
primitive days, it must have differed essentially from all other living
things at the time—all the protists and the plants—by its possession of
a skin, stomach, and mouth. _Gaster_ is the Greek for stomach. Let us,
therefore, call this primitive parent of all the sponges polyps,
medusaæ, worms, crustacea, insects, snails, mussels, cephalopods,
fishes, salamanders, lizards, birds, mammals, and man, the _gastræa_,
the primitive-stomach or primitive-gut animal. The corresponding
embryonic form may be distinguished from it as the _gastrula_. There are
still many living species of animals that are very little higher in
organisation than the gastræa-form. The _Pemmatodiscus gastrulaceus_,
discovered by Monticelli in 1895, corresponds entirely to it. And the
gastrula is found, as I said, with astonishing regularity in its precise
gastræa-form in representatives of all the higher groups of animals.
That is an outline of the famous gastræa-theory, that Haeckel discovered
when he was engaged in studying the calcisponges. It was first published
in his large _Monograph on the Calcispongiæ_ in 1872, elaborated in his
_Studies of the Gastræa-theory_ in 1873, 1875, and 1876 (published in
one volume in 1877), and generally expounded, together with the
biogenetic law, in (amongst other works) his polemical essay, “The aims
and methods of modern embryology” (1875). This discovery, in Haeckel’s
opinion, now made the biogenetic law a real search-light in the
exploration of the obscure past. It indicated a third critical point in
the great genealogical tree. Already we had the root (the monera) and
the crown (man); now we had the point from which the various real animal
stems radiated like the umbellate branches of a single large bloom.
Through it the Darwinian system had been converted into the greatest
practical reform of animal classification. If this gastræa-theory was
correct, it was an incalculable gain for zoology. The difficulty of it,
on the other hand, lay in the infinite modifications of the embryonic
processes in detail that had been brought about by cenogenesis; almost
everywhere this had more or less obscured the original features. On the
whole it gave rise to the greatest and most far-reaching discussion that
has taken place in zoology for the last thirty years, apart from the
Darwinian theory itself. To-day, at the close of these three decades,
there are only two alternatives. One is that there is still an
absolutely mysterious and hidden law of ontogeny, that compels countless
animals over and over again to pass through these embryonic forms and
assume a likeness to the gastræa. After all the eagerness with which the
whole school of embryologists opposed to Haeckel have sought, up to our
own day, to establish such a direct law, we have not yet got the shadow
of a clear formulation of it. The other alternative is that Haeckel is
right in believing that he has discovered the correct formula in his
phylogenetic interpretation of embryonic processes in accordance with
the biogenetic law. If that is so, the gastræa-theory is the crown of
all his labours in technical zoology proper. Let us wait another thirty
years.
The scientific controversy over the gastræa-theory was in full swing
when Haeckel entered upon another bold experiment in the direction of
the biogenetic law. He thought it would be useful, instead of framing
wider hypotheses, to take one single instance of one of the highest
animals, and trace the whole parallel of its embryonic and ancestral
development down to its finest details. It would serve as an excellent
object-lesson. He would take it, not from some remote corner of the
system, such as the sponges or medusæ, but from the very top of the
tree, where palingenesis and cenogenesis seemed to have culminated in an
inextricable confusion. But what example could be more appropriate and
effective than the most advanced of all living things—man. He would
write a monograph on man on an entirely new method; would show ontogeny
and phylogeny confirming each other down to the smallest detail. It was
another great enterprise. And this particular subject was so interesting
that it would appeal strongly to the general readers of his _History of
Creation_ as well as to the academic scientists. Man was a subject of
such obviousness and importance to the layman that in this case there
was really no professional limitation of interest at all. Every detail
in the most technical treatment of the subject would be taken into
account, and evoked his strongest sympathy.
When Haeckel had fully matured this plan, he produced his
_Anthropogeny_.[6] The word, founded on the Greek, means the “genesis”
or “evolution of man.”
Footnote 6:
The fifth edition is translated into English, with all the plates and
illustrations, under the title of _The Evolution of Man_. [Trans.]
The work is a very able combination of two different aims. On the one
hand it affords the technical student the outline of a wholly new and
distinctive manual of human embryology (up to a certain extent) and
general anatomy; and this is intimately bound up by his method with a
kind of historical introduction to general anthropology. At the same
time the book forms a second part of the _History of Creation_. It
builds up the most important chapter of the later work, from the
philosophical point of view, namely, that which deals with the origin of
man, into a fresh volume; and it represents the first popular treatment
of embryology on broad philosophic lines—a thing that had never been
attempted before. Springing up from this double root, the work is
certainly one of the most successful things in the whole of Haeckel’s
literary career. Moreover, it is not merely a compendium of a larger
work, like the _History of Creation_. In spirit and form it is an
original work, and gives his very best to the reader. As far as its
general effect is concerned, the double-address of the work has had its
disadvantages. The academic students who were hostile to it have once
more selected for attack certain excrescences and gaps that were merely
due to the exigencies of popular treatment. On the other hand, the
general reader found it, in spite of the popular form, on which
Herculean labour had been spent—one has only to think of the details of
embryology—a book that was not to be “read” in the ordinary sense of the
word, but studied. The first edition appeared in 1874. A fifth edition
has now been published, equipped with the finest illustrations, both
from the artistic and the scientific point of view, that have ever
appeared in a popular work on embryology. We find in the _Anthropogeny_
all that the nineteenth century has learned or surmised with regard to
the ancestral history of mankind. Even the gastræa-theory—the gastræa
belonging to man’s direct ancestry—is dealt with in popular fashion as
far as this was possible.
When the _Anthropogeny_ was published Haeckel’s public position became
more stormy than ever. In professional circles a number of the
embryologists had taken up an attitude of opposition to him; the most
heated of them attacked his popular works continually on the ground that
he was popularising, not the real results of official science, but his
own personal opinions. There was a great deal of truth in that. The only
question was, which would stand best with the future, his or their
personal opinion? It does not alter the subjectivity of opinions that a
few people here and there combine and pretentiously constitute
themselves into a “science.” Posterity will deal coolly enough with
their collective decisions. It will take every man of science as an
individual, and merely ask which of them came nearest to the truth. The
name, the official science, will pass into the grave with many titles
and decorations. All that will remain in men’s minds is the star of the
personality in its relation to the great constellation of contemporary
human truth. However, as regards the particular embryological attacks of
these opponents, it seems to me to-day especially characteristic that
such people are more and more abandoning the idea that it is only a
question of contesting certain particular deductions of Haeckel’s
_within_ the limits of Darwinism. They find themselves increasingly
compelled to throw Darwinism overboard altogether. Instead of its
attempts to explain phenomena they are putting forward a confused claim
of “direct mechanical explanations,” or relying on the sonorous old
phrase, started in 1859, an “immanent law of evolution,” or retreating
into a despairing attitude of “I don’t know.” These clearer divisions
will make it very much easier for posterity to pass its judgment on the
situation.
After the embryologists we have a considerable group of opponents on the
anthropological side. The objections of these anthropological critics
have in the course of time narrowed down to the single argument that no
transitional form between man and the ape has yet been discovered. And
for many years now this position has not been held on serious scientific
grounds, but rather on ingenious and strained hypotheses. Because we now
have, in the bones found at Java by Eugen Dubois in 1894, the remains of
a being that stands precisely half-way between the gibbon and man. Hence
what is called the anti-Darwinian and especially anti-Haeckelian school
of anthropology to-day is mainly distinguished for its preference of
more risky and more subtle hypotheses instead of plain conclusions from
obvious facts. Finally, there is the theological opposition to Haeckel
that increased with every book in which he put his ideas before the
general public and helped them (in their boundless professional wisdom)
to realise the danger of the situation.
The year 1877 was a critical one in this respect. In the middle of his
struggles Haeckel retained all the simplicity of his nature. He saw that
the idea of evolution was triumphing over all obstacles and rapidly
securing the allegiance of the best men of the time. On the 18th of
September, 1877, he spoke of this with unrestrained delight at the
scientific congress at Munich. He described the theory of evolution as
“the most important advance that has been made in pure and applied
science.” Then Rudolf Virchow delivered a speech at the same congress.
There is no doubt whatever that in the period since Virchow had
indicated a neutral field in 1863, in which science might effect “its
compromise,” Haeckel had boldly invaded that province. In the previous
year he had published a little work called _The Perigenesis of the
Plastidules, or the Generation of Waves in Vital Particles_. It was
delivered in lecture-form at the medical-scientific congress at Jena in
November, 1875, and then printed on the occasion of Seebeck’s jubilee,
May 9, 1876. Possibly it is the least known of all Haeckel’s works,
though in my opinion it is one of the most valuable in regard to the
prophetic breadth of its intuition. It essays to establish a theory of
heredity. In dealing with this deepest mystery of life psychic factors
are pressed into service without reserve. Not only is the cell-soul put
into prominence, but the cell in turn is resolved into a number of
smaller units, the plastidules. Each plastidule is then conceived as a
psychic unity. The souls of the plastidules are endowed with memory;
that is the root of heredity. They learn; that is the psychological
expression of adaptation. The little work offers a suggestion of a
psychology of Darwinism that may very well become the nucleus of the
whole Darwinian structure in the twentieth century. But at the time it
was quite obvious that a man with such ideas as these was breaking with
lusty fist through the sacred net that spread before Virchow’s reserved
province. The hour had come, therefore, for Virchow to feel that he must
expel the idea of evolution from the whole field of science, and not
merely from embryology and anthropology.
It is very instructive to note how Virchow shifted his position a little
in accordance with the time. In his judgment science _had_ to make
peace. It had to make concessions in certain directions. In 1863 he had
spoken of the “ruling Churches.” Now, in 1877, he speaks of the freedom
of science in the “modern State.” The great _Kulturkampf_ had set in.
