Prof. Ernst Haeckel 55 



and other poets and philosophers have said about matter being " alive." 

 This he does by overlooking the distinction between the spontaneous 

 motion, or " life," of 'inorganic matter, and the vital and psychic life 

 found only in organized matter i. e., protoplasm. Goethe, Haeckel, 

 Carus, and the rest of them are constantly comparing these very dis- 

 parate processes ; but no one now, with a bit of sense left, ever really 

 confounds them. They are compared for poetic piirposes, as Goethe 

 does artistically and avowedly, or for pseudo-religious purposes, as 

 some modern .theological " apologists " do. Dr. Carus (Fundamental 

 Problems, pp. Ill, 114, 128, 130, etc.) thus states the proper distinction, 

 made by common sense every time : " We must well distinguish this 

 kind of life in a broader sense (which is an inherent quality of matter) 

 from the vegetable and animal organisms. The former is elementary 

 and eternal ; the latter is complex and unstable, because produced by 

 a combination of the former. Spontaneity is an inherent quality in 

 all matter, and if spontaneously moving bodies have to be called 

 'alive,' we must acknowledge that nature throughout is alive. . . . 

 The word life, however, as commonly understood, is applied to or- 

 ganized life only. . . . The essential difference is the absence of or- 

 ganic growth and psychic life in one, and its presence in the other.'' 

 Then he speaks of " all organized and psychic life as evolved from 

 the general life of the universe," and he adds that a " psychic life, con- 

 sidered as foreign to our world," is the " corner-stone of dualism." 



This is the monistic view, and Dr. Carus expressly states in The 

 Open Court of March 13, 1890, after a personal interview with Prof. 

 Haeekel at Jena, that this professor agrees with this version of monism, 

 and not with agnosticism at all.* 



Now, all this is stated by monists to refute and rule out " the un- 

 knowable, substantial, inscrutable reality " which Dr. Janes gives us 

 from Mr. Spencer, and which on one side, Spencer and he say, gives us 

 matter, and, on the other side, mind. But as correlation does the 

 whole business, whence comes this fifth wheel, " inscrutable," and what 

 for t And being inscrutable, how do we know that it has sides and 

 gives us matter or mind or anything else t It can not be the correlate 



* Dr. Paul Carus, in The Open Court of March 13, 1890. says : "Prof. Ernst 

 Haeckel is again and again erroneously quoted as an authority in support of ag- 

 nosticism. When I visited him in Jena last summer he very warmly expressed 

 his sympathy with the attitude of The Open Court for taking such a decided and 

 unmistakable stand against the ignorabimus (we can not know) of agnosticism. 

 He called my attention in this connection to his own controversies with Virchow 

 and Du Bois-Reymond (especially Freie Wissenschaft und Freie Lehre)." 



The first number of The Open Court, page 17, contains the following quotation 

 from Haeckel without reference : 



" I believe that my monistic convictions agree in all essential points with that 

 natural philosophy which in England is represented as agnosticism. ..." 



Prof. Haeckel declared that he did not remember ever having written a sen- 

 tence to that purport, and I come to the conclusion that there is something wrong 

 about the quotation. 



