8 THE WORLD OF LIFE 



there lyiay be other universes besides ours; but if so, they may 

 l^ossibly be different from ours — not of matter and ether only. 

 To assert the contrary, as Ilaeckel does so confidently, is surely 

 not science, and very bad philosophy. 



He further implies, and even expressly states, that there is 

 no spirit-world at all ; that if life exists in other worlds it must 

 be material, physical life; and that, as all worlds move in 

 cycles of development, maturity, and destruction, all life must 

 go through the same phases — that this has gone on from all 

 eternity past, and will go on for all eternity to come, with no 

 past and no future possible, but the continual rise of life up to 

 a certain limited grade, which life is always doomed to extinct 

 tion. And it is claimed that this eternal succession of futile 

 cycles of chance development and certain extinction is, as an 

 interpretation of nature, to be preferred to any others ; and 

 especially to those which recognise mind as superior to matter, 

 which see in the development of the human intellect the prom- 

 ise of a future life, and which have in our own day found a 

 large mass of evidence justifying that belief. 



With Professor HaeckeFs dislike of the dogmas of theo- 

 logians, and their claims to absolute knowledge of the nature 

 and attributes of the inscrutable mind that is the power within 

 and behind and around nature, many of us have the greatest 

 sympathy ; but we have none with his unfounded dogmatism 

 of combined negation and omniscience, and more especially 

 when this assumption of superior knowledge seems to be put 

 forward to conceal his real ignorance of the nature of life 

 itself. He evades altogether any attempt to solve the various 

 difficult problems of nutrition, assimilation, and growth, some 

 of which, in the case of birds and insects, I shall endeavour 

 to set forth as clearly as possible in the present volume. As 

 Professor Weismann well puts it, the causes and mechanism 

 by which it comes about that the infinitely varied materials 

 of which organisms are built up ^' are always in the right 

 place, and develop into cells at the right time," are never 

 touched upon in the various theories of heredity that have been 