The Church was for the time being powerless in face of the State. Hence
Virchow now plays off the State as the guardian of his tabooed province.
This time Darwinism is supposed to be threatening the virgin field in
which we exact scientists make our peace with the State. At the right
moment he adroitly points out that the Social Democrats have taken to
Darwinism. Every man on deck, then. That must not go any further. At the
bottom it was the old contest. If one lays down as a general principle
that the scientific pursuit and presentment of truth has to respect
neutral provinces and make concessions, every change in current affairs
will demand a fresh application of it. To-day it is some Church or
other, to-morrow a State, the next day the momentary code of morals, and
lastly some bumbledom or other that renews the prohibition to dissect
corpses, because our dissecting knives disturb the peace of mind of our
Philistine neighbours. Haeckel published a sharp reply to Virchow (_Free
Science and Free Teaching_, 1878), in which he sought to show amongst
other things, taking his stand on his political principles, that
Socialism and Darwinism have nothing to do with each other.
I will not go more fully into the controversy here. If one province of
knowledge is to receive light from another at all, we must admit that
there is only one general truth. All stationary or reactionary political
interest is irreconcilable with the theory of evolution. That is clear
from the very meaning of the words. As to the direction in which we must
seek real political and social progress opinions are bound to differ
very considerably; it may be shown that the laws of evolution which have
selected the various species of plants and animals can only be used very
sparingly and cautiously for the promotion of human progress. But I
believe that is quite an immaterial point in this matter of Virchow’s
attack. The real influence of Darwinism on political questions is not
the chief question. The principle we have to determine is whether the
freedom of scientific research and the teaching of what the individual
student believes he has discovered to be true are to have “external”
restrictions or not. The question is whether inquiry and teaching are to
be regarded merely as things “tolerated” and interfered with at will
amongst the various elements of modern life; or whether they are not to
be considered the very bed-rock of civilisation, and every agency that
has power for the moment is not doomed whenever it comes into collision
with them.
In this momentous duel of the two men who were regarded at the time as
unquestionably the most distinguished scientists in Germany it seemed to
most people for a time that Haeckel had gone off altogether into general
and public questions with regard to the aim of research and philosophy.
He seemed to lend colour to the belief as he published, in quick
succession, a number of new popular lectures (_Cell-souls and
Soul-cells_, 1878, and _The Origin and Evolution of the Sense-organs_,
1878), and at the same time published a collected volume of older and
recent _Essays_ _on the Theory of Evolution_ (one part in 1878, a second
in 1879, and a new and enlarged edition in 1902). As a matter of fact,
we find him in these years occupied with a small but particularly
well-lit field of his whole work. It was not merely that in a few years
he buried himself in the primitive forests of Ceylon, in order to pursue
his special studies far removed from all civilisation for months
together. Just at this date appeared the great monograph on the medusæ,
which he had at length concluded. The first volume (_The System of the
Medusæ_, with 40 coloured plates) was published in 1879, and the second
(_The Deep-sea Medusæ of the Challenger Expedition and the Organisms of
the Medusæ_, with 32 plates) in 1881. And while these splendid volumes
showed his academic colleagues that he had no mind to remain entirely on
the outer battlements as a philosophic champion, he plunged up to the
ears in a new special study of a range that would have made even the
most enthusiastic specialist recoil.
From December, 1872, to May, 1876, the English had conducted a peaceful
enterprise that will be for ever memorable. A staff of distinguished
naturalists had gone on the ship _Challenger_ to explore the depth,
temperature, and bottom of remote seas. With the aid of the best
appliances specimens of the mud from the floor of the ocean (sometimes
more than a mile in depth) were brought up at 354 different spots. It
was known from earlier deep-sea explorations that this slime on the
floor of the ocean, from a certain coast-limit into the deepest parts,
is composed for the most part of the microscopically small shells of
little marine animals. The living creatures that form these shells swim
in the water of the ocean, partly at the surface and partly at various
depths beneath it. When they die the little hard coat of mail sinks to
the bottom, and as there are millions upon millions of them living in
the sea, thick deposits are gradually formed at the bottom that consist
almost entirely of these microscopic shells. The animals in question are
primitive little creatures consisting of a single cell, of the type that
Haeckel has called “Protists.” Even in Ehrenberg’s time it had been
noticed that amongst the shells in the deep-sea mud there were, besides
chalky shells, a number of graceful flinty coats that clearly pointed to
the radiolaria. The _Challenger_ expedition now made the great discovery
that vast fields at the floor of the ocean, especially of the Pacific,
were covered almost exclusively with these flinty shells. It was seen at
once that the few hundred species of radiolaria that had hitherto been
described by Haeckel and others were only a very small part of the
masses of radiolaria found in the ocean. The specimens of the deposits
which were carefully preserved and brought home by the _Challenger_
contained such an immense number of unknown species with their flinty
shells faultlessly preserved, that it was necessary to reconstruct the
whole of this wonderful group of animals. And who could be better
qualified for the work than the man who had already made a name by his
study of the radiolaria, Haeckel?
When the English Government came to publish the results of the
_Challenger_ expedition in a monumental work (of fifty volumes), he was
entrusted with the work on the siphonophores, the corneous sponges, and
all the radiolaria in the collection. For ten years, from 1877 to 1887,
Haeckel devoted every available hour to the work of selecting the
radiolarian shells with his microscope from these specimens of the
deep-sea deposits, and naming, describing, and drawing the new species.
When he began his task 810 species of radiolaria were known to science.
When he came to his provisional conclusion, ten years afterwards, though
his material was not yet exhausted, there were 4,318 species and 739
genera. They are described in the splendid work that he wrote for the
_Challenger_ Report. It consists of two volumes of text (in English)
with 2,750 pages and 140 large plates, with the title, _Report on the
Radiolaria collected by H.M.S. Challenger_. In the preparation of these
plates (and in the illustration of all his later works) he had the very
valuable assistance of the gifted Jena designer and lithographer, Adolph
Giltch. A good deal of new information with regard to the living body of
the radiolaria had come to light since 1862. In particular it had now
been settled beyond question that they consisted merely of a single
cell. There was, therefore, a good opportunity of reconstructing the
_Monograph_ of 1862 with the new and more comprehensive work. The chief
contents of the English work (with a selection of the plates) were then
published in German, and appeared in 1887 and 1888 as the second, third,
and fourth parts of the _Monograph on the Radiolaria_. A sort of
supplementary essay on the methods of studying the radiolaria and
cognate “plancton” animals was published separately with the title of
_Planctonic studies_ (1890). Though it was a moderate and tactful
criticism of the methods of some of his colleagues in this kind of work,
it was “refuted” by them in a way that it would be difficult to
qualify—in other words, it was fruitlessly assailed with charges of the
most general but most unpleasant character. In the English Report we
find two other volumes afterwards from Haeckel—the volume on the
siphonophoræ in 1888, and the _Report on the Deep-sea Keratosa collected
by H.M.S. Challenger_ in 1889; these again opened up new chapters in
zoology. The _Challenger_ work is the crown of Haeckel’s studies as a
specialist. To some extent the conclusion of it closes an epoch in his
life.
We will only touch briefly on what he has done since. It has not yet
passed into the region of history.
The latest years in Haeckel’s constructive work are characterised mainly
by _one_ idea. He had often been pressed to work up afresh the material
of his _General Morphology_. He has not done so in the form that was
expected, but chose a form of his own. In the first place he took the
systematic introduction to the second volume, which had been the first
able attempt to draw up the genealogical tree of the living world,
branch by branch, and, with the material that had accumulated in the
subsequent thirty-four years, built it up into a separate work. It had
consisted formerly of 160 pages: now it formed three volumes of 1,800
pages. There were forty years of incessant study embodied in it. It had
the title _Systematic Phylogeny_:[7] “a sketch of a natural system of
organisms on the basis of their stem-history.” The first volume (dealing
with the protists and plants) appeared in 1894; the second volume
(dealing with the invertebrate animals) in 1896, and the third (dealing
with the vertebrates) in 1895. Closely connected with it is his special
systematic study of the stem-history of the echinoderms (star-fish,
&c.), with particular reference to paleontology (_The Amphoridea and
Cystoidea_ in the _Work in Commemoration of Karl Gegenbaur_, 1896).
Footnote 7:
It has not been translated into English. A recent reviewer in _Nature_
pronounced it to be Haeckel’s best work. [Trans.]
His academic colleagues had hardly begun to master this new phylogeny
when Haeckel once more roused a general agitation by working up the
philosophic nucleus of the _Morphology_ in a more general form than he
had done in the _History of Creation_. This new work was _The Riddle of
the Universe_, “a popular study of the Monistic philosophy.”[8] It was,
he declared, his philosophical testament. In a few months 10,000 copies
of the work were sold, and a later cheap popular edition ran to more
than 100,000 copies. It has also been translated into fourteen different
languages. The controversy it excited has not yet died away. Already a
supplementary volume, _The Wonders of Life_, has followed it (1904).
