WHAT LIFE IS 5 



constituting, an old-fashioned superstition. That such a view 

 is not uncommon may be shown by a few extracts from scien- 

 tific writers of some eminence. 



The well-known German biologist Ernst Haeckel, in a recent 

 work, makes the following statement : 



" The peculiar phenomenon of consciousness is not, as Du Bois- 

 Eeymond and the dualistic school would have us believe, a com- 

 pletely transcendental problem ; it is, as I showed thirty-three years 

 ago, a physiological problem, and, as such, must be reduced to the 

 phenomena of physics and chemistry " (The Eiddle of the Uni- 

 verse, p. 65, translated by Joseph M'Cabe). 



Again he says : 



" The two fundamental forms of substance, ponderable matter 

 and ether, are not dead, and only moved by extrinsic force, but they 

 are endowed with sensation and will (although, naturally, of the 

 lowest grade) ; they experience an inclination for condensation, a 

 dislike of strain; they strive after the one and struggle against the 

 other'' (p. 78). 



In these two passages we have a self-contradiction in mean- 

 ing if not in actual words. In the first, he reduces conscious- 

 ness to phenomena of physics and chemistry ; in the second 

 he declares that both matter and ether possess sensation and 

 will. But in another passage he says he conceives ^^ the ele- 

 mentary psychic qualities of sensation and will which may be 

 attributed to atoms to be unconscious" (p. 64). 



It is this quite unintelligible theory of matter and ether 

 possessing sensation and will, being able to strive and struggle 

 and yet be unconscious, which enables him to say: 



"We hold with Goethe that matter cannot exist and be oper- 

 ative without spirit, nor spirit without matter. We adhere firmly 

 to the pure, unequivocal monism of Spinoza : Matter, or infinitely 

 extended substance, and Spirit (or Energy), or sensitive and think- 

 ing substance, are the two fundamental attributes, or principal 

 properties, of the all-embracing essence of the world, the universal 

 substance" (p. 8). 



