54 Prof. Ernst Haechel. 



ant and helpful intercourse with him in matters of science and reform. 

 We all recognize in him a worthy representative— may we not almost 

 say, in view of his advanced years, survivor ?— successor, certainly, of 

 Iluygens and the great physicists and discoverers, who have made his 

 native Holland glorious as the nursery and home of science and liberty. 

 liis remarks this evening have not only been in the line of ray lecture, 

 but his charts and drawings have made evolution visible to the eye and 

 mind at once, and so have done what no lecture otherwise could. 



But what shall I say of my two opposing critics, Dr. Eccles and Dr. 

 Janes f Fortunately, by taking the last first, they help to explain the 

 lecture, and to extinguish each other. 



Dr. Janes, for instance, well confirms all I said about the great va- 

 riety of limited and incomplete evolutionists ; and he joins with me in ' 

 placing Prof. Haeckel in the front rank as a naturalist and philosopher. 

 That the lecture was " inadequate " may be true, for the whole of a 

 new system of philosophy and religion could hardly be adequately pre- 

 sented in one lecture, and I claim to deserve well of you that I did not 

 further try to insert in it the •' whole world and the rest of mankind.'' 



Whether wliat I did insert is -'correct" or not must not be left to 

 critics prepossessed by opposite views, but to an impartial view of the 

 wliole field. I was trying to see how the science, philosophy, and re- 

 ligion of positive monism, or monistic positivism — either will do— could 

 be held iij its extreme and most thorough statement, and without re- 

 gard to captious and verbal objections which could be picked out of 

 Haeckel or any master. I am familiar with all those clauses the doctor 

 has cited, and thiid< they amount to nothing but the using of Ilaeckel's 

 words in an anti-monistic sense. For instance, ho invokes " The Rela- 

 tivity of Knowledge." Yes, certainly ; but relative to what f Why, 

 as the rest of the sentence shows, "to our senses and brains," the 

 human mind ; as all monists say : but not at all to any " unknowable 

 entity." Then the doctor mistakenly makes me say that life or con- 

 sciousness is a " by-play of nature." No expression could be more 

 anti-monistic. Nature, as Goethe and Haeckel tcacli, has no by-plays 

 nor inside nor out. Life, mind, and the Ego are the outilowcring cor- 

 relate and glory of all nature, and no by-play at all ! But for that 

 very reason they can not be a constant, universal, eternal " ingredient " 

 in nature- any more tlian the flower and fragnince of the plant are 

 - ingredients in its roots, or the earth out of which it grows. Of course, 

 we also say: " Mental power and corporeal substance are inseparable." 

 But this substance is no unknowable entity or spook, but the prior 

 correlations from which mental action is the caused and causal se- 

 quence. 

 The doctor then makes a fog by confounding what Goethe, Haeckel, 