Haeckel had been working in this department with great vigour for many
years. He only made one appearance at a German scientific congress since
the Virchow affair. That was on September 18, 1882, in quiet and
uncontroversial form. A little excitement was caused amongst those who
saw their salvation in keeping the gentle Darwin far apart from the
impetuous Haeckel when he read a rather free philosophical confession of
Darwin’s. Their tactics broke down as the deceased Darwin passed into an
historical personality and disappeared from the struggle of contending
parties. In 1892 Haeckel wrote with great vigour in the militant Berlin
journal, the _Freie Bühne_, on the new alliance of the Church and
political parties in Germany, criticising the political situation on
general philosophical principles, and in opposition to Virchow’s spirit
of compromise. In the same year he delivered at Altenburg a lecture on
“Monism as a connecting link between religion and science.” In this he
took a conciliatory line, and showed how his philosophic views could be
reconciled with any really sincere pursuit of truth, whatever aim it
professed to have. The address closed with the words: “May God, the
spirit of the good, the beautiful, and the true, grant it.” However,
both his criticism and his attempt at conciliation only led to further
and more bitter attacks in certain quarters. His only reply was to bring
out the first numbers of a fine illustrated work—a work that came from a
quite different depth of his rich personality. This was the _Art-forms
in Nature_ [not translated], a collection of beautiful forms of
radiolaria, sponges, siphonophores, &c., for artists and admirers of the
beautiful. It was a work such as he alone could produce. “In the storm
didst thou begin: in the storm shalt thou end,” he might have said to
himself, in the words of David Strauss. The storm never left him. In its
mood was flung off with ready pen the _Riddle of the Universe_. “Up, old
warrior, gird thy loins!” as we read in Strauss.
Footnote 8:
Literally, the title is “World-Riddles,” or “World-Problems.” [Trans.]
[Illustration:
ERNST HAECKEL, 1896.
_From a photograph by Gabriel Max._
]
The biographical sketch of a living man does not close with a stroke,
but with three stars. They glow still, these stars. Under their
influence much may yet happen—much struggle, much peace. In view of the
general situation of our time there is little hope that the last stretch
of this extraordinary career will be spent in peace, though behind it
all lies the peace-loving soul of an artist. But if Haeckel’s career is
to be one of struggle to the last hour, he may console himself with the
noble words of Goethe:—
“And when at length the long gray lashes fall
A gentle light will broaden o’er the scene,
In whose effulgence our remoter sons
Will read the lineaments of yonder stars,
And in the loftier view to which they rise
Of God and man a loftier image hold.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CHAPTER VIII
THE CROWNING YEARS
[By JOSEPH MCCABE]
When Professor Bölsche closed his biographical sketch in 1900 with the
three stars that “still glowed,” he had little suspicion how widely they
would yet flame out before they passed from the firmament of biography
to that of history. As it has proved, Haeckel was then only entering
upon the period of vast popular influence which forms the closing part
of his remarkable career. He had in 1900 a few thousand thoughtful
readers in several countries beside his own. To-day he is read by
hundreds of thousands in Germany, England, France, and Italy, and the
fourteen different translations of his most popular work have carried
his ideas over the whole world. To-day the thoughts of this professor of
zoology in an obscure German town are discussed eagerly by bronzed and
blackened artisans in the workshops of London, Paris, and Tokio, as well
as throughout Germany. The reader will have noticed in the earlier
chapters that the most dignified and disdainful of Haeckel’s opponents
have been the academic philosophers. In the year 1905 a Berlin professor
of philosophy, a stern critic of his system, devotes a long special
section of his _History of Philosophy since Kant_ to Haeckel and his
long-contemned speculations. Why? Because, to quote his concluding
sentences, “the far-reaching impulse that Haeckel has given will never
more die out. He has become a sower of the future. The glad echo that
his words have found in a hundred thousand breasts must stir every
representative of ruling power in Church and Science to make a closer
self-examination, a closer scrutiny of received ideas. Does not the
thought press irresistibly upon us that somehow or other we have entered
upon the wrong path in our modern development?”[9]
Footnote 9:
Dr. Otto Gramzow’s _Geschichte der Philosophie seit Kant_, p. 503.
In an earlier chapter Professor Bölsche tells the moving story of the
writing of the _General Morphology_: the young man making his masterly
appeal to the scientists of Germany, which he thinks they will read over
his grave. There is a singular parallel to this in Haeckel’s attitude at
the time when Bölsche closed his work. Haeckel had just written another
“last will and testament,” another proud and defiant utterance of what
he felt to be the truth about God and man and nature. Once more he
seemed to see the marble gates at the close of his career, and his
sombre glance fell round on a world that was, he thought, sinking into
reaction. This time he appealed to the people. The five years that have
followed have witnessed an extraordinary response on the part of the
people. With the speed of a popular romance his work has flown through
Europe. He has received a hundred proofs that, at all events, the ideas
he thinks to be fraught with salvation for humanity are being considered
and discussed in wide circles that had never before known that there was
a “riddle of the universe.” He has been urged in the heart of the Sahara
to read his own works. He has met, as he travelled on an Alpine railway,
cultured nuns who told him they had learned evolution from “Professor
Haeckel’s works.” He has looked down with mingled feeling on the wild
applause of a gathering of thousands of Socialists. He has been
immortalised—strangest and last of all apotheoses—in an academic history
of philosophy!
The present chapter will tell the story of these five stirring years. It
will aim at conveying to the English reader, by plain presentment of
facts, a full picture of the activity that has attracted or distracted
the attention of so many in the last few years. If Dr. Gramzow is right,
if through these five years of indefatigable labour the aged scientist
has become a “sower of the future,” it is well for friend and foe to
understand him.
There is only one respect in which one’s personal feeling may be allowed
to tinge such a narrative as this. 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. Yet there is one aspect of
Haeckel’s recent life that makes us almost forget the cosmic issues.
These five years have been, in literal truth, “crowning years” of his
aims. For all the slights and insults that have been showered on the
grim worker he has had a rich recompense of honour and love. Even if his
ideas are to fade and wither like his laurel crowns, it will be
something for a future historian to record that a gentler and more
genial light fell about his closing years. As Gramzow says: “He _tried_
to give us his best.”
An event that Professor Bölsche has only briefly alluded to in his last
crowded chapter was a fitting inauguration of the last decade of
Haeckel’s career. On the 17th of February, 1894, his sixtieth birthday
was celebrated at Jena. The lover of nature and of the silent study
passes uneasily through such functions, but the student of Haeckel’s
life must dwell on it. Jena had for some years realised that world-fame
somehow attached to the straight, smiling figure that it saw passing
daily to the Zoological Institute. It had witnessed the grave procedure
of the boycott in the sixties. It had heard distinguished leaders of
Churches, like Professor Michelis, brand his works as “a fleck of shame
on the escutcheon of Germany,” “an attack on the foundations of religion
and morality,” “a symptom of senile marasmus.” It saw all these unworthy
attacks sink into confusion, and a new era begin. It heard of greater
universities competing for their professor and his refusal to leave
them. It saw Bismarck fall on his neck and kiss him repeatedly when, in
1892, he headed the deputation to invite him to Jena; and it noted how
the Prince absolutely refused to drive through their town “unless
Haeckel comes with me” in the carriage. It gave his name proudly to one
of its fine new streets.
In February, 1894, Jena witnessed a remarkable celebration—remarkable
not only to those who had lived with him in the sixties. A marble bust
of Haeckel was unveiled by Professor Hertwig, with noble speech, in the
Zoological Institute. A festive dinner, such as Germans alone can
conduct, was held in the famous Luther-Hostel. More than a thousand
letters and telegrams poured in from all parts of the world, and scores
of journals awoke the interest of Germany. I have before me the
privately-published report on the celebration, autographed to “Agnes
Haeckel.” Two lists in it catch the eye. One is a list of Haeckel’s
publications. Apart from his long and numerous articles in scientific
journals he has written forty-two works (13,000 pages, frequently
quarto) in thirty-three years. All but two are pure contributions to
science: some of them are classical monographs of original research;
most are beautifully illustrated by himself. The second list gives the
names of those who have contributed towards the marble bust by Professor
Kopf, of Rome. It is worthy of science. It includes five hundred
university professors and heads of academic institutions in all parts of
the world, from Brazil and the States to Algiers and Egypt and India. In
their name Professor Hertwig greeted Haeckel as one “who has written his
name in letters of light in the history of science.” From Italy the
Minister of Public Instruction sent the following telegram: “Italy, that
you love so much, takes cordial part in all the honours that the
civilised nations of the earth are heaping on you in commemoration of
your sixtieth birthday. In the name of the Italian Universities, which
love you so much and so much admire your undying work, I send you a
heartfelt greeting and wishes for a long and happy and active career.”
Dr. Paul von Ritter gave 75,000 marks [shillings] for the erection of a
monument to Haeckel at Jena when the hour comes. He had previously given
300,000 marks to be spent in the furtherance of Haeckel’s scientific
views.
The story so vividly unfolded by Professor Bölsche has explained how the
estrangement arose between Haeckel and so many of his scientific
colleagues in Germany. It is not a little gratifying to find the names
of some of his critics amongst the subscribers to his festival. The
personality, the aim, the self-sacrifice of the man, no less than his
distinguished special contributions to science, had won a superb
recognition.
In the years 1894-6 Haeckel published the _Systematic Phylogeny_. “We
may differ,” says Professor Arnold Lang of it, “as to the value of
special or even fundamental opinions in it, but we must stand before
this work in astonishment and admiration: astonishment at the vast range
of his knowledge—it would seem that one head could contain no more:
admiration of the intellectual labour with which the various phenomena
are connected and the gigantic mass of material is reduced to order.”
The Royal Academy of Science at Turin judged the work the best that had
been published in the last four years of the nineteenth century, and
awarded its author the Bressa prize, a sum of 10,000 lire.
[Illustration:
HAECKEL AND A GROUP OF ITALIAN PROFESSORS.
HOTEL BRISTOL, GENOA, 1904.
Pavona. Cattaneo. Ariola. Berninzo. Porro. Locchi. Andres.
Monti. Issel. Orlando. Penzig. Maggi. Haeckel. Morselli. Cattaneo.
]
In August, 1898, he made a further visit to England. The International
Congress of Zoology met at Cambridge, and Haeckel was invited to deliver
an address. He chose his ever-present theme—the evolution of man. The
long lecture, or essay, has been translated by Dr. Gadow under the
title, _The Last Link_. The title is somewhat misleading, as only a page
or two are devoted to “the last link.” Otherwise the little work offers
students a most excellent summary of “our present knowledge of the
evolution of man,” the title which Haeckel gave it.
