THE CROWNING YEARS 295 



earlier chapters that the most dignified and dis- 

 dainful of Haeckers opponents have been the 

 academic philosophers. In the year 1905 a Berlin 

 professor of philosophy, a stern critic of his 

 system, devotes a long special section of his 

 History of Philosophy since Kant to Haeckel and 

 his long-contemned speculations. Why? Because, 

 to quote his concluding sentences, '* the far- 

 reaching impulse that Haeckel has given will never 

 more die out. He has become a sower of the 

 future. The glad echo that his words have found 

 in a hundred thousand breasts must stir every 

 representative of ruling power in Church and 

 Science to make a closer self-examination, a closer 

 scrutiny of received ideas. Does not the thought 

 press irresistibly upon us that somehow or other 

 we have entered upon the wrong path in our 

 modern development ? " * 



In an earlier chapter Professor Bolsche tells the 

 moving story of the writing of the General Morph- 

 ology : the young man making his masterly appeal 

 to the scientists of Germany, which he thinks they 

 will read over his grave. There is a singular par- 

 allel to this in HaeckeFs attitude at the time when 

 Bolsche closed his work. Haeckel had just written 

 another *'last will and testament," another proud 

 and defiant utterance of what he felt to be the 

 truth about Grod and man and nature. Once more 

 he seemed to see the marble gates at the close of 

 his career, and his sombre glance fell round on a 



* Dr. Otto Gramzow's Geschichte der PJiilosophie. seit Kant, 

 p. 503. 



