EARLY YOUTH 41 



and there the flanks open and the stream beconies 

 visible ; not a restless bubbling spring, but a broad 

 mirror. There is, however, a closer following of 

 Goethe. There are a few strong spirits that have 

 been consciously inspired by him from the first 

 in all their thoughts ; have throughout life felt 

 themselves to be the apostles of the ^'gospel of 

 Goethe " ; and in every new creation of their own 

 have held that they did but reflect or expand 

 his ideas, did but carry on his principles to these 

 further conclusions. Haeckel is, in his whole 

 work, one of this smaller band ; his whole person- 

 ality is, in fact, one of its most conspicuous 

 manifestations in the second half of the century. 



In Goethe we find the basic ideas of his philo- 

 sophy. Goethe took from him his God, and gave 

 him a new one : took from him the external, 

 transcendental God of the Churches, and gave 

 him the God that is in all things, in the eternal 

 development of the world, in body and soul alike, 

 the God that embraces all reality and being, 

 beside whom there is no distinct '^ world," no 

 distinct " sinful man," no special beginning or 

 end of things. When Haeckel found himself, at 

 the highest point of his own path, by the side of 

 Darwin, he was the first to see and to insist that 

 Darwin was but a stage in the logical development 

 of Goethe's ideas. 



Fate decided that Haeckel should be even 

 externally in some sense an heir of the Goethe 

 epoch. Jena, the university that Goethe had 

 regarded with such afiection, and at which Schiller 



