Major Prophets of To-Day

by Edwin E. Slosson

The monistic and the socialistic movements in Germany are closely associated, but chiefly, it seems to me, because both are anti-clerical rather than because the evolutionary philosophy necessarily leads to either democracy or socialism. Many Social Democrats profess themselves Monists, and doubtless a large proportion of that party would agree with Haeckel in the matter of religion. But on the other hand, they can derive little if any support for their doctrines from the monistic literature. Haeckel states his opinion with his usual frankness in a contribution to Maximilian Harden's magazine, which concludes with the words:

I am certainly no friend of Herr Bebel, who has attacked me repeatedly, and among other things has slandered me in his book on Woman. Besides, I hold the utopian aims of the official social democracy to be impracticable and its ideal future state to be a big workhouse. That, however, cannot prevent me from recognizing the kernel of justice in the great social movement. That this can be overcome by the repressive acts of the Berlin council, by the power of the police and of the State prosecutors can be believed only by one who knows neither the history nor the natural history of mankind.—Zukunft, 1895, No. 18. Quoted in the introduction to "Freie Wissenschaft und freie Lehre", p. 9.

The immense popularity of "The Riddle of the Universe" is, I think, largely to be accounted for by the personality of the author. The man behind the gun was what gave it power. I do not mean that the reception given to the book was due to Haeckel's standing as a zoölogist. The outside world knows little and cares less for scientific reputation. It was rather that the book revealed a man tremendously in earnest who had made up his mind on questions of the most vital interest to all and who said what he thought in the plainest and most emphatic language, without regard to whose feelings he hurt. "The Riddle of the Universe" and "The Wonders of Life" are, it seems to me, more valuable as contributions to the psychology of genius than to philosophy. The personal interest he aroused is evinced by the thousands of letters he received and is still receiving about these books, ranging in tone from the warmly sympathetic to the furiously antagonistic. He years ago had to give up the task of answering them save by a printed slip.

Few books have ever excited so much heated controversy. Hundreds of criticisms and replies have been published, and new ones appear frequently yet, fifteen years after. The book was intended to draw the fire of the enemy, clericalism, and it did. Nor did the philosophy of the chair receive it any more favorably. It will be sufficient on this point to quote the sharp criticism of Professor Friedrich Paulsen, of Berlin University, whose idealistic monism comes into direct contact with Haeckel's materialistic monism:

"I have read this book with burning shame for the state of general culture and the philosophical culture of our people. That such a book was possible, that it could be written, printed, sold, read, admired, believed by a people which claims a Kant, a Goethe, a Schopenhauer, is painful."

It is one of the curiosities of controversy that the Church should often be found defending with desperation, not her own positions, but some of the old, abandoned redoubts of Science. This was largely the case in the evolution controversy. The real "origin of species" was in the scientific mind. It was Science that discovered that all the multifarious forms of plant and animal life could be classified into distinct types, which, it too hastily assumed, were absolutely separate and fixed. When later Science came to revise that view, it discovered that the immutability of species had somehow in the meantime become a theological dogma, to be zealously defended by curates who could not tell a species from a genus.

It was the same in regard to the theory of spontaneous generation or the production of living beings from non-living matter. This was formerly good Christian doctrine, accepted by St. Augustine and taught by the medieval schoolmen, and when in 1674 the Italian physician, Francisco Redi, showed that the maggots that appeared in dead matter came from eggs, he was persecuted for unbelief. But it was still maintained that microscopic living forms could arise spontaneously in bouillon and infusions of hay until Pasteur proved that this was false, for in sealed and sterilized tubes no trace of life appears. Such negative experiments are, of course, not competent to prove that at some time and under other conditions life might not be produced from the non-living. Yet, strangely enough, Haeckel's theological opponents voluntarily adopted this untenable position and waged war against him especially on account of his belief that when the earth's crust cooled down, compounds of cyanic acid were transformed into globules of albumin, from which developed unicellular organisms.

The only alternative hypothesis to this which has been brought forward is the one advocated by Arrhenius, that the germs of life might have been brought from some other planet in meteorites or floating free in space and propelled by radiant energy. This is apparently not impossible, but it seems a very violent assumption, much harder of acceptance than the other, that of abiogenesis. For the wall between the organic and the inorganic has been broken down completely, and that between the living and non-living is being tunneled into from both sides. On the one hand we have been able to construct artificially such complex organic molecules as sugar and protein. On the other hand, it has been found possible to produce in siliceous and metallic solutions mimic cells which grow, move, put forth pseudopodia, select their food, propagate by fission, and assume many of the characteristic forms of vegetable and animal life. In more than one laboratory experiments in the generation of life are still being hopefully carried on, and an announcement of their success at any time would not amaze biologists in general. But even though abiogenesis should forever remain impossible as a laboratory experiment, it would not be untenable as a hypothesis of the origin of life under the exceptional conditions of some earlier stage in the world's history. Such a supposition, whether true or not, is at least no more irreligious than is a recognition of the fact that non-living matter is being continuously transformed into living within our own bodies.

The volume invited attack because it was not only intentionally provocative, but unintentionally vulnerable. One does not have to be very learned in order to discover in it occasional errors as well as many extravagant and questionable statements. The fact that few people could treat of such a wide range of topics without making more mistakes than Haeckel did not, of course, protect him from criticism. Huxley, who enjoyed crossing swords with the clergy as much as Haeckel, was more careful to guard himself from counter attack. If a discussion of demonology led unexpectedly to the question of the exact status of the district of Gadara in the Roman Empire, he was prepared to meet his opponents on that ground as well as in biology. Not so Haeckel. He picks up his church history from infidel pamphleteers[8] and recklessly caricatures Christian beliefs. In attacking the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary he confuses it with that of the Virgin Birth of Christ, and at the same time uses language needlessly offensive to those who regard the Mother of Jesus with adoration.[9]

A more serious charge than ignorance of ecclesiastical history was later brought against Haeckel by Doctor Brass, namely, that he had fabricated evidence in support of his theory of evolution by falsifying his drawings of embryos, that he had, among other things, taken away vertebræ from the tail of a monkey embryo and had extended the backbone of a human embryo in order to enhance the resemblance. Since accuracy is the soul of science, this is as serious as it would be, for instance, to charge a minister with preaching miracles when he does not believe in them. In his reply Haeckel acknowledged