16 



Problems, Concepts and Their History 



dividual repeats in his development the 

 stages of cultural development through 

 which the human race has passed. And in 

 om- own times, Jung, following Nietzsche 

 and Freud among others, with all his im- 

 measurable influence on modern psychology 

 and literature, has erected the superstruc- 

 ture of his Psychology of the Unconscious 

 on the acceptance of Haeckel's premise as 

 though this were the immutable truth that 

 Haeckel in his own day had hoped it: 



All this experience suggests to us that we draw a 

 parallel between the phantastical, mythological 

 thinking of antiquity and the similar thinking of 

 children, between the lower human races and 

 dreams. This train of thought is not a strange one 

 for us, but quite familiar through our knowledge of 

 comparative anatomy and the history of develop- 

 ment, which show us how the structure and func- 

 tion of the hmnan body are the results of a series of 

 embryonic changes which correspond to similar 

 changes in the history of the race. Therefore, the 

 supposition is justified that ontogenesis corresponds 

 in psychology to phylogenesis. Consequently, it 

 would be true, as well, that the state of infantile 

 thinking in the child's psychic life, as well as in 

 dreams, is nothing but a re-echo of the prehistoric 

 and the ancient" ('27, pp. 27-28). 



But the blind adoption of Haeckel's doc- 

 trines by such workers in bordering fields, 

 and their infection with his faith that "de- 

 velopment is now the magic word by means 

 of which we shall solve the riddles by which 

 we are surrounded" (cited from Radl, '30, 

 pp. 126-127), is less reprehensible than their 

 uncritical acceptance by the professional 

 embryologists, who swallowed them with as 

 much gullibility, and who remained utterly 

 unperturbed by the fact that Haeckel him- 

 self was never in any sense a professional 

 embryologist. The seduction of embryology 

 by a fanatic who expressed himself even 

 metaphorically in terms of magic represents 

 a darker chapter in its history than any of 

 its earlier or later retreats to mere meta- 

 physics lacking such taint of the mystic. 



Deplorably enough, the record of many of 

 our "modern" textbooks is none too pure 

 with respect to the biogenetic law. But there 

 is no space here for a modern critique of the 

 doctrine (for brief statements of the modern 

 position see Shumway, '32, and de Beer, '51); 

 what is relevant here at the moment is not 

 so much Haeckel's rightness or wrongness 

 as the magnitude of his influence. It was 

 considerable, and acted as a delaying rather 

 than an activating force; and it was stifling 

 to immediate progress, since embryologists 

 were for many years after to examine em- 

 bryos primarily to establish evidence of phy- 



logenetic relationship. This was not wholly 

 detrimental, of course; like the earlier tran- 

 scendentalism this gave a strong incentive 

 for looking at embryos, and many accurate 

 observational data were collected which were 

 later to stand embryology in good stead; but 

 progress in terms of new concepts was neces- 

 sarily impeded. Balfour specified the task, 

 prescribed the fashion, set the standard 

 (1880, I, 4-5): 



To test how far Comparative Embryology brings 

 to light ancestral forms common to the whole of the 

 Metazoa. . . . 



How far . . . larval forms may be interpreted 

 as the ancestral type. . . . 



How far such forms agree with living or fossil 

 forms in the adult state. . . . 



How far organs appear in the embryo or larva 

 which either atrophy or become fimctionless in the 

 adult state, and which persist permanently in mem- 

 bers of some other group or in lower members of 

 the same group. . . . 



How far organs pass in the course of their devel- 

 opment through a condition permanent in some 

 lower form. . . . 



Balfour himself acknowledged another de- 

 partment of embryology concerned with the 

 origin of organs and germ layers and tissues, 

 but to this he devoted only a quarter of his 

 great treatise; many of his contemporaries 

 more fully ignored it, and advance had to 

 wait until the furor over Darwin and re- 

 capitulation had subsided. The degree to 

 which evolutionary relationships dominated 

 embryology is nowhere better shown than 

 by the results of the few cases where investi- 

 gators attempted to pursue other paths, and 

 failed in influence. 



Leuckart and Bergmann had, in fact, sev- 

 eral years before the publication of the 

 Origin of Species, already set the programme 

 for a new embryology (1851; cited from 

 1855, p. 36): 



Ebenso wie man gegenwartig strebt, die Com- 

 bination von Wirkungen zu ermitteln, auf welcher 

 erne bestimmte Krystallform oder die Bildung und 

 Umbildung der Zelle beruht, so wird man sich auch 

 Wege zu eroffnen suchen, um die bewirkenden 

 Ursachen der Anordnung der Organe zu ermitteln: 

 man wird eine Physiologie der Plastik dereinst 

 anstreben. 



But the few who had the originality, during 

 the nineteenth century, to attempt to work 

 out a "physiology of the plastic" were 

 doomed to failure. Lereboullet made an at- 

 tempt to do so, in France (cf. Oppenheimer, 

 '36), where he could do so in part because 

 of the dominating spirit of Cuvier, who, like 

 von Baer, emphasized animals rather than 



