254 HACKEL'S 



and the Divine Spirit everywhere acting therein, we 

 lose, it is true, the hypothesis of a Personal Creator, 

 but we gain instead of it the undoubtedly far more 

 elevated and perfect idea of a divine spirit penetrating 

 and filling the universe. According to our conviction, 

 this idea (consistently carried out !) is alone able to 

 reconcile the still existing opposition between Realism 

 and Idealism, Materialism and Spiritualism, and to 

 fuse them together in the far higher conception of 

 Monism."* And if people will call him a pantheist 



* There is a vague grandeur about this sentence -which is imposing 

 at first sight, but, on closer inspection, there is little real meaning in 

 it. For what does he mean by spirit and spiritual ? In explanation 

 lie quotes from Goethe, " Matter can never exist and be active without 

 spirit, nor spirit without matter." Now this appeal is quite useless, as 

 the true nature of force was not known to Gfoethe, and the meaning 

 of his " spirit" is probably a vague compound of what is really force, 

 and of an allusion to the immateriality of every action, including life 

 and mind. Hackel also appeals to the authority of August Schleicher 

 (" Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft," 1863), from 

 whom he quotes a sentence containing these words " There exists no- 

 matter without spirit (without the necessity determining it), but just 

 as little does there exist spirit without matter or rather, there exists 

 neither spirit nor matter in the ordinary sense, but only one, which is 

 both at the same time. To brand this view, which rests on observa- 

 tion, with the epithet materialism, is just as perverse as it would be to 

 impeach it as spiritualism." Here, we perceive, by that little paren- 

 thesis, that " spirit" means simply the inherent properties of matter. 

 Truly, there is nothing new under the sun ; but who would have 

 thought of a revival of the " essences" of the ancients as a way for the 

 modern German Pantheists to get out of the reproach of materialism ? 

 Hackel's own use of the word spirit (Greist) in other places is equally 

 fatal to the apparent meaning of the above paragraph. For instance, 

 the expression, " We know no matter without this Divine Spirit, and na 

 spirit without matter," he explains away in the " Grenerelle Mor- 

 phologie " (bk. ii. 449) thus : " We know a spiritless matter i.e., 

 matter without force just as little as an immaterial spirit i.e., a force 

 without matter." His idea of " spirit" is, therefore, simply " force," 

 and he comments on the incongruity and absurdity into which people 

 fall when they attempt to imagine an "immaterial force," such as 

 spirit, soul, vital principle, creative force, and so forth, for, in fact, 

 what they picture to themselves is, after all, something material, such 

 as gas, imponderable matter like heat, or light, or the eether, &c. And 



