5X4 THE HISTORY OF BIOLOGY 



Haeckel' s Weltratsel 

 In the nineties Haeckel returned to natural philosophy; he published one 

 or two papers on monism and an important work on "systematic phy- 

 logeny," comprising a genealogical tree for all living beings — that is, a 

 detailed application of his earlier, and even then somewhat out-of-date, 

 theorifes. In 1899 he published his famous work Die Weltratsel, which was 

 intended to be a summary of his ideas and at the same time a farewell to 

 his activities; being a child of the nineteenth century, he wished to con- 

 clude his work with its exit — a promise that unfortunately he failed to 

 keep. The Kiddle of the Universe had extraordinary success; in Germany the 

 book was sold by the hundred thousand and in England by tens of thou- 

 sands; special emphasis has been laid on the fact of its widespread distribu- 

 tion among the working-classes, and in Japan it is said to have been used 

 as a school text-book. Nevertheless, from a scientific point of view it must 

 be regarded as utterly valueless. Its biological section is a rehash of the his- 

 tory of the creation; anthropogeny, and the monograph on the plastidule, 

 as little attention as possible being paid to the immense progress made by 

 scientific research since then. As a matter of fact, biology takes up only one- 

 quarter of the volume; the rest is devoted to psychology, cosmology, and 

 theology. The cosmological section gives evidence of the author's hopelessly 

 confused ideas on the simplest facts of physics and chemistry; final judgment 

 has been passed on it in a widely distributed polemical paper, which has 

 never been challenged by trustworthy authorities, written by the Russian 

 physicist Chwolson, to whom we refer those who desire to gain an insight 

 into Haeckel's standing in regard to the exact sciences. The philosophical 

 section of the book has been no less severely criticized by specialists on the 

 subject; philosophers of different schools have pointed out its utter lack of 

 clarity in point of theoretical knowledge and logic, its incapacity to define 

 even the simplest ideas. In passing, it may be mentioned that this time "mon- 

 ism" is based mostly on Spinoza, the great dogmatist and repudiator of evo- 

 lution, whose purely metaphysical idea of substance is at once placed on 

 a par with the "matter" of physics. True, the real character of substance 

 is said to be inexplicable, but, notwithstanding this, everything between 

 heaven and earth is explained with its aid. If we add to this Haeckel's total 

 lack of historical sense and critical judgment — his views on events and 

 persons are derived from the simplest vocabulary of contemporary political 

 and cultural radicalism — the final impression of The Kiddle of the Universe 

 will be an utterly depressing one. The cause of the book's popularity is 

 obviously to be found in the political and social sphere. Its very introduction 

 points in that direction, the progress in the scientific world being there con- 

 trasted with a dark picture of the political situation of the time: government, 

 administration, courts of justice, and education are depicted as appallingly 



