46 Prof. Ernst Haechel. 



gressive tlian tlie old principle of authority. It can never 

 agree upon any proposition for social reform but not to 

 do it. Rights are fatally divorced from duties. 



But there is a third view and spirit in regard to social 

 and political affairs— a spirit of science, which breathesfrom 

 tfie works of the great men we have named. That _ spirit is 

 evolutionarv. It is integrative and yet differentiative, con- 

 servative and yet progressive— laying the sure foundation of 

 the real liberty and welfare of the individual in the social, 

 integrative order, which, no matter what the form of govern- 

 ment, can alone make such liberty and welfare possible. 

 Take, for instance, Goethe's remarkable letter from the Dorn- 

 berg Castle in 1828, to which we have referred, on the cTeath 

 of the Duke, upon the administration of the little world of 

 the Duchy of Weimar, and compare its far-reaching Musdom, 

 resting upon the continuity and solidarity of society, vrith 

 the shallowness of the French social philosophy of that day 

 or of our current metaphysical anarchism. Or do the same 

 with the sociology of Comte— excepting, of course, his pa- 

 pistic Utopia, which belongs only to the past polity of the ^ 

 Latin races, as to which he was misled, largely by De Mais- 

 tre's work on the Pope. 



Then turn to the latter part of Haeckel's Freedomof 

 Science and Teaching, and see how under the scientific 

 spirit he, too, preserves the integrative and the differenti- 

 ative sides of social progress, and refuses to be driven into 

 anarchy by the taunts of Virchow, who evidently sought in 

 that way to compass his destruction. Ilaeckcl had never 

 the time to study deeply history, law, statesmanship, or poli- 

 tics, yet his scientific "instinct and spirit enabled him to 

 apply in sociology the law of biology; that true progress 

 in the social, as "in the animal, world must be an ever-in- 

 creasing integration of the functions of organs ever increas- 

 ing in their freedom of individual action. This law, stated 

 by fJoethc fifty years ago and quoted from him by our Carey 

 as the basis of his great work on Social Science, is just as 

 true of a jelly-fish as of an elephant— of a Roman Empire 

 as of a mail fit is true of every social organism ; of tlie Re- 

 public of tlie United States, or of tlie Republic of the World ! 

 If some intimation of this law could reach our anarchistic 

 reformers, how soon their metaphysical bubbles would col- 

 lapse ! 



Finally.— It we turn to the treatment of the religions 

 progress " of mankind under this scientific spirit of evolu- 



