The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy. Ernst Haeckel

dualist metaphysics, approached very close to modern pantheism. Subsequent rationalistic theologians, especially those of the Tübingen school (Baur, Zeller, etc.), devoted themselves to the historical study of the gospels and their sources and development, and thus more and more destroyed the base of Christian superstition. Finally, the radical criticism of David Friedrich Strauss showed, in his Life of Jesus (1835), the mythological character of the whole Christian system. In his famous work, The Old and New Faith (1872), this honorable and gifted theologian finally abandoned the belief in miracles, and turned to natural knowledge and the monistic philosophy for the construction of a rational view of life on the basis of critical experience. This work has lately been continued by Albert Kalthoff. Moreover, many modern theologians (such as Savage, Nippold, Pfleiderer, and other liberal Protestants) have endeavored in various ways to obtain a certain recognition for the claims of progressive science, and reconcile them with theology, while discarding the belief in the miraculous. However, these rationalistic efforts, based on monistic or pantheistic views, are still isolated and apparently without effect. The great majority of modern theologians adhere to the traditional teaching of the Church, whose columns and windows are still everywhere adorned with miracles. While a few liberal Protestants restrict their faith to the three fundamental dogmas, most of them still believe in the myths and legends which fill the pages of the gospels. This orthodoxy is, moreover, encouraged of late by the conservative and reactionary attitude taken up by many governments on political grounds.

      Most modern governments maintain the connection with the Church in the idea that the traditional belief in the miraculous is the best security for their own continuance. Throne and altar must protect and support each other. However, this conservative-Christian policy meets two obstacles in an increasing measure. On the one hand, the ecclesiastical hierarchy is always trying to set its spiritual power above the secular and make the state serve its own purposes; and, on the other hand, the modern right of popular representation affords an opportunity to make the voice of reason heard and oppose the reactionary conservatives with opportune reforms. The chief rulers and the ministers of public instruction, who have a great influence in this struggle, generally favor the teaching of the Church, not out of conviction of its truth, but because they think knowledge brings unrest, and because docile and ignorant subjects are easier to rule than educated and independent citizens. Hence it is that we now hear so much on every occasion, in speeches from the throne and at banquets, at the opening of churches and the unveiling of monuments, from able and influential speakers, of the value of faith. They would give the palm to faith in its struggle with knowledge. Thus we get this paradoxical situation in educated countries (such as Prussia), that encouragement is given at once to modern science and technical training and to the orthodox Church, which is its deadly enemy. As a rule, it is not stated in these florid orations to how many and what kind of miracles this precious faith must extend. Nevertheless, we may yet, in view of the spread of intellectual reaction in Germany, see it made obligatory for at least all priests, teachers, and other servants of the state to profess a belief in the three fundamental mysteries—the triune God of the catechism, the personal immortality of the soul, and the absolute freedom of the human will—and even in many of the other miracles which are found in the gospels, sacred legends, and religious journals of our time.

      The refined belief in the miraculous embodied in Kant's practical philosophy assumed many different forms among his followers, the Neo-Kantians, approaching sometimes more and sometimes less to the conventional beliefs. Through a long series of variations, which still continue to develop, it is gradually passing into the cruder form of superstition which we find popular to-day as spiritism, and which provides the basis for what is called occultism. Kant himself, in spite of his subtle and clear critical faculty, had a decided leaning to mysticism and positive dogmatism, which showed itself especially in his later years. He thought a good deal of Swedenborg's idea of the spirit world forming a universe apart, and compared this to his mundus intelligibilis. Among the natural philosophers of the first half of the nineteenth century, Schelling (in his later writings), Schubert (in his History of the Soul and Observations on the Dark Side of Science), and Perty (in his mystic anthropology) especially investigated the mysterious phenomena of mental action, and sought to connect them with the physiological functions of the brain on the one hand and supernatural spiritual agencies on the other. Modern spook-seeking has no more value than mediæval magic, cabalism, astrology, necromancy, dream-interpretation, and invocation of the devil.

      We must put at the same stage of superstition the spiritism and occultism we find mentioned so much in modern literature. There are always thousands of credulous folk in educated countries who are taken in by the performances of the spiritists and their media, and are ready to believe the unbelievable. Spirit-rapping, table-turning, spirit-writing, the materialization and photographing of deceased souls, find credit, not only among the uneducated masses, but even among the most cultured, and sometimes among imaginative scientists. It has been proved without avail by numbers of impartial observations and experiments that these occultist performances depend partly on conscious fraud and partly on careless self-deception. Mundus vult decipi—"the world wishes to be taken in"—as the old saying has it. This spiritistic fraud is particularly dangerous when it clothes itself with the mantle of science, makes use of the physiological phenomena of hypnotism, and even assumes a monistic character. Thus, for instance, one of the best-known occultist writers, Karl du Prel, has written, not only a Philosophy of Mysticism and Studies of Scientific Subjects, but also (1888) a Monistic Psychology, which is dualistic from beginning to end. In these popular writings lively imagination and brilliant presentation are combined with a most flagrant lack of critical sense and of knowledge of the elements of biology (cf. chapter xvi. of the Riddle). It seems that the hereditary bias towards mysticism and superstition is not yet eliminated even from the educated mind of our time. It is to be explained phylogenetically by inheritance from prehistoric barbarians and savages, in whom the earliest religious ideas were wholly dominated by animism and fetichism.

      IV

THE SCIENCE OF LIFE

       Table of Contents

      Object of biology—Relation to the other sciences—General and special biology—Natural philosophy—Monism: hylozoism, materialism, dynamism—Naturalism—Nature and spirit—Physics—Metaphysics—Dualism—Freedom and natural law—God in biology—Realism—Idealism—Branches of biology—Morphology and physiology—Anatomy and biogeny—Ergology and perilogy.

      The broad realm of science has been vastly extended in the course of the nineteenth century. Many new branches have established themselves independently; many new and most fruitful methods of research have been discovered, and have been applied with the greatest practical success in furthering the advance of modern thought. But this enormous expansion of the field of knowledge has its disadvantages. The extensive division of labor it has involved has led to the growth of a narrow specialism in many small sections; and in this way the natural connection of the various provinces of knowledge, and their relation to the comprehensive whole, have been partly or wholly lost sight of. The importation of new terms which are used in different senses by one-sided workers in the various fields of science has caused a good deal of misunderstanding and confusion. The vast structure of science tends more and more to become a tower of Babel, in the labyrinthic passages of which few are at their ease and few any longer understand the language of other workers. In these circumstances, it seems advisable, at the commencement of our philosophic study of "the wonders of life," to form a clear idea of our task. We must carefully define the place of biology among the sciences, and the relation of its various branches to each other and to the different systems of philosophy.

      In the broadest sense in which we can take it, biology is the whole study of organisms or living beings. Hence not only botany (the science of plants) and zoology (the science of animals), but also anthropology (the science of man), fall within its domain. We then contrast with it all the sciences which deal with inorganic or lifeless bodies, which we may collectively call abiology (or anorganology); to this belong astronomy, geology, mineralogy, hydrology, etc. This division of the two great branches of science does not seem difficult in view of the fact that