But the last period of Haeckel’s career is associated chiefly with, and
is really inaugurated by his now famous _Riddle of the Universe_,
published in 1899. To understand that work, to avoid the extremes of
praise and censure that have been lavished on it, one must put oneself
in Haeckel’s position at the close of the last century. Mr. Wells has
given us a forecast of the coming social order in which the intellectual
few are separated by a wider and deeper gulf than ever from the workers
and the women of the world. That keen-eyed and judicious social writer
has already modified his forecast, but there were symptoms enough of the
possibility of such an issue a few years ago. In Germany the signs were
ominous to a man like Haeckel. The older Liberalism to which he belonged
by tradition and conviction seemed in danger of being ground to dust
between the upper and the nether stones of the new political mill—the
increasing strength of Social Democracy and the increasing and
consequent alliance of Conservative Kaiserism with the still powerful
Catholic Church. Haeckel distrusted the power of Demos much as Renan did
when he wrote his sombre dialogues in the seventies; and a political
alliance with the Vatican opened out to him the grim prospect of a
return to the Middle Ages. The freedom of research and teaching for
which he had fought with unsparing vigour was, he thought, imperilled by
the new alliance, no less than the very existence of culture was
endangered by the triumph of Social Democracy. His academic colleagues
remained in that isolation which he had ever bitterly resented.
In face of this situation, which seemed to grow more sombre as the last
years of the century dragged on, his zeal for truth and progress had but
one outlet. He must appeal to the people. He must take the conclusions
he had so laboriously worked out in his _Systematic Phylogeny_, and
translate them from scientific hieroglyphics into a demotic tongue. He
must nail his theses with his own hand on the cathedral door, like the
great monk whose work seemed in danger of perishing. The partial success
of his _History of Creation_ was encouraging, though that work had only
penetrated into the first circle beyond the sacred academic enclosure,
and was still unknown to the crowd. Gathering his strength for what he
believed to be his final effort, he blew a blast that would reach the
far-off shop and factory. It must be no gentle note, no timid suggestion
that the scientific work of the nineteenth century had thrown doubt on
current religious notions. He was quitting the stage. He believed these
things were true, were established. The world must listen to them, must
discuss them; and then the twentieth century would pass its informed
verdict over his grave.
So he wrote a vigorous, an irritating, an awakening book. It must be
read in this context. The charge of “dogmatism” so often hurled at it is
not without humour. It is generally raised by men who in the same breath
hold their truths so dogmatically that they resent his very questions.
They forget, too, that the chief conclusions of the _Riddle_ are
references to the larger work in which, soundly or unsoundly, they are
provided with massive foundations of scientific material. In England
there is some excuse, as the larger work is untranslated and unknown;
though one may resent the critic who charges Haeckel with egoism for his
constant references to his other works and then proceeds to ridicule the
slenderness of the foundations of his theories. Further, it is too often
forgotten that Haeckel opens his work with a rare warning to the reader
that his opinions are very largely “subjective” and his command of other
subjects than biology is very “unequal.” In fine, his constant and
exaggerated allusions to the opposition he encounters from his
scientific colleagues is, for any candid reader, a sufficient corrective
of “dogmatism.”
The work lit up at once a flame of controversy that has hardly yet
diminished in Germany. Students have told me how, when some professor
dropped the well-known name in the course of his lecture, the class
would split at once into two demonstrative sections. Ten thousand copies
of the library edition of the work were sold within a few months, and it
quickly ran to eight editions. This remarkable success irritated his
opponents, and the wide range of the subjects touched in the work gave
them opportunities. Germany was deluged with pamphlets of offence and
defence. Some of Haeckel’s pupils replied to his opponents, but the
master himself smiled through the storm. His chief critics were men with
no competence in biology, and he was not minded to comply with their
stratagem of withdrawing attention from the substantial positions of the
work. Dennert, the philologist, swept together all the hard sayings
about Haeckel that the fierce struggle of the preceding twenty years had
produced—Paulsen and Adickes, the metaphysicians, poured philosophic
scorn on his pretensions to construct a theory of knowledge. Adickes, in
particular, met him with a vigorous fusillade of pure Kantism. It is a
curious commentary on this long philosophic disdain to find Haeckel
awarded a prominent place amongst “the philosophers since Kant.”
Two points in this connection are noteworthy. Haeckel’s first sin
against the ruling metaphysic of the nineteenth century was his “naïve
realism.” He had dared to think he could break beyond the charmed circle
of our states of consciousness. He had dreamed that a real material
world lay here in space before the human mind came into existence; that
a living, palpitating humanity, not a bloodless phantasm in the mind,
called for our most solemn efforts. Where the ordinary reader saw a
truism the metaphysicians recognised a deadly sin, and laughed Homeric
laughter. To-day we have, both in England and Germany, a strong claim
arising amongst the metaphysicians themselves for a return to a realist
basis. Haeckel’s second and chief sin was his claim to have thrown light
on the evolution of consciousness and his disdain of all study of mind
that was not grounded on evolution. To-day Gramzow writes: “The
criticism which he makes of Kant’s theory of knowledge from the
evolutionary point of view is the greatest advance that philosophy has
made in that branch since Kant’s time.”
The most violent critics of the _Riddle_ were the theologians. It would
be improper here to enter into the controversy, and indeed Haeckel has
paid little attention to his critics of late years. Some time ago a
German religious magazine was sent to me in which one of his leading
critics had written a shameful article with the aim of alienating him
from me. I at once wrote to him, and received a letter brimming over
with his hearty laughter at the idea that he might have taken any notice
of what they said. The eminent ecclesiastical historian, Professor
Loofs, made a ponderous attack on his incidental reference to the birth
of Christ. As Loofs himself denied the divinity and supernatural birth
of Christ, Haeckel felt little inclination to enter on a serious
argument about the human parentage. The theologian was so much hurt that
he used language, as far as was consistent with a broad view of the
theological dignity, that came within legal limits, and then quoted to
Haeckel the page and letter in the German code on which he might take
action!
But a great counterpoise to these bitter attacks—attacks that forgot, as
Gramzow says, that “there is an ethic for the critic as well as for the
man of science”—had now been provided. Men like Dr. Schmidt, Dr.
Breitenbach, Professor Bölsche, and Professor Verworn rallied to their
master, and conveyed a juster image of him and his work to the public.
The ominous silence of the great biologists was felt to mean that his
views were, in substance, no heresy to them. The man’s warm and
enthusiastic zeal for truth and humanity, his earnest efforts to pierce
the barriers that shut off the treasures of science from the mass, could
not be ignored. A cheaper edition of his work was demanded, and it was
soon in the hands of more than 150,000 readers. Country after country
imported his “gospel of Monism,” the stirring agitation spread to
France, England, America, Italy, and on until it reached Australia and
Japan. To-day fourteen translations of the _Riddle_ bear his teaching to
the ends of the world.
Little need be said here of the Haeckel controversy in this country. I
remember well the day when the German work was submitted to me with a
view to publication. It did not seem to have the stuff of a
conflagration in it. I hazarded a guess that it would sell a thousand
copies, and thought that it contained so valuable a description of the
evolution of mind that it should be published. It has sold, with rather
less than the usual advertising, with no special machinery for pressing
it such as is at the command of religious works—it has sold about
100,000 copies. The success of the work astounded us. While we were
being accused of “thrusting it down people’s throats” we could not have
arrested its circulation, had we wished, without positively refusing to
republish it. Indeed, the last library edition has long been out of
print, though still in frequent demand. It has made Haeckel’s a familiar
name in circles where even Spencer has been heard to be described as “a
great balloonist.” Clergymen have written to their journals saying how
they heard the Monistic philosophy discussed by groups of paviors. Sir
Leslie Stephen told me, on his death-bed, but with a momentary flash of
his old humour, how an Orkney clergyman had written to him for
consolation, as it was circulating amongst the fishers of that _ultima
thule_.[10]
Footnote 10:
The reader who desires a summary of the criticisms passed on the work
may consult Dr. Schmidt’s _Der Kampf um die Welträthsel_ for Germany,
and my own _Haeckel’s Critics Answered_ for England. The only
biologist of competence who has written on it in this country is Prof.
Lloyd-Morgan (_Contemporary Review_, 1903), but his reply is indirect.
Sir Oliver Lodge has recently dealt with it at length in his _Life and
Matter_, but the distinguished physicist’s conception of life is in
extreme and general disfavour with the biologists of England.
From the seething agitation he had aroused Professor Haeckel cheerfully
withdrew in the autumn of 1900 to make his long journey to Java. He now
lived under the public eye, and amusing constructions were put on his
movements. American journalism arrived, by its peculiar methods, at the
knowledge that he had gone in quest of bones of the “missing link.” A
few bones of a half-human, half-ape form had been discovered on the
south coast of Java a few years previously, and the trained American
imagination quickly constructed a theory, which as quickly crystallised
into fact. Haeckel had been heavily subsidised by an American
millionaire to discover more bones of the ape-man of Java. Not to be
outdone, other journals added a rival subsidy (from the American
Government) and a rival search. The sober truth was that Haeckel had
used his Bressa prize fund, with a subsidy from the Ritter fund at Jena,
to make a study of botany and marine life in the tropics. He was within
a hundred miles of the spot where Dubois had found his interesting
relics, but made no effort to go further. For him the evolution of man
rested on too massive a foundation for a few bones to increase its
solidity. Once more he brought home huge cases of preparations, a large
number of sketches (some of them touched up by Verestchagin, who was
returning on the boat from China), and material for the inevitable book.
_Aus Insulinde_ is a charming and finely illustrated work of travel, but
has not been translated.
