He does not say a word concerning the fact that this is Leibnitz' theory, and one that is preëminently Occult. Nor does he understand the term “soul” as we do; for, with Hæckel it is simply, along with consciousness, the product of the grey matter of the brain, a thing which, as the cell-soul
Is as indissolubly bound up with the protoplasmic body as is the human soul with the brain and spinal cord.[1607]
He rejects the conclusions of Kant, Herbert Spencer, of du Bois-Reymond and Tyndall. The latter expresses the opinion of all the great men of Science, as of the greatest thinkers of this and past ages, in saying that:
The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable. Were our minds and senses so ... illuminated as to enable us to see and feel the very molecules of the brain; were we capable of following all their motions, all their groupings ... electric discharges ... we should be as far as ever from the solution of the problem.... The chasm between the two classes of phenomena would still remain intellectually impassable.
But the complex function of the nerve-cells of the great German Empiric, or, in other words, his consciousness, will not permit him to follow the conclusions of the greatest thinkers of our globe. He is greater than they. He asserts this, and protests against all:
No one has the right to hold that in the future we shall not be able to pass beyond these limits of our knowledge that to-day seem impassable.[1608]
And he quotes from Darwin's introduction to The Descent of Man the following words, which he modestly applies to his scientific opponents and himself:
It is always those who know little, and not those who know much, that positively affirm that this or that problem will never be solved by Science.
The world may rest satisfied. The day is not far off when the “thrice great” Hæckel will have shown, to his own satisfaction, that the consciousness of Sir Isaac Newton was, physiologically speaking, but the reflex action (or minus consciousness) caused by the perigenesis of the plastidules of our common ancestor and old friend, the Moneron [pg 712] Hæckelii. Though, the said Bathybius has been found out and exposed as a pretender simulating the organic substance it is not, and though among the children of men, Lot's wife alone—and even this, only after her disagreeable metamorphosis—could claim as her forefather the pinch of salt it is; all this will not dismay him in the least. He will go on asserting, as coolly as he has always done, that it was only the peculiar mode and motion of the ghost of the long-vanished atoms of our Father Bathybius, which—transmitted across æons of time into the cell-tissue of the grey matter of the brains of every great man—caused Sophocles and Æschylus, and Shakspere as well, to write their tragedies, Newton, his Principia, Humboldt, his Cosmos, etc. It also prompted Hæckel to invent Græco-Latin names three inches long, pretending to mean a good deal, and meaning—nothing.
Of course we are quite aware that the true, honest Evolutionist agrees with us; and that he is the first to say that not only is the geological record imperfect, but that there are enormous gaps in the series of hitherto discovered fossils, which can never be filled. He will tell us, moreover, that “no Evolutionist assumes that man is descended from any existing ape or any extinct ape either,” but that man and apes originated probably æons back, in some common root stock. Still, as de Quatrefages points out, he will urge as an evidence corroborating his claim this wealth of absent proofs as well, saying that: