74 HAECKEL 



and movement to the floor of his mind. Rudolf 

 Virchow was the coolest, boldest, and clearest- 

 minded of the group. He went to the opposite 

 extreme. If Muller was standing on a volcano, 

 which he only repressed by the giant force of his 

 will a nature that was above all master of itself 

 Virchow, on the contrary, was standing on a 

 glacier, and he had never taken the trouble to 

 conceal it. I should not venture to count him 

 amongst the instinctively Monistic minds, in the 

 sense of Goethe, to whom the unity of God and 

 nature, the inorganic and the organic, the animal 

 and the man, comes as an ardent and irresistible 

 feeling. But it would have been strange if, in 

 those years and in the middle of the whole scien- 

 tific current of his time, his own organ, his icy 

 logic, had not led him to the same conclusion ; 

 that it is a simpler method of research to 

 believe in natural law alone, to regard the living 

 merely as a complex play of the same forces that 

 we have in physics and chemistry, and to consider 

 man, with the bodily frame of an ape-like mammal, 

 to be really such an animal. I believe, indeed, that 

 Virchow never abandoned this simple solution in 

 his own mind at any part of his career. The con- 

 troversy he afterwards engaged in ran on diSerent 

 lines. It seems to me that at an early stage of 

 his development he became convinced that there 

 must be limits to scientific inquiry, not on logical, 

 but on diplomatic grounds ; because it is not an 

 absolute agency, but only a relatively small force 

 amongst many more powerful institutions, th( 