Before he left Jena he had, with his characteristic urbanity and
diligence, given personal replies to about a thousand letters he had
received apropos of his _Riddle of the Universe_. The epistolary flood
rose higher than ever on his return. The struggle had spread to England
and France. He had returned to a cauldron of controversy. He quietly
resumed his teaching at the university and attacked his still formidable
literary programme. Day after day the aged scholar—he was now in his
sixty-seventh year—briskly stepped up to the podium at the Zoological
Institute and delivered his lectures, drawing his objects with a few
quick strokes on the board or exhibiting the plates prepared by Giltsch.
He noted with a quiet gleam of satisfaction that a few ladies now
ventured into the “Materialist” circle. The new century had begun.
In 1902 he issued the cheap edition of the _Riddle_, of which 180,000
copies have been sold in Germany, with a reply to its critics. “The
great struggle for truth,” he wrote to his friend, Dr. Breitenbach,
“grows fiercer and fiercer, the more my work is attacked by the clergy,
the metaphysical schoolmen, and the erudite Philistines. I am
continually receiving lively and sometimes enthusiastic letters of
congratulation from all parts of the world.” In the meantime he was
engaged upon two important works, which he published in 1903.
The earlier edition of the _Anthropogeny_, of which Professor Bölsche
has written, was undergoing a thorough revision. New evidence was
pouring in every year in support of his sketch of the genealogy of
humanity. Dubois had discovered what is now admitted to be an organism
midway between the highest ape and the earliest prehistoric man. Selenka
had published wonderful studies of the anthropoid apes. Friedenthal and
others had shown the literal blood-relationship of the higher apes and
man by a series of beautiful experiments. He must once more gather
together the enormous mass of facts, and marshal them with his old
command. For six months he worked incessantly on the new edition. A
hundred pages of matter were added to it, a hundred fresh illustrations.
Great and exacting as the task would have been for a younger man, the
work appeared in 1903 in a form that silenced criticism. I need only
quote a sentence from the notice of it that was published in the _Daily
Telegraph_ by one of our leading literary critics, when it was issued in
this country. “It is a grand conception, this of the great physiologist,
that every man, in the brief term of his prenatal development, should go
through these successive changes, by which man has, in countless ages,
been evolved from the primitive germ-cell; and it is triumphantly
vindicated in _The Evolution of Man_. It is impossible to do justice in
words to the patience, the labour, the specialised skill and industry
involved in the preparation of this monumental work.” And one has only
to compare this latest edition with the previous one to see at a glance
the complete transformation, and realise the freshness and force of mind
of the aged biologist.
In the face of such a work, with its towering structure of proof from
embryology, comparative anatomy, and paleontology, one must look
leniently on some of Haeckel’s references to fellow-anthropologists like
Virchow. It is not many years since the great pathologist declared
emphatically at a scientific congress that “we could just as well
conceive man to have descended from a sheep or an elephant as from an
ape.” When a leading anthropologist could say such things in 1894, a
strain is laid on our charity. Darwin’s words, written in a letter to
Haeckel, press on us once more: “Virchow’s conduct is shameful, and I
trust he will one day feel the shame of it.” Professor Rabl has lately
contended that his deceased father-in-law (Virchow) admitted the
evolution of man in private. We cannot wonder if Haeckel merely retorts:
“So much the more shame on his public utterances.” Such things must, at
least, be borne in mind when one reads Haeckel’s severe judgment on some
of his great contemporaries.
The _Evolution of Man_ not only offers the complete proof of its
thesis—a proof accepted by every prominent biologist in England and by
many prelates (such as the Bishop of London and the Dean of
Westminster)—but affords also interesting proof of Haeckel’s artistic
gifts. Some of the best plates in the work are executed by him. But in
the same year, 1903, he gave a more popular evidence of it. In detached
numbers he published the large and beautiful volume of his _Art-forms in
Nature_. In this work he depicts with remarkable success hundreds of the
most beautiful forms that his long study of marine life had brought
before him. A fine expression of the man’s dual nature, the work appeals
with equal force to the æsthete and the scientist. And during the long
hours that he was peering into his microscope and sketching the delicate
and graceful forms, the din and roar of the mighty controversy he had
aroused was breaking in with every post. By the end of the year he had
received more than 5,000 letters in connection with the _Riddle of the
Universe_. Scurrilous letters and idolatrous letters, sober letters and
fantastic letters, flowed upon the Zoological Institute, where he worked
with pen and pencil, and were duly read. He merely defended himself by
posting to each correspondent a printed form that he would soon issue a
new work in which the further questions would be answered. He had given
his life to science and humanity, and would not withdraw for the
well-earned rest. And from a thousand pulpits over Europe and America
the aged and self-sacrificing worker was being denounced and caricatured
to audiences who had not the remotest knowledge of his aims and his
work. A friend of mine heard a minister in an important Glasgow church
assure his congregation from the pulpit that “Haeckel was a man of
notoriously licentious life;” he had heard it “from a friend of
Haeckel’s.” At the very time when Haeckel was buried in his splendid
artistic work, the _Christian World Pulpit_ was issuing a sermon in
which Dr. Horton was explaining “the personal factor” in Haeckel. “He is
an atrophied soul, a being that is blind on the spiritual side,” the
popular preacher declared.
From the turmoil Haeckel withdrew once more to his beloved Italy. There
was another reason for his flight. His seventieth birthday was
approaching. He had declared at the banquet given in his honour on the
occasion of his sixtieth birthday, that if he lived for the seventieth
he would “bury himself in some dark corner of the Thuringian forest, far
away from all festivities.” Strenuous and exacting as the ten years had
been, he now found himself on the threshold of his eighth decade of
life. His wife, also, was ailing, and they both proceeded to the Italian
Riviera at the beginning of the winter. Few of his friends were informed
where he was. “I want,” he wrote to me, “to pass my seventieth birthday
in peace.” He settled at Rapallo, and at once commenced his favourite
fishing for the tiny inhabitants of the Mediterranean. The “cloistral
quietness” of the little town, the daily prospect of the blue
Mediterranean, “the solitary walks in the wild gorges of the Ligurian
Apennines, and the uplifting sight of their forest-crowned
mountain-altars” restored his freshness of spirit. Once more a vast
labour lay before him. He had promised a work that would answer all
biological questions addressed to him in the 5,000 letters of his
correspondents. He had all the queries, all the criticisms of his views,
all the latest literature of the subject, to digest into a compact
volume. The result was a new work of 557 pages, _The Wonders of Life_, a
remarkable summary of his zoological and botanical knowledge, with
excursions into psychology, suicide, lunacy, ethnography, theology, and
ethics. Its twenty solid and well-arranged chapters were written in four
months.
“Promptly at 5,” he wrote in December, “I am awakened by the bells of
the church hard by. I write continuously until 12. After a frugal lunch
and a short rest, the afternoon is devoted to a walk or to water-colour
sketches. The longer days allow me to sit and paint in the open air
until five. Our quiet evenings, from 5 to 10, are spent in reading and
in writing letters. The interruption for dinner, from 7 to 8, gives us
an opportunity to exchange jokes over our ‘cloistral life.’” Thus the
veteran naturalist, of “notoriously licentious life” (the words of the
Glasgow preacher were spoken at this very period), approached his eighth
decade of life—of work.
He remained at Rapallo until the birthday had passed, but his address
had meantime become widely known, and the miniature postal arrangements
at Rapallo were severely taxed. Letters, telegrams, flowers, and other
gifts—mostly spontaneous expressions of gratitude from “unknown readers
of the _Riddle of the Universe_“—reminded him of the larger world that
now appreciated him. A still larger number of letters and gifts reached
Jena from all parts of the world. Hundreds of German journals and
periodicals devoted long and generous articles to the distinguished
worker, and little festive commemorations were held at many of the
universities. At Zurich, Professor Conrad Keller and Professor Arnold
Lang delivered speeches which have since been published. Jena sent a
deputation consisting of a number of its professors to visit the hero in
person at Rapallo. Reflecting on these remarkable demonstrations and the
extraordinary correspondence that continually reaches Haeckel, one is
disposed to repeat of him the phrase applied to a great heretical
teacher of the Middle Ages, Peter Abélard: “Never was man so loved—and
so hated.”
A feature of the commemoration that peculiarly gratified him was the
special festive number of the German students’ lively periodical,
_Jugend_, published at Munich. On February 16th it appeared as a
“Haeckel number,” full of sprightly anecdote and generous appreciation,
and bearing on its cover a striking reproduction in colour of the
Lenbach portrait. His letter of thanks to the journal shows that the
repose and the beauty of Italy, and the outburst of affection his
birthday has provoked, have set him perfectly atune to life once more.
“Ah! Prithee stay, thou art so fair,” he almost says in the Goethe
phrase, as he “hails the moment fleeing.” He goes on to deprecate the
effort to make “a learned man” of him. “That, alas, I am not. 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. This 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. And I have honestly tried with all my modest powers, to
reproduce with pen and pencil a part of what I saw, and reveal it to my
fellows. I have had to fight many a hard fight, and in my hatred of lies
and hypocrisy and decaying traditions I have at times struck a sharp
note. But I trust, dear _Youth_, that thou wilt not judge all that
harshly in so old and storm-tried, a warrior, and that thou wilt go on
to stand with me, shoulder to shoulder, fighting for the spiritual
progress of humanity, fighting in the cause of the great trinity of the
true, the good, and the beautiful.”
