LUCRETIUS AND HAECKEL 1 27 



kind of embryonic slumber or latent life) ; it was taken out by a bird 

 (sometimes represented as an eagle, generally as a white stork), and 

 implanted in the human body. 



" The myth of the creation of the soul. — God creates the souls, and 

 keeps them stored — sometimes in a pond (Hving in the form of plank- 

 ton), according to other myths in a tree (where they are conceived 

 as the fruit of a phanerogam) ; the Creator takes them from the pond 

 or tree, and inserts them in the human germ during the act of concep- 

 tion."^ 



III. As TO THE Form of the Soul in its Immortal Existence after 

 THE Death of the Body 



a) That it has a more or less incorporeal, but still material, nature. 

 Haeckel, with a by no means winning flippancy, insists that such an 

 entity is essentially gaseous, and inasmuch as practically all gases 

 have been reduced to Hquids, it should be possible to Hquefy the soul 

 by the appHcation of a high pressure at low temperature.^ "We 

 could then catch the soul as it is breathed out at the moment of death, 

 condense and exhibit it in a bottle as 'immortal fluid ' (Fluidum animae 

 immortale). By a further lowering of temperature and increase of 

 pressure it might be possible to solidify it — to produce 'soul snow.' 

 The experiment has not yet succeeded." Lucretius^ insists that if 

 the soul is to have a conscious existence — that is, if it can feel — it 

 must be provided with the organs of sense. "Painters therefore and 

 former generations of writers have thus represented souls provided 

 with senses. But neither eyes nor nose nor hand can exist for the 

 soul apart from the body; nor can tongue, nor can ears perceive by 

 the sense of hearing or exist for the soul by themselves apart from the 

 body. " That Haeckel also maintains the absolute necessity for mate- 

 rial instruments of feeling need only be recalled. 



b) That the soul is still clothed with the body it had in hfe. This 

 conception is dismissed by Haeckel as pure dogma. "The impos- 

 sibility of 'the resurrection of the body' is clear to every man who 



' WR., 135. 



" WR., 199-201. This sort of trifling, conscious as it is, seems to me quite as puerile as the uncon- 

 scious humor of Lucretius when he thinks that worms generated in our dead bodies may receive their life from 

 some of the "soul-stuff" still remaining therein. Cj. De R. N ., HI, 713 seq. 



3 De R. N., in, 624-633. 



