132 HAECKEL 



Man himself owing his origin neither to God nor 

 the finger of God, but to natural selection in the 

 ordinary course of natural laws ! It was not to be 

 thought of. Hence the phrase was struck out, as 

 quite too extravagant, in his otherwise admirable 

 work. 



Bronn had himself become something of a 

 revolutionary amongst his colleagues by the 

 translation. The rigidly ^' exact " workers crossed 

 themselves before the Germanised work. Most of 

 the " evolutionists " in the older sense had by no 

 means the bonhomie to speak even of a ''possi- 

 bility^' like the patriarch Bronn. From the first 

 Darwin was — Haeckel was the first to experi- 

 ence it — branded with the anathemas of the two 

 opposite schools of science in Germany. On the 

 one hand the rigorous and exact workers declared 

 that his teaching was pure metaphysics, because 

 it sought to prove evolution and contemplated 

 vast ideal connections. On the other hand the 

 Dualist metaphysicians denounced him as an 

 empiric of the worst character, who sought to 

 replace the great ideal elements in the world by 

 a few miserable natural necessities. It is 

 significant to find that Schopenhauer, the brilliant 

 thinker, regarded the Origin of Species as one of 

 the empirical soapsud or barber books produced 

 by exact investigation, which he thoroughly 

 despised from his metaphysical point of view. 

 And there were already (there are more to-day) 

 whole schools of zoology and botany that looked 

 upon Darwin's theoretical explanations as un- 



