[72] See Pfaundler, Pogg. Ann., Jubelband, p. 182.
[73] See the beautiful discussions of this point in Hering's Memory as a General Function of Organised Matter (1870), Chicago, The Open Court Publishing Co., 1887. Compare also Dubois, Ueber die Uebung, Berlin, 1881.
[74] Spencer, The Principles of Psychology. London, 1872.
[75] See the article The Velocity of Light, page 63.
[76] I am well aware that the endeavor to confine oneself in natural research to facts is often censured as an exaggerated fear of metaphysical spooks. But I would observe, that, judged by the mischief which they have wrought, the metaphysical, of all spooks, are the least fabulous. It is not to be denied that many forms of thought were not originally acquired by the individual, but were antecedently formed, or rather prepared for, in the development of the species, in some such way as Spencer, Haeckel, Hering, and others have supposed, and as I myself have hinted on various occasions.
[77] Compare, for example, Schiller, Zerstreute Betrachtungen über verschiedene ästhetische Gegenstände.
[78] We must not be deceived in imagining that the happiness of other people is not a very considerable and essential portion of our own. It is common capital, which cannot be created by the individual, and which does not perish with him. The formal and material limitation of the ego is necessary and sufficient only for the crudest practical objects, and cannot subsist in a broad conception. Humanity in its entirety may be likened to a polyp-plant. The material and organic bonds of individual union have, indeed, been severed; they would only have impeded freedom of movement and evolution. But the ultimate aim, the psychical connexion of the whole, has been attained in a much higher degree through the richer development thus made possible.
[79] C. E. von Baer, the subsequent opponent of Darwin and Haeckel, has discussed in two beautiful addresses (Das allgemeinste Gesetz der Natur in aller Entwickelung, and Welche Auffassung der lebenden Natur ist die richtige, und wie ist diese Auffassung auf die Entomologie anzuwenden?) the narrowness of the view which regards an animal in its existing state as finished and complete, instead of conceiving it as a phase in the series of evolutionary forms and regarding the species itself as a phase of the development of the animal world in general.
[80] An address delivered before the General Session of the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians, at Vienna, Sept. 24, 1894.
[81] Inaugural lecture delivered on assuming the Professorship of the History and Theory of Inductive Science in the University of Vienna, October 21, 1895.