248 ERNST HAKCKEL AM) CAUL GEGENBAUR 



Darwinian thought. It was a medley of dogmatic materialism, 

 idealistic morphology, and evolution theory ; its sources 

 were, approximately, Biichner, Theodor Schwann, Virchow, 

 H. G. Bronn, and, of course, Charles Darwin. 



It was scarcely modern even on its first appearance, and 

 many regarded it, not without reason, as a belated offshoot 

 of Natur philosophic. 



Its materialism is of the most intransigent character. 

 The form and activities of living things are held to be 

 merely the mechanical result of the physical and chemical 

 composition of their bodies. The simplest living things, 

 the Monera, are nothing more than homogeneous masses of 

 protein substance. " They live, but without organs of life ; 

 all the phenomena of their life, nutrition and reproduc- 

 tion, movement and irritability, appear here as merely the 

 immediate outcome of formless organic matter, itself an 

 albumen compound" (p. 63, 1906). 



Teleology, the Achilles' heel of Kant's (otherwise sound !) 

 philosophy, is to be regarded as a totally refuted and 

 antiquated doctrine, definitely put out of court by Dar- 

 winism. 



Haeckel works out his materialistic philosophy of living 

 things very much after the fashion of Schwann. There 

 is the same talk of cells as organic crystals, of crystal 

 trees, of the analogy between assimilation by the cell and 

 the growth of crystals in a mother liquid. Heredity and 

 adaptation are shown equally as well by crystals as by 

 organisms ; for heredity, or the internal Bildungstrieb (!), is 

 the mechanical effect of the material structure of the 

 crystal or the germ, and adaptation, or the external 

 Bildungstrieb i is a name for the modifications induced by 

 the environment. Adaptation so defined comes to be 

 synonymous with the fortuitous variation which plays so 

 great a part in Darwin's theory of natural selection. 



It goes without saying that Haeckel allowed to the 

 organism no other nor higher individuality than belongs to 

 the crystal, and took no account at all of that harmonious 

 interaction of the organs which ('uvicr called the principle of 

 the "conditions of existence." The concept of correlation 

 had simply no meaning for Haeckel. The analysis and 



