DARWINISM AND EVOLUTION 39 



Haeckel has been confusing Darwinism with the 

 theory of evolution, and his reason for so doing, 

 as he stated in his address on Monism as a 

 Bond of Union between Religion and Science, 

 is that Darwin s Theory of Selection supplied 

 him with the only means of explaining orderly 

 action in nature without assuming a designing 

 or ordering Creator. But in the first of his Berlin 

 lectures in 1905 he expresses another view, and on 

 page 20 of his book entitled The Struggle con 

 cerning the Idea of Evolution we read : 



It is the theory of Selection, which supplies a causal 

 explanation of the processes attending the formation of 

 species, that should, strictly speaking, be described as 

 Darwinism. How far this theory of selection can be 

 justified, and how far it is liable to modification by other 

 theories, such, for instance, as Weismann s Germ-plasm 

 theory, or de Vries s theory of mutations, we cannot dis 

 cuss at the present moment. 



He did not discuss it in his subsequent lectures, 

 and I can only account for this by supposing that 

 Haeckel has finally seen that if we do not limit 

 Darwinism to the theory of selection, we shall have 

 to let the name go altogether and therefore he 

 prefers to say no more on the subject. But the 

 word Darwinism is still commonly used in the 

 earlier sense, and men s ideas continue to be con 

 fused. I have, I think, said enough to prove that 

 we are perfectly justified in demanding a clear 

 distinction between Darwinism in the narrower 

 sense and the theory of evolution. 



