42 Prof. Ernst HaecM. 



final results over every known domain, must result in a sci- 

 entific faith. 



This scientific faith, or faith according to knowledge, is 

 certainly the rising faith of mankind. It received its solid, 

 everlasting foundation when Copernicus, Bruno, and Gali- 

 leo gave us the true solar system, which revealed to us a 

 new earth and a new heaven, and consequently a new 

 philosophy, finally to lead to this new religion. From Des- 

 cartes, Spinoza, Bacon, and Diderot, Goethe received this 

 new world of science, barren and forlorn, as it rose out of 

 the chaos of the French revolution. He was the first great 

 creative and furnishing soul that fully moved into it to 

 stay. He peopled it with enduring and even human char- 

 acters, sowed the seed to cover the naked landscape with use 

 and beauty, and made the very clouds glow with a light that 

 foretold a higher heaven than Iramanity had ever dreamed. 



Haeckel is fond of quoting Goethe ; and well he may be. 

 As we recede in time, the distance brings out, mountain- 

 like, the true height of this poet-prophet of the new faith 

 of the new era. We begin to see how he, in science, had a 

 sure prevision of the results of our evolution ; in politics, 

 he discounted the French revolution and the metaphysical 

 anarchy of his and even of our time ; in religion, he rightly 

 estimated all the theologies, and sung the emancipation of 

 erring man (Faust), from the very devil to whom he had 

 sold himself, and the conquest of a heaven of ever-increas- 

 ing progress and blessedness by his own victorious striving 

 to accomplish the good. In a wonderful poem called In- 

 heritance ( Vermdchtniss) Goethe expressly dates the new 

 era from " the sage who showed the earth to circle around 

 the sun and taught her sister orbs their paths." 



These triumphs of astronomy, followed by similar prog- 

 ress in physics and chemistry, made sure the material 

 foundation of the scientific faith at the close of the last 

 century. Our century opened with the great triumphs in 

 biology, or the organic world, led by Oken, Goethe, and 

 especially the unappreciated Lamarck. They laid the foun- 

 dation of the new faith in the vital world, upon which Dar- 

 win and Haeckel have well-nigh completed the structure. 

 From Lamarck's Philosophic Zoologique (1809) Haeckel 

 quotes this biological foundation in a useful summary, as 

 follows (History of Creation, vol. i, p. 112) : 



" The systematic division of classes, orders, families, 

 genera, and species, as well as their designations, are the 



