264 HAECKEL 



a subject of scientific inquiry. Haeckel proceeds 

 to this further task. His panorama of nature does 

 not stand out rigidly before us ; it develops, under 

 the eyes of the observer, from the formless nebula 

 to the intelligent human being. Even on the 

 surface this was seen to be a prodigious advance. 

 Very plain, but very attractive, it makes its way 

 by the force of its convincing dialectic, and places 

 no reliance on the fireworks of rhetoric. The 

 subtle power of it lies in the arrangement of the 

 facts, which suddenly assume the form of a logical 

 chain instead of being a shapeless chaos. Even if 

 all the main ideas of the work were false, we should 

 be compelled to regard it as one of the cleverest 

 works that was ever written, from the dialectical 

 point of view. But the essence of this cleverness 

 is the way in which the grouping of the facts is 

 made to yield the philosophic evolution, which is 

 the thoughtful basis of the work. As the world 

 proceeds in its natural development from the 

 nebular cosmic raw-material until it culminates in 

 the ape and man, the reader finds himself at the 

 same time advancing along a series of general 

 philosophic conclusions with regard to God, the 

 world, and man. If at the end he has retained the 

 whole series of what are to him more or less new 

 scientific details, he is bound to find himself caught 

 in a strong net of philosophic conclusions. 



In view of all this we can easily understand the 

 different reception that the book met with from 

 friend and foe. People who had already assented to 

 the main issues of the work on general grounds of 



