Scientific Evolution. 145 



materialism may be cited Professor Haeckel's History 

 of Creation. 



Professor Haeckel is a very instructive writer, because 

 his zeal for materialistic pantheism is so fiery that it 

 hurries him sometimes into antitheistic deductions from sup- 

 posed facts which later investigations prove to have been 

 fictions (e.g., the supposed organism Bathybius Haeckelii, 

 too probably but a sea mare's-nest, discovered by Professor 

 Huxley, and appropriately named by him after his German 

 alter ego), sometimes into a ludicrously exaggerated esti- 

 mate of the philosophical or theological consequences of 

 elementary truths ; e.g., those of development. 



This writer tells us (vol. i., p. 179) : " The soul of man, 

 just as the soul of animals, is a purely mechanical activity, 

 the sum of molecular phenomena of motion in the particles 

 of the brain." Again he is translated as saying (p. 237) : 

 " The widely spread dogma of the freedom of the will is 

 from a scientific point of view altogether untenable ; every 

 physiologist who scientifically investigates the activity of 

 the will, must of necessity arrive at the conviction that 

 in reality the will is never free, but is always determined 

 by external or internal influences." 



The animus of the author and his freedom from 

 prejudice in judging is made manifest by the praise 

 he gives to Mr. Darwin's hypothesis for its antitheistic 

 tendency, and by mentioning (p. 115) "as a special merit 

 of Lamarck, that he endeavoured to prove the development 



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