202 HAECKEL 



tails. Professional philosophers have written 

 whole libraries on them. The matter recalls a 

 fundamental defect in academic philosophy : it 

 has little or no sympathy with real scientific 

 work ; in fact, it studiously avoids such sympathy 

 in the consciousness of its own weakness. Hence 

 it has, like every other layman with general inter- 

 ests, to wait for attempts to popularise scientific 

 work before it can know what is going on 

 in the serious camp. The man who wants to-day 

 to criticise the mechanical conception of nature 

 should first make himself acquainted with these 

 chapters of the Morphology. How many know 

 the mere title of the work? How many even 

 of those who evince great hostility whenever 

 Haeckel's name is mentioned? 



The book contains much more than the metho- 

 dological introduction. This only takes up the first 

 hundred pages, but it contains the whole pro- 

 gramme. We start off, therefore, under full sail 

 for a new epoch of thought, for natural philosophy ; 

 but we must keep an alert mind. The deeper 

 task, that Darwin only gave the means of accom- 

 plishing, was to reduce all living things, animal 

 or vegetal, to the inorganic. The laws of life 

 must be merely certain complications of the 

 simple laws that are encountered directly in 

 chemistry and physics, and rule throughout 

 nature. It must be one of the first aims of a 

 general philosophic morphology to open out a 

 path in this direction. 



The living and what is called the " dead " must 



