212 HAECKEL 



problems spring up for morphology to deal with; 

 it must make its way through the labyrinth of 

 these complicated types of individualisation. 



The matter is still more intricate if I begin 

 at the bottom of the biological series and proceed 

 upwards. I, man, am an individual of a certain 

 stage in my own collective activity. It is true 

 that I am made up of millions of cell-individuals, 

 but when we look at the whole these are merely 

 elementary units. But take a being from the 

 protist-world that is too lowly to be either animal 

 or plant. In respect of its whole activity it is an 

 individual just as much as I am, and therefore 

 in this regard at the same stage as I. At the 

 same time it consists of a single cell. The dis- 

 tinction in me between unit and whole does not 

 exist in it. Its unit is the whole. It would seem 

 a Sisyphean task to reduce all this to a system. 



Yet that is just what Haeckel has done. 



With crystalline clearness he separates and 

 reunites and arranges everything, from the 

 primitive organic individual, that is not yet a 

 true cell — the monera he had himself discovered 

 — upward. Organic morphology begins with them 

 as its first object, the first complete individuality, 

 the first " form." All that hes below it is beyond 

 the province of morphology. The last conceivable 

 organic individuality is, perhaps, the atom ; and 

 that is not the concern of morphology. We start 

 from the organic. Above the pre-cellular indivi- 

 duals and the true cells the next form-unities are 

 the organs. Above the organs, after a few subtle 



