652 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



That all the doctrines above mentioned are necessarily included 

 in monism may perhaps be doubted. Monism would still flourish 

 were all these theories disproved. For human philosophies have 

 wonderful recuperative power. Their basis is in the structure of 

 the brain itself, and external phenomena are only accessory to 

 them. 



If monism is purely a philosophic conception, it can have no 

 necessary axioms or corollaries, except such as are involved in its 

 definition. These could not be scientific in their character, be- 

 cause they could in no way come into relation with the realities 

 of human life. If, however, monism be a generalization resting 

 in part on human experience, then it must be tested by the meth- 

 ods of science. Until it is so tested, however plausible it may be, 

 it has no workable value. There is no gain in giving it belief, or 

 in calling it truth. Still less should we stultify ourselves by 

 pinning our faith to its postulates as to the matters yet to be 

 decided by experiment, and to be settled by human experience 

 only. Haeckel says, for example : " 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." Here we may ask. Who knows that there is any 

 such formative influence ? What do we know of this or any 

 other subject beyond what in our investigations we find to be 

 true ? When was monism a subject of special revelation, and 

 with what credentials does it come, that one of the greatest con- 

 troversies in modern science should be settled by the simple word ? 

 " Ro77ia loouta est ; causa finita est" is a dictum no longer heeded 

 by science. 



The great bulk of the arguments in favor of the heredity of 

 acquired characters, as well as most of those in favor of the 

 opposed dogma, the unchanged continuity of the germ-plasm, are 

 based on some supposed logical necessity of philosophy. All such 

 arguments are valueless in the light of fact. Desmarest's sugges- 

 tion to the contending advocates of Neptunism and Plutonism 

 was, " Go and see." When they had seen the action of water and 

 the action of heat, the contest was over, for argument and con- 

 tention had vanished in the face of fact. To believe without 

 foundation is to discredit knowledge. Such ** Confessions of 

 Faith " on Haeckel's part lead one to doubt whether in his zeal 

 for belief he has even known what it is to know. In fact, if we 

 may trust his critics, much of HaeckeFs scientific work is vitiated 

 by this mixture of "believe" and "make-believe." The same 

 confusion is shown in this remarkable passage which President 

 White quotes from John Henry Newman : " Scripture says that 



