DARWIN 135 



unite in ardent prayer and the making of vows, 

 she will be appeased and do it. Every hair on a 

 man's head is twofold ; there is the natural hair 

 and a hair that can at any moment be changed, 

 transformed, annihilated, or created afresh from 

 nothing, by divine power. The man who has 

 lived in this atmosphere of practical Dualism for 

 years must be saturated to his innermost being 

 with a feeling of the absolute contradiction 

 between this conception of God and nature and 

 Goethe's philosophy. If he is to follow Goethe, 

 this ancient extramundane, ever-interfering Deity 

 must be given up without the least attempt at 

 compromise. 



Thus Haeckel's position was incomparably more 

 radical than Darwin's from the very first. He no 

 longer believed in a Creator, either in whole or 

 part. 



He asked himself, therefore, how he could now 

 explain certain things in nature. He had learned 

 from the great Johannes Miiller that species were 

 unchangeable, and it was impossible to conceive 

 the spontaneous generation of the living from the 

 dead. The essence, the predominant element 

 of the living thing was the mysterious, purposive 

 " vital force." The first of these three ideas of 

 the master's to be surrendered entirely by him was 

 the vital force. Even in Muller's lifetime, and in 

 his own laboratory, so to say, his pupil, Du Bois- 

 Eeymond, made the first great breach in the 

 doctrine with his famous study of animal 

 electricity, a really pioneer piece of work, especially 



