160 HAECKEL 



falls — falls into a line that has nothing in common 

 with the ideal struggle of the really free and 

 liberating thought of humanity. We come to the 

 great salto mortale, which one must see from 1863 

 onward in order to understand the Virchow of 1877. 



The passage is the more interesting as it refers 

 to one of the chief stages in the development of 

 HaeckeFs mind. The conception of man as a cell- 

 state, established by Virchow in so masterly a 

 fashion, involved a very curious conclusion. This 

 conclusion, however we take it, came so close to 

 the roots of every philosophy that it justified 

 Schleiden to some extent when he protested that 

 the whole cell-state theory was a philosophical 

 element. 



If the human body is composed of millions 

 of cells ; if all the processes and functions, the 

 whole life of the body in Virchow's sense, are 

 merely the sum of the vital processes and functions 

 of these millions of individual cells; is not what 

 we call '^ the soul " really the product of the 

 millions upon millions of separate souls of these 

 cells ? Is not man's soul merely the state-soul, 

 the general spirit of this gigantic complex of 

 tiny cell-souls ? The lowest living things we 

 spoke of, which consist of a single cell, showed 

 unmistakable signs of having a psychic life. 

 There was nothing to prevent us from thinking 

 that in the combination of these various cells 

 into communities each of them brought with 

 it its little psychic individuality. And just as 

 the individual bodies of the cells combined ex- 