The work he had composed in four months at Rapallo, _The Wonders of
Life_, was issued on his return. It has not had the stormy success of
its predecessor. The fact is instructive. This work contains a fuller
proof of the chief scientific positions of the _Riddle_. It is,
therefore, more technical and more difficult to read. Amongst other
matters, it contains a fine summary of those speculations on the
mathematical forms of organisms and the idea of individuality of which
Professor Bölsche has written so appreciatively. It must be recognised
that Haeckel has fulfilled a duty in thus providing the general reader
with a fuller biological proof of his theses. If that estimable person,
the general reader, betrays less eagerness for the fuller proof, we must
remember that for ages he has been taught to disregard such a thing as
“proof.” It is the general reader that makes Haeckel didactic. It is
Haeckel’s opponents who made the general reader. However, the great bulk
of _The Wonders of Life_ is true to its title. It is an intensely
interesting summary of biological facts. For the rest, if it contains
speculations that run beyond the evidence (though based on it) who is
better qualified to open up these new paths than men with the enormous
range of knowledge that Haeckel has? “I agree with you,” one of the
first biologists in England wrote to me recently, “that Haeckel is one
of the first living biologists. There are not any others who have the
same wide knowledge and experience and consequent ‘point of view.’ He
knows his zoology, botany, physiology, and pathology, also geology, and
has travelled, and has a keen interest in and knowledge of no small
degree of philology, archæology, and ethnography.”
Haeckel was in Italy once more in the autumn of 1904, and although he
did little quiet travel and no fishing for radiolaria it is probable
that no visit to the country ever afforded him such satisfaction. One
great shadow lay over the beautiful land and its genial race whenever he
visited it—a gross and almost impenetrable superstition. Turn off the
great routes of Italy, with their splendid cathedrals, and visit the
small towns and villages. See the scum of Naples tearing the clothes
from each other to kiss the “blood of St. Januarius.” Peer into the
abysses of vice and grossness that are covered effectually by this
formal and unlovely practice of religion. Haeckel had seen all that with
sad eyes for many a year.
In 1904 a little institution that called itself “The International
Congress of Freethinkers” announced that it would hold its annual
gathering at Rome. The pope—the new pope, friend of the royal
house—lodged a feeling protest with the authorities. The priests poured
inflammatory rhetoric over their people until violence seemed
inevitable. The Italian Government’s only reply was to grant the
heretics all the privileges that were ever given to the great Catholic
pilgrimages: to put at their disposal its finest institution, the
Collegio Romano, and to send its Minister of Public Instruction to open
the Congress. Veteran warriors such as Haeckel, Berthelot, Salmeron,
Sergi, Denis, and Björnsen, gladly announced their adhesion. Paris sent
a thousand delegates; Spain nearly a thousand; Italy her thousands.
Whole municipalities in Italy and France (even that of Paris) took part.
The Latin world was aflame with rebellion. We met, seven thousand
strong, in the heart of Rome, and Rome—the jade—smiled prettily as we
marched up the Via Venti Settembre, as it had smiled once on processions
of Cybele, and then on processions of Catholics.
Haeckel was greeted with a wild demonstration as he stepped on to the
platform in the great _Cortile_ of the College. Straight and proud,
white with age but pink with more than the freshness of a young man, he
adjured them in futile German, in his thin, inaudible voice, to form
themselves into a new Church, the great Association of Monists. Few
heard and less understood him, but his name was on every heart and his
reception superb.
A week afterwards I picked up a London journal in an Italian hotel, and
read—as hundreds of thousands had done—that a miserable Freethought
conference had been held at Rome: that its rowdy proceedings had
disgusted the scholars who had, in a misguided moment, lent their names
to it. Thus are we informed at times. I remembered Sergi’s enthusiastic
comments at the close. “E magnifico, e magnifico,” was all he could
gasp. I remembered Haeckel’s exultation as we walked home to his Albergo
Santa Chiara, and Berthelot’s deep joy. The same scholars, except
Björnsen, took part in the Congress at Paris, in 1905, when 100,000 of
us were nobly received by the Conseil Municipal. But Haeckel was too
unwell to come. Nature has laid her hand on him at length, and bade him
hang his weapons on the wall. He can but hope to remain a passive
spectator for a few years more of that vast stirring of the Latin
peoples which he has so much contributed to bring about.
His last active effort was the delivery of three lectures at Berlin in
the spring of 1905. He has always avoided public lectures as much as
possible. His poor voice and comparative nervousness make the work
unattractive. A severe attack of influenza sapped his strength in the
winter of 1905, and he has been unable to eliminate its unpleasant
consequences. But the opportunity of enforcing his gospel in the capital
of the Empire, where the Virchows and Du Bois-Reymonds had ruled so long
made him deaf to the counsels of prudence. He chose as his theme the
controversy in regard to evolution, and gave three spirited lectures.
The changed world came home to him vividly enough. A vast and
enthusiastic gathering of admirers in one of the finest halls in Berlin:
outside, at the very door, his clerical opponents distributing handbills
that offered a choice selection of the most venemous attacks on his
person and work. The lectures are now available in English under the
title of _Last Words on Evolution_.
The present state of Haeckel’s health forbids him to hope that he will
do any more active work. As I write, he lies in his villa, in “Haeckel
Street,” overlooking the handsome Zoological Institute, which he raised,
and the little university town that he has made known to the world.
Beyond the graceful hills that cradle it, he sees the dark waves tossing
that he has worked so hard to set in motion. 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 _him_ 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. Through inexorable
labour, through constant sacrifice, through storms of painful obloquy,
he has lived his ideals, if he has made mistakes—been mortal. Those
ideals are an enduring contribution to the good. The first, the motto of
his young days, was _Impavidi progrediamur_—“Let us march on
fearlessly.” The second, the motto of his later years, was: “The good,
the true, and the beautiful, are the ideals, yea the gods, of our
Monistic philosophy.”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bibliography
The following is a list of the works by Professor Haeckel that have been
translated into English:—
“The History of Creation.” Translation (in two vols., edited by E.
Ray-Lankester) of the _Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte_. 1876. [4th
edition, 1892.]
“Freedom in Science and Teaching.” Translation (with preface by T. H.
Huxley) of the _Freie Wissenschaft und Freie Lehre_. 1879.
“Report on the Deep-sea Medusæ dredged by H.M.S. _Challenger_.” Zoology
series, vol. iv. [330 pp. and 2 plates.] 1882.
“The Pedigree of Man.” Translation (by E. B. Aveling) of the _Gesammelte
Populäre Vorträge_. 1883.
“A Visit to Ceylon.” Translation (by Clara Bell) of the _Indische
Reisebriefe_. 1883.
“Report on the Radiolaria collected by H.M.S. _Challenger_.” Zoology
series, vol. xviii. [2,000 pp. 4to and 140 plates.] 1887.
“Report on the Siphonophoræ collected by H.M.S. _Challenger_.” Zoology
series, vol. xxviii. [380 pp. 4to and 50 plates.] 1888.
“Report on the Deep-sea Keratosa collected by H.M.S. _Challenger_.”
Zoology series, vol. xxxii. [92 pp. and 8 plates.] 1889.
“Planktonic-studies.” Translation (by S. W. Field) of
_Plankton-studien_. 1891.
“The Confession of Faith of a Man of Science.” Translation (by J.
Gilchrist) of _Monismus_. 1894.
“The Last Link.” Translation (by Dr. Gadow) of the Cambridge Lecture on
Evolution. 1898.
“The Riddle of the Universe.” Translation (by J. McCabe) of _Die
Welträthsel_. 1901. [6th edition, 1905.]
“The Wonders of Life.” Translation (by J. McCabe) of _Die Lebenswunder_.
1904.
“The Evolution of Man.” Translation (by J. McCabe) of the 5th edition of
the _Anthropogenie_. [905 pp., 512 illustrations, and 30 plates.] 1905.
“Last Words on Evolution.” Translation (by J. McCabe) of _Der Kampf um
den Entwichelungs-Gedanken_. 1906.
--------------
COMPLETE LIST OF PROF. HAECKEL’S WORKS
(EXCLUSIVE OF ARTICLES IN SCIENTIFIC PERIODICALS, ETC.)
“De telis quibusdam Astaci fluviatilis.” Dissertatio inauguralis
histologica. [48 pp. and 2 plates.] 1857.
“De rhizopodum finibus et ordinibus.” Diss. pro venia legendi
impetranda. 1861.
“Die Radiolarien (_Rhizopoda radiaria_).” [Vol. i., 572 pp. fol.; vol.
ii., 35 plates.] 1862.
“Beiträge zur Naturgeschichte der Hydromedusen. Die Familie der
Rüsselquallen (_Medusæ Geryonidæ_).” [204 pp. and 6 plates.] 1865.
“Generelle Morphologie der Organismen.” [Vol. i, xxxii and 574 pp. and 2
plates; vol. ii., clx and 462 pp. and 8 plates.] 1866.
“Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte.” [568 pp. and 9 plates.] 1868. [10th
edition, 1902.]
“Uber die Entstehung und den Stammbaum des Menschengeschlechts.” 1868.
“Zur Entwickelungsgeschichte der Siphonophoren.” Crowned by the Utrecht
Society of Art and Science. [124 pp. 4to and 14 plates.] 1869.
“Uber Arbeitstheilung in Natur und Menschenleben.” 1869.
“Das Leben in den grössten Meerestiefen.” 1870.
“Biologische Studien.” [184 pp. and 6 plates.] 1870.
“Die Kalkschwämme (_Calcispongiæ_).” [Vol. i., xvi and 484 pp.; vol.
ii., 418 pp.; vol. iii., 60 plates.] 1872.
“Anthropogenie, oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen.” [xviii and
732 pp., 12 plates, and 210 woodcuts.] 1874.
“Arabische Korallen.” 1875.
“Die Perigenesis der Plastidule oder die Wellenzengung der
Lebenstheilchen.” 1876.
“Studien zur Gastræatheorie.” [270 pp. and 14 plates.] 1877.
“Die heutige Entwickelungslehre im Verhältnisse zur
Gesammtwissenschaft.” 1877.
“Freie Wissenschaft und Freie Lehre.” [106 pp.] 1878.
“Das Protistenreich.” [104 pp., 58 woodcuts.] 1878.
