NOTES
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[ Scientific Articles of Faith. In Professor Schlesinger's address (delivered on 9th October at Altenburg) on this subject he rightly called attention to the limits of knowledge of nature (in Kant's sense of the terms) imposed upon us by the imperfection of our perceptive organs. The gaps which the empirical investigation of nature must thus leave in science, can, however, be filled up by hypotheses, by conjectures of more or less probability. These we cannot indeed for the time establish on a secure basis; and yet we may make use of them in the way of explaining phenomena, in so far as they are not inconsistent with a rational knowledge of nature. Such rational hypotheses are scientific articles of faith, and therefore very different from ecclesiastical articles of faith or religious dogmas, which are either pure fictions (resting on no empirical evidence), or simply irrational (contradicting the law of causality). As instances of rational hypotheses of first-rate importance may be mentioned our belief in the oneness of matter (the building up of the elements from primary atoms), our belief in equivocal generation, our belief in the essential unity of all natural phenomena, as maintained by monism (on which compare my General Morphology, vol. i. pp. 105, 164, etc., also my Natural History of Creation, 8th ed., 1889, pp. 21, 360, 795). As the simpler occurrences of inorganic nature and the more complicated phenomena of organic life are alike reducible to the same natural forces, and as, further, these in their turn have their common foundation in a simple primal principle pervading infinite space, we can regard this last (the cosmic ether) as all-comprehending divinity, and upon this found the thesis: "Belief in God is reconcilable with science." In this pantheistic view, and also in his criticism of a one-sided materialism, I entirely agree with Professor Schlesinger, though unable to concur with him in some of his biological, and especially of his anthropological, conclusions (cf. his article on "Facts and Deductions derived from the Action of Universal Space" Mittheilungen aus dem Osterlande, Bd. v., Altenburg, 1892).]
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[ Unity of Nature. I consider the fundamental unity of inorganic and organic nature, as well as their genetic relation, to be an essential axiom of monism. I particularly emphasise this "article of faith" here, as there are still scientists of repute who contest it. Not only is the old mystical "vital power" brought back upon the stage again from time to time, but even the "miraculous" origin of organic life out of "dead" inorganic nature is often brought up still against the doctrines of evolution, as an insoluble riddle—as one of Du Bois-Reymond's "seven riddles of the world" (see his Discourse on Leibnitz, 1880). The solution of this "transcendent" riddle of the world, and of the allied question of archigony (equivocal generation, in a strictly defined meaning of the term), can only be reached by a critical analysis and unprejudiced comparison of matter, form, and energy in inorganic and organic nature. This I have already done (1866) in the second book of my General Morphology (vol. i. pp. 109-238): "General Researches as to the Nature and First Beginning of Organisms, their Relation to things Inorganic, and their Division into Plants and Animals.">[
A short résumé of this is contained in Lecture XV. of my Natural History of Creation (8th ed., pp. 340-370). The most serious difficulties which formerly beset the monistic view there given may now be held to have been taken out of the way by recent discoveries concerning the nature of protoplasm, the discovery of the Monera, the more accurate study of the closely-related single-celled Protista, their comparison with the ancestral cell (or fertilised egg-cell), and also by the chemical carbon-theory. (See my "Studies on Monera and other Protista," in the Jenaische Zeitschrift für Naturwissenschaft, vols. iv. and v., 1868-1870; also Carl Naegeli, Mechanisch-physiologische Begründung der Abstammungslehre, 1884.)]
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[ Religion in the Lower Animals. We cannot fail to recognise in the more highly developed of our domestic animals (especially in dogs, horses, and elephants) some first beginnings of those higher brain-functions which we designate as reason and consciousness, religion and morality; they differ only in degree, not in kind, from the corresponding mental activities of the lowest human races. If, like the dogs, the apes, and especially the anthropoids, had been for thousands of years domesticated and brought up in close relation with civilised man, the similarity of their mental activities to those of man would undoubtedly have been much more striking than it is. The apparently deep gulf which separates man from these most highly-developed mammals "is mainly founded on the fact that in man several conspicuous attributes are united, which in the other animals occur only separately, viz. (1) The higher degree of differentiation of the larynx (speech), (2) brain (mind), and (3) extremities; and (4) the upright posture. It is merely the happy combination of these important animal organs and functions at a higher stage of evolution that raises the majority of mankind so far above all lower animals" (General Morphology, 1866, vol. ii. p. 430).]
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[ Inheritance of Acquired Characters. As the controversy on this important question is still unsettled, special attention may here be called to the valuable data for arriving at a decision which are afforded precisely by the development of instincts among the higher animals, and of speech and reason in man. "The inheritance of characters acquired during the life of the individual, is an indispensable axiom of the monistic doctrine of evolution." "Those who, with Weismann and Galton, deny this, entirely exclude thereby the possibility of any formative influence of the outer world upon organic form" (Anthropogenie, 4th ed., pp. xxiii., 836; see, further, the works there referred to of Eimer, Weismann, Ray-Lankester, etc.; also Ludwig Wilser's Die Vererbung der geistigen Eigenschaften, Heidelberg, 1892).]