136 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ERNST HAECKEL: DARWINIST, MONIST 



By Professor VERNON LYMAN KELLOGG 



STANFORD UNIVERSITY 



IX 1859 Darwin's "Origin of Species" appeared, . and the struggle 

 was on. In 1862 Huxley began his active participation in it, a 

 participation brilliantly maintained until his death. In 18G3 Haeckel, 

 before an association of German naturalists in Stettin, declared the 

 Darwinian theory to be the greatest step forward in the study of life 

 that had been taken in modern times; and he prophesied for it the 

 same importance in the understanding of organic nature that Newton's 

 law of gravitation had had in the understanding of the inorganic 

 world. Steadily, since that day, Haeckel has been carrying on the 

 fight for Darwinism and its corollaries. 



Of greatest popular interest among these corollaries or logical 

 conclusions and most opposed by all tradition and ecclesiastic and 

 metaphysical authority are, first, the direct descent of man from the 

 lower animals, with all his attributes mental and spiritual as well 

 as physical; and, second, a strictly monistic conception of the world 

 as opposed to the old strongly-established clualistic conception. As 

 Huxley was in England, so Haeckel is in Germany, the special battling 

 champion of the theory of descent and its conclusions. And even more 

 conspicuously than Huxley, Haeckel has maintained and fought for the 

 revolutionary and " irreligious " logical conclusions of the full accept- 

 ance of the theory of cosmic and organic evolution. 



Such a complete acceptance unites God and nature into an indis- 

 soluble unity, even as it does matter and force, body and soul. It 

 leaves no place in one's philosophy for a supernatural, creating God, 

 or for a distinct and peculiar vital force or for a personal immortality 

 of the soul. It accepts completely the cosmic and organic evolution 

 explanation of the earth and its life, holding that life originated on the 

 cooling earth naturally out of non-living materials " by catalysis from 

 colloidal carbohydrogen combinations," and that man is, in his entirety, 

 the outcome of biological transformation, his nearest relatives among 

 living animals kinds being the tailless apes. 



Obviously the man who should stand as the champion in poetic, 

 metaphysical, religious Germany of such a Weltanss chaining must be a 

 man of unusual strength to stand at all, much less to make head against 

 the great forces that would necessarily bar and dispute his way ; indeed 

 would combine to overwhelm and trample him under foot. Haeckel has 



