MODERN BIOLOGY 5x5 



behind the times, and, above all, the Church is, of course, represented as 

 the centre of all kinds of obscurity, superstition, and tyranny. From all 

 quarters, both radical and conservative, the signal to open hostilities was 

 eagerly awaited. Some years after the appearance of The Kiddle of the Utiiverse 

 there was founded the Monist League, a widely ramified association formed 

 for the purpose of working for the ideas to which Haeckel gave expression 

 in this book and in a sequel to it. Die Lebenswunder. Since then it has laboured, 

 by means of meetings, lectures, and papers, and in some circles by devotional 

 exercises, with a view to taking the place of the ecclesiastical cult. Haeckel's 

 colleagues, however, for the most part kept aloof from the league; only a 

 few scientists of importance have joined it. From the side of the conserva- 

 tives violent attacks were made on the league; in the Prussian Diet Reincke, 

 the professor of botany, made a strong stand against it, characterizing it as 

 a menace to society and subversive of morals. This started the battle in ear- 

 nest. To counteract the Monist League there was founded the Keplerbund, 

 so-called after the great astronomer. The very name, however, proved fatal; 

 Kepler, it is true, was at the same time a great naturalist and a devout Chris- 

 tian, but all the same he was so saturated with the grossest superstitions of 

 his time that he cannot by any stretch of the imagination be held up as the 

 ideal seeker after truth in modern times. And the Keplerbund failed no less 

 than the Monist League to attract scientists of any weight; the latter kept 

 more strictly than ever outside the struggle and showed on the whole — 

 the biologists, at any rate — their sympathy for Haeckel, whose work, in 

 spite of all his mistakes, nevertheless seemed to them to represent a struggle 

 for enlightenment and liberty of doctrine against the constant menace of 

 the powers of reaction. 



And Haeckel certainly did maintain the radically liberal-minded stand- 

 point of his youth undisturbed through all these changes — which it was 

 all the more easy for him to do as he had never taken part in practical poli- 

 tics and therefore had not to solve any political or social problems of detail. 

 But the shock caused him by the Great War proved all the greater on that 

 account; the idea that the fellow-countrymen of Darwin should have sided 

 with the enemies of Germany drove him to despair. A few more works came 

 from his pen, among them one entitled Funf^igjahre Stammesgeschichte, with 

 which he celebrated the fifty years' jubilee oiGenerelle Morpbologie, and which 

 testifies to his having learnt nothing and forgotten nothing. His final work, 

 Krisfall-Seelen, is sufficiently characterized by its title. It came out in 1917; two 

 years later he died, his death being hastened by an accident, which de)ivered 

 him from the infirmities of old age and the misery of those unhappy years. 



Hartjnann on Haeckel 

 The well-known philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, in an otherwise sym- 

 pathetic character-sketch of Haeckel, describes the latter's "monism" thus: 



