198 HAECKEL 



to-day by this anti-Darwinian but professedly 

 mechanical school. His individual error can only 

 have been that he was deceived as to the true 

 course of the line, and so clung to Darwinism. 

 However, we have said enough on this point. 



Haeckel himself, at the time he was producing 

 his greatest work, saw in Darwin the absolute 

 " open Sesame " to all the doors of philosophic 

 morphology. With this Sesame came an entirely 

 new impulse, namely, to write the natural history 

 of the animal and plant form. It was just the 

 same as when aesthetics perceives a new world, 

 a world that alone is worthy of it, the moment it 

 passes from the making of a mere catalogue of the 

 world's art-treasures to the knowledge of even one 

 single law of artistic creation, in virtue of which 

 one single work of art has been actually built up. 



It is impossible to begin with more general 

 considerations than this book does. The method 

 of scientific research generally is explained in 

 order to give an idea of the new Darwinian mor- 

 phology. With a calmness that must have made 

 most of the contemporary zoologists and botanists 

 shiver, the discredited idea of natural philosophy is 

 restored from the lumber-room. " All true science 

 is philosophy, and all true philosophy is science. 

 And in this sense all true science is natural 

 philosophy." 



The various periods in the development of 

 morphology are coolly schematised. These epochs 

 are characterised by the vicissitudes of the struggle 

 between the simple description of forms in the 