“Gesammelte populäre Vorträge aus dem Gebiete der Entwickelungslehre.”
[181 pp., 50 woodcuts.] 1878.
“Das System der Medusen.” [xxx and 672 pp. and 40 plates.] 1879.
“Gesammelte populäre Vorträge.” Vol. ii. [164 pp. and 30 woodcuts.]
1879.
“Das System der Acraspeden.” [312 pp. and 20 plates.] 1880.
“Metagenesis und Hypogenesis von _Aurelia aurita_. [36 pp. and 2
plates.] 1881.
“Die Tiefsee-Medusen der Challenger-Reise und der Organismus der
Medusen.” [205 pp. and 32 plates.] 1881.
“Indische Reisebriefe.” [380 pp.] 1882.
“Die Naturanschauung von Darwin, Goethe, und Lamarck.” 1882.
“Grundriss einer allgemeiner Naturgeschichte der Radiolarien.” [248 pp.
4to and 64 plates.] 1887.
“Die Acantharien oder actipyleen Radiolarien.” [32 pp. and 12 plates.]
1888.
“Die Phæodarien oder cannopyleen Radiolarien.” [32 pp. and 30 plates].
1888.
“Plankton-studien.” [112 pp.] 1890.
“Der Monismus als Band zwischen Religion und Wissenschaft.” 1892.
“Zur Phylogenie der Australischen Fauna.” 1893.
“Die Systematische Phylogenie.” [3 vols., 1,800 pp.] 1894.
“Die Amphorideen und Cystoideen.” 1896.
“Ueber unsere gegenwärtige Kenntniss vom Ursprung des Menschen.” 1898.
“Die Welträthsel.” [473 pp.] 1899.
“Aus Insulinde.” [260 pp., 80 illustrations.] 1901.
“Anthropogenie.” [5th edition, 991 pp., 30 plates, and 512
illustrations.] 1903.
“Kunstformen der Natur.” [100 large coloured plates and text.] 1904.
“Die Lebenswunder.” [567 pp.] 1904.
“Ernst Haeckel’s Wanderbilder.” [Series of prints of his oil-paintings
and water-colour landscapes.] 1905.
“Der Kampf um den Entwickelungs-Gedanken.” [112 pp. and 4 plates.] 1905.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Index
A
Adam’s Peak, Haeckel on, 244
Adaptations, embryonic, 228
Adaptation to environment, 119
Adickes, Professor, 304
Adriatic, visit to the, 257
Æsthetic element in Haeckel, 83
Affinities of animals, 233
Agassiz, 229
〃 , on creation, 128
Alexander, Karl, Grand Duke of Weimar, 254
Algeciras, Haeckel at, 252
Algiers, Haeckel arrested in, 259
Allmers, Hermann, 85
Alpine salamander, the, 221
America, the discovery of, 20
Amphioxus, the, 274
_Amphoridea and Cystoidea_, the, 291
Angelo, Michael, paintings of, 15
_Anthropogenie_, the, 279, 309
Anthropological critics, Haeckel’s, 283
Arabia, coral-fishing in, 257
Archeopteryx, the, 167, 223
Arctic hare, the, 119
Art and mathematics, 216
_Art-forms in Nature_, the, 26, 293, 311
Artificial selection, 117
Artistic gifts of Haeckel, 83-4
Asia Minor, travels in, 257
_Aspects of Nature_, 46
Association of Monists, 319
Athletic festival, Haeckel at the, 173
Atom, the, 212
_Aus Insulinde_,308
B
Bacilli, the, 206
Bacteria, the, 180
Basedow, 32
Belligemma, 258
Berlin, Haeckel’s criticism of, 30
〃 , lectures at, in 1905, 319
Berthelot, 318, 319
Björnsen, B., 318, 319
Bible, the, 126
Biogenetic law, the, 219
Bird, evolution of the, 223
Birth of Haeckel, 29
Birthday, celebration of Haeckel’s sixtieth, 297
Birthday, celebration of Haeckel’s seventieth, 314
Birthdays, real determination of, 102
Bismarck, esteem of, for Haeckel, 298
Bleek, Professor, 37
Bose, Countess, liberality of, 255
Botany, Haeckel’s early love of, 36
Braun, Alexander, 52
Bressa prize, the, 300
Bronn, 128
Bruno, Giordano, 16
Butterfly, development of the, 227
C
Calcispongiæ, the, 272
〃 , embryology of the, 273
Calumniation of Haeckel, 266, 268
Cambridge, Haeckel at, 300
Canaries, voyage to the, 240
Catastrophic theory, the, 108
Catholicism in Germany, 301
〃 , lower features of, 134
Cell, discovery of the, 56, 65
〃 , nature of the, 178
Cell-soul, the, 161
_Cell-souls and Soul-cells_, 286
Cell-state, the, 57
〃 , man as a, 160
Cell-theory, the, and Darwinism, 178
Cenogenesis, 231
Ceylon, Haeckel’s life in, 33
〃 , visit to, 258
_Challenger_ expedition, the, 287
Chromacea, the, 180
_Chrysaora_, 176
Classical studies, 35
Classification, Haeckel’s reform of, 233-4
Colombo, Haeckel at, 258
Columbus, 16, 20
Compromise, Virchow advocates, 163-171
Congresses, founding of scientific, 144
Consciousness, Virchow on, 163
Copernicus, 16
_Corals of Arabia_, the, 257
Craw-fish, study of the, 77
Creation, difficulties of, 98
Crystal, life of the, 203
Cuvier’s theory of creation, 107
_Cyanea_, 176
D
Dalmatia, visit to, 257
Darwin’s condemnation of Virchow, 311
Darwin, Haeckel’s intercourse with, 241
〃 in South America, 103
〃 on botany, 39
〃 , physiognomy of, 146
〃 , reasoning of, 117-20
〃 , theism of, 124
Darwinism accepted by Haeckel, 133
“Dead” matter, 203
Death of Haeckel’s wife, 184
_Deep-sea Medusæ_, the, 287
Degree, dissertation for the, 77
Dennert, Prof., 304
_Descent of Man_, the, 243
Design, abandonment of, 169
_Desmonema Annasethe_ the, 186
Dissection, 55
Division of labour, essay on, 249
Doctorates held by Haeckel, 24
Dogmatism, alleged, of Haeckel, 23, 218, 303
Dohrn, Anton, 59
Down, Haeckel’s visit to, 241
Dubois, Eugen, 167, 309
Du Bois-Reymond, E., 135
E
Education, Haeckel on elementary, 34
Egypt, visit to, 257
Ehrenberg, 78, 96
_Elective Affinities_, the, 45
Embryonic diagrams, Haeckel’s early, 268
Embryology, 57
〃 and evolution, 170
〃 in Haeckel’s works, 268, 280
_Embryology of the Siphonophoræ_, the, 248
Emotional character of Haeckel, 186-7
Engelmann, 173
_Erica cinerea_, search for the, 37
“Ernst Haeckel Street,” 43
Essay, Haeckel’s first, 71
_Essays on the Theory of Evolution_, 287
Evolution, internal law of, 130
〃 of species, 114
_Evolution of Man_, the, 279, 310
“Exact” scientists, 131, 132, 164
Extinct species, 107
Extinction of species, 112, 119
F
Family of Haeckel, the, 253
Filippo de Filippi, 76
Fish, nature of the, 219
FitzRoy, Captain, 103
_Flora Hallensis_, contribution to the, 37
Fol, 245
_For Darwin_, 230
_Force and Matter_, 201
Forms, science of, 190-2
Form-unities, 207
_Free Science and Free Teaching_, 285
Freedom of research, 75, 156
French rule in Prussia, 25
Freytag, Gustav, 21, 29
Friedenthal, 310
Frog, the, 219
〃 , evolution of the, 222
G
Galapagos Islands, Darwin in the, 116
Galileo, 16
Gandtner, 37
Gastræa, the, 276
Gastræa-theory, the, 278
Gastrula, the, 277
Gegenbaur, Karl, 62-4
Genealogical tree of organisms, 149, 152, 226
_Generelle Morphologie_, the, 188
Genius, 102
Geology, 108
〃 and evolution, 167
_Geryonidæ_, the, 177
Gill-slits in the human embryo, 269
Giltsch, Adolph, 289
Glyptodon, the, 113
Gneisenau, 29
God, Haeckel’s conception of, 133-5, 236
〃 , the new conception of, 19
Goethe, 17
〃 , evolution in works of, 238
〃 on morphology, 190-1
Goethe’s influence on Haeckel, 41-6
Gramzow, Otto, on Haeckel, 295
Greece, visit to, 257
Greeff, Richard, 244
Greek, Haeckel’s knowledge of, 36
_Green Henry_, 45
Gryptotherium, the, 113
Gude, Karl, 37
H
Haeckel abandons theology, 75, 133
〃 , æsthetic element in, 83, 185
〃 , ancestry of, 21
Haeckel and Darwin, 127, 241
〃 〃 Gegenbaur, 62
〃 〃 Müller, 69
〃 〃 Virchow, 163, 284
〃 as a physician, 80
〃 〃 traveller, 256
〃 at Down, 241
〃 at Stettin, 146
〃 , birth of, 29
〃 , boyhood of, 31-3
〃 , early education of, 34-50
〃 embraces evolution, 137
〃 , family of, 253
〃 , first marriage of, 100
〃 goes to Jena, 100
〃 , honours awarded to, 10, 298, 300
〃 in Heligoland, 69
〃 in Italy, 82
〃 in the Canaries, 240
〃 , medical training of, 76
〃 , parents of, 28
〃 , personal charm of, 146
〃 , political views of, 301
〃 , recent popularity of, 295
〃 reconstructs zoology, 181
〃 , religion of, 230
〃 , second marriage of, 253
〃 , university training of, 54
Haeckel, Councillor Karl, 29, 32
〃 , Walter, 83
_Haeckel’s Critics Answered_, 307
Heine, 21
Heligoland, the first journey to, 69
Heliosphæra, the, 141
Heliozoa, the, 258
Heredity, a theory of, 284
Hertwig, Oscar, 257
Hertwig, R., 189
Histology, 56
_History of Creation_, the, 262
History, unity of, 44
Holy Land, travels in the, 259
Horton, Dr., on Haeckel, 312
Hüffer, Hermann, 21
Humboldt, 46, 144
〃 foundation, the, 31
Huschke, Agnes, 253
Huxley on the origin of man, 180
I
Illustrations, charges against Haeckel’s, 267-8
Imagination in science, 200
Independence, Haeckel’s early sense of, 31
_Indische Reisebriefe_, the, 261
Individuality, nature of, 207, 211
〃 , stages of, 209
Infusoria, the, 78
International Congress of Freethinkers, the, 316
_Irene_, 176
Ischia, journey to, 87
Italy, appreciation of Haeckel in, 299
〃 , Haeckel’s first visit to, 82
J
Java, ape-man of, 167, 308
〃 , voyage to, 260, 308
Jena, 42
〃 , Haeckel’s first visit to, 50
_Jugend_, Haeckel number of, 315
Jump, Haeckel’s record, 173
Jurist, Haeckel as a, 22
K
Keferstein, Professor, on Darwinism, 148
Keller, Gottfried, 45
Kepler, 16
Kölliker, Albert, 56
Königsberg, Congress at, 99
Kopf, Professor, bust of Haeckel by, 299
Kükenthal, 43
_Kulturkampf_, the, 284
L
Lamprey, the, 181
Lancelet, the, 181
Lang, Professor A., on Haeckel, 300
Lange, F. A., 154
Language, evolution of, 150
Lanzarote, Haeckel at, 245
_Last Link_, the, 300
_Last Words on Evolution_, the, 320
Latin, Haeckel’s knowledge of, 36
〃Law of development,” 129
Law, training for the, 23
Lawyers in Haeckel’s family, 22
Lemur, the, 181
Leydig, Frantz, 56
Lichtenstein, Professor, 71
Life, earliest forms of, 151
〃 , origin of, 124
Linné, classification of, 105
Literary production of Haeckel, 299
Lizard, evolution of the, 222
_Lizzia Elizabethæ_, the, 185
Lloyd-Morgan, Professor, 307
Lodge, Sir Oliver, 307
Loofs, Professor, 305
Love of nature in Haeckel, 31
Lyell’s reform of geology, 109
M
Macrauchenia, the, 112
Mammoth, the, 106
Man, creation of, 126
〃 , evolution of, 180-1, 279
Man’s genealogical tree, 181
Marine animals, study of, 60
Marriage, Haeckel’s first, 100
〃 〃 second, 253
Mastodon, the, 112
Materialism and idealism, 83, 154
Mathematical types of form, 214
Matter, potentialities of, 204
Mechanical embryology, 249
Medical studies of Haeckel, 72
Medusæ, the, 174, 246
Megatherium, the, 106, 112
Merseburg, 30
Messina, 90
Metaphysics, Haeckel’s views on, 304
Method, analysis of scientific, 200
Meyer, Frau, 253
Microscope, beauty in the, 92
Miklucho-Maclay, 245
Miracles in modern Italy, 134
“Missing link,” the, 308
_Mitrocoma Annæ_, the, 185
Moleschott, 83, 154
Monera, the, 179
Monism, 73, 203, 217
_Monism as a Connecting Link_, the 292
_Monograph on the Calcispongiæ_, the, 272
_Monograph on the Medusæ_, the, 185
_Monograph on the Monera_, the, 182
_Monograph on the Radiolaria_, the, 100, 138
Monophyletic theory of life, the, 158
Morphology, the science of, 190
〃 , history of, 199
Mosaic story of creation, 105, 108
Mottoes, Haeckel’s, 321
Mouth, the primitive, 275
Müller, Fritz, 230
〃 , Johannes, 65-8
〃 〃 , death of, 80
Müller-net, the, 69
Munich, Haeckel and Virchow at, 157, 283
Murray, Sir John, 259
N
Naples, Haeckel at, 87
Natural law, relativity of, 232
〃 , philosophy, 48
Natural selection, 119-120
Nature and God, 20
_Naturalist’s Voyage round the World_, 46
_Nausicaa phæacum_, the, 185
Nineteenth century, work of the, 18
Nomenclature, scientific, 185
Nucleus, the, 179
O
Oken, L., 144
〃 on embryonic development, 224
Ontogeny, 231
Optimism of early Darwinians, 166
_Origin and Evolution of the Sense-organs_, 286
_Origin of Species_, the, 122
Over-individuals, 247
_Ovi di mare_, 93
Ovum, the, 268, 273
〃 , discovery of the, 58
P
Paleontology, 149
Palingenesis, 231
Pampas, fossil remains in the, 112
Paris, Freethought Congress at, 319
Pathology, Virchow’s reform of, 57
Paulsen, Professor, 304
Peak of Teneriffe, Haeckel climbs the, 250
Pelagic sweepings, 70
_Pemmatodiscus gastrulaceus_, the, 277
Persephone-impulse, the, in Haeckel, 256
Philosophy and observation, 156
〃 and science, 202
Philosophy, Haeckel’s work in, 305
Phylogeny, 231
Physician, Haeckel as a, 80
〃 , qualities of the, 53
Pithecanthropus, the, 167, 308
Plankton, 70
_Plankton-studies_, 290
Plant or animal, priority of the, 205
Plastidules, 284
Political views of Haeckel, 301
Polyps, 175
Popular works, why written, 262
Potsdam, Haeckel’s birthplace, 30
Private teacher, Haeckel as, 100
Profession, choice of a, 53
Professor of Zoology, Haeckel appointed, 100
Progressive evolution, 168
Promorphology, 215
Protestant religion, character of the, 134
Protists, the, 206
Protistology, 206
Puerto del Arrecise, 250
Pupa, the, 227
R
Rabl, Professor, 311
Radiolaria, the, 93, 289
〃 , shells of the, 95
〃 , system of the, 140
Rapallo, Haeckel at, 313
Realism of Haeckel, 304
_Report on the Deep-sea Keratosa_, the, 290
_Report on the Radiolaria_, the, 289
_Riddle of the Universe_, the, 22, 291, 301-7
Ritter, Paul von, donation of, 255, 299
Riviera, marine study on the, 76
Rocks, formation of the, 109
Roederer, 25
Romance nations, religion of the, 134
Rome, Freethought Congress at, 316
Roux, Professor, 249
Russia, travels in, 259
S
Scandinavia, visit to, 257
Schiller, 42, 43
Schleiden, M. J., 47
Schleiermacher, 27-8
Schmidt, Dr., 307
School-days at Merseburg, 34
Schopenhauer on Darwinism, 132
Schwann, Theodor, 65
Scientific method, variations of, 48
_Scilla bifolia_, search for the, 51
Scotland, visit to, 257, 259
Sea-urchin, fertilisation of the, 257
Seebeck refuses Haeckel’s resignation, 254
Semon, 43
Sergi, Professor, 319
Sethe, Anna, 81, 100
〃 , Bertha, 26
〃 , Christian, 21, 22
〃 , Christoph, 21, 25
Siphonophores, the, 246
Social Democrats, the, 285, 301
Soul, unity of the, 161
Spain, Haeckel’s visit to, 252
Specialism in science, 48
Species, early difficulties about, 37-8
〃 idea of fixity of, 105
Sponge, nature of a, 271
Sponges, Haeckel’s study of the, 270
Spontaneous generation, Haeckel’s early opposition to, 77
Spontaneous generation, possibility of, 136
Stereometric structures, 215
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 307
Stettin, Congress of, 145
Stocks, animal, 211
Strauss, 83
Struggle for life, the, 119
_Studies of the Gastræa-theory_, the, 277
Sumatra, Haeckel in, 260
Superstition in Italy, 315
_System of the Medusæ_, the, 287
_System of the Siphonophoræ_, the, 249
_Systematic Phylogeny_, the, 291
T
Tadpole, the, 220
Teeth in young parrots, 223
Teneriffe, 240
Terminology created by Haeckel, 36
Theological critics of Haeckel, 298, 305
Theology, Haeckel’s rejection of, 75-6
_Tiara_, 176
Tierra del Fuego, 103
_Tissues of the Craw-fish_, the, 77
Tjibodas, 260
Training, early, of Haeckel, 32
Transformism, 111
Translations of Haeckel’s works, 294
“Travel Pictures,” 84
Travels of Haeckel, 256
Tree-frog, the, 119
U
Unicellular animals, 94, 98
Unity of nature, the, 235
Unnucleated organisms, 180
Utrecht Society of Art and Science, 248
V
Venus of Milo, the, 191
Vienna, medical studies at, 80
Villefranche, fishing at, 76
Virchow, Rudolf, 56, 72
〃 at Stettin, 153-171
〃 Haeckel’s conflict with, 74
〃 on the evolution of man, 311
_Visit to Ceylon_, the, 259
Vital force, the, 135
Vogt, 83, 154
Volger, Otto, 167
W
Wallace, A. R., and Darwin, 123
Weimar, Grand Duke of, 254
_Wonders of Life_, the, 292, 313
Works, number of Haeckel’s, 299
Worm, evolution of the, 276
Würtzburg, Haeckel at, 54
〃 , invitation to the University of, 253
Z
Zipangu, 20
Zoological Institute, the, 42
〃 philosophy, 194
〃 Station at Naples, 59
Zoology, reconstruction of, by Haeckel, 24
〃 , the old and the new, 60
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
● Transcriber’s Notes:
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○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
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