THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863
In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Oken had inspired the
formation of large public gatherings of German naturalists and
physicians. Oken was one of the advanced thinkers who felt that all
technical science was in the end only preparatory to the great work of
educating the people. In his opinion the naturalist, even if he spent
his whole life in investigating the filaments of plants or the limbs of
insects, was a pioneer of culture. In any case these gatherings were a
very good practical move at the time. In a time of terrible reaction on
all sides a feeling came at last even to the recluse of science that,
besides the technical value of his work, it ought to do something
towards lifting his fellows out of the rut they were falling into. They
felt that if all ideals were going to be lost, the ultimate aim of
special research would perish with them. Oken took up a position of
democratic opposition. He was soon joined by Alexander von Humboldt,
who, with the same feeling at heart, gave the work a certain polish of
scientific and impartial dignity. There are features of his work that
amuse us to-day, but those were evil days, and every particle of
goodwill had to be appreciated. However, there was a serious difficulty.
The bolder elements met in congresses, and encouraged each other in the
pursuit of their ideal. But it at once became clear in their public
discussions that some of their purely scientific discoveries were
dangerous and heretical in such a period of reaction. This or that had
hitherto been buried innocently in scientific monographs, quite unknown
to the crowd, and the author might be a royal councillor, receive
decorations, and almost be an elder of the Church. Suddenly, by means of
these assemblies, the sinfulness of all this lore about snails or
insects or vertebrates was brought to light and put before the profane
public, and there was much anger. The whole of scientific research was
full of secret plots, heresies, and bombs—against God.
There was a most appalling illustration of this in the Scientific
Congress, held in September, 1863. Nothing is more amusing to-day than
to run through the yellow and almost unknown papers of the Congress.
They are illuminating to some extent. An idea that belongs to humanity
is openly brought into the debate for the first time. Ages lie behind
this hour. We must grant all that savours of human comedy, of triviality
even, in such an assembly, but after all we must see in it the swell and
clash of great waves. Haeckel spoke for the first time on Darwin’s
theory, at a spot from which the waves were bound to spread through the
whole scientific culture of the land. Virchow, afterwards his bitter
opponent, supported him. All the deepest questions and consequences of
Darwinism were mooted with the first vibrant accents. It was a great and
unforgettable hour.
The first speaker at the Congress on the Sunday evening, September 19,
1863, was Haeckel. We must remember the charm that attached to his
person even outwardly, the direct charm that did not need any allusion
to his growing repute in zoology. It was the charm that had been felt by
the simple folk of uncultured Italy, who had never heard even the name
of the science. Darwin was never a handsome man from the æsthetic point
of view. When he wanted to sail with FitzRoy, it was a very near
question whether the splenetic captain would not reject him because he
did not like his nose. His forehead had so striking a curve that
Lombroso, the expert, could put him down as having “the
idiot-physiognomy” in his _Genius and Insanity_. At the time when he
wrote the _Origin of Species_ he had not the patriarchal beard that is
inseparable from his image in our minds; he was bald, and his chin clean
shaved. The prematurely bent form of the invalid could never have had
much effect in such a place, no matter what respect was felt for him.
Haeckel, young and handsome, was an embodiment of the _mens sana in
corpore sano_. He rose above the grey heads of science, as the type of
the young, fresh, brilliant generation. It was an opponent at this
Congress, who sharply attacked the new ideas, that spoke of the
“colleague in the freshness of youth” who had brought forward the
subject. He brought with him the highest thing that a new idea can
associate with: the breath of a new generation, of a youth that greets
all new ideas with a smiling courage. Behind this was the thought of
Darwin himself, a wave that swept away all dams.
The speech was as clear as crystal, and is still useful as an
introduction to the Darwinian question. He at once strikes the greatest
and the dominant note. Darwin means a new philosophy. All organisms
descend from a few primitive forms, possibly from one; and man is one of
these organisms. What Darwin had merely hinted in his concluding
passage, what the aged Bronn had excluded altogether from his
translation as too dangerous, was now set forth emphatically in the very
beginning of his speech. “As regards man himself, if we are consistent
we must recognise his immediate ancestors in ape-like mammals; earlier
still in kangaroo-like marsupials; beyond these, in the secondary
period, in lizard-like reptiles; and finally, at a yet earlier stage,
the primary period, in lowly organised fishes.”
There is something monumental in this passage, as in the previous
confession of Darwinism in the _Monograph on the Radiolaria_. Others may
have come to similar conclusions at the time on reading Darwin’s work.
Here we have the profession made at the psychological moment, a
trumpet-blast that sent its thrilling alarm from the threshold of a new
age, for friend or foe to hear. The speech gives a slightly exaggerated
account of the struggle that already existed. All was in confusion.
Science was breaking up into two camps. On the one side evolution and
progress, on the other the creation and immutability of species. Already
there are distinguished leaders of science in favour of evolution. It is
time to discuss the matter in full publicity—and the thing is done.
There was, let me say parenthetically, on the Continent at least no
question at that time of this clear division, or even of a serious
agitation. It was partly this speech, together with Haeckel’s next work,
that was to bring it about. To the highest authorities the subject
seemed to be below the level of discussion. We must recall a passage
that the Professor of Zoology at Göttingen, Keferstein, had written a
year before in the _Göttinger Gelehrte Anzeiger_. “It gives great
satisfaction to the earnest scientific worker,” we read, “to see a man
like Agassiz, with an authority based on the finest zoological works,
reject unreservedly a theory [Darwin’s] that would discredit the whole
work of classifiers for a century, and to see that the views built up by
several generations and the general consent of humanity hold a stronger
position than the views of a single individual, however eloquently they
may be stated.” There is no idea in this of two regular camps of
scientists. Humanity is adduced as the one party; against it stands the
anarchist, trying to blow up the work of centuries, Darwin. But that
gave no concern to the young orator; he saw a whole decade of success in
the first attack.
He rolled off geology. Cuvier’s theory of catastrophes, Linné’s belief
in the immutability of species—all a purely theological cosmogony. The
“philosophical theory of evolution” rises behind it like a Mene Tekel
Pharshim.
All living things, including those of past geological epochs, form one
great _genealogical tree_. The word, the new leading word for zoology
and botany, comes out with a flash. What is the system that has been
awaited so long? It is the genealogical tree of life on our planet. Its
roots lie deep in the remote past. “The thousands of green leaves on the
tree that clothe the younger and fresher twigs, and differ in their
height and breadth from the trunk, correspond to the living species of
animals and plants; these are the more advanced, the further they are
removed from the primeval stem. The withered and faded leaves, that we
see on the older and dead twigs, represent the many extinct species that
dwelt on the earth in earlier geological ages, and come closer to the
primeval simple stem-form, the more remote they are from us.”
This was the great new idea for science to work upon. Paleontology, the
science of past life, found at last a common task with botany and
zoology. Haeckel’s own programme for decades was unfolded. This phrase,
too, was a birth-hour. In all the struggle that has followed as to the
“how” of evolution this figure of the tree with the verdant branches as
the new field of zoological and botanical work, and the withered
branches for the paleontologist, has never been abandoned. A symbol from
the living world itself, the branching tree, had at last taken a
decisive place in the science and the classification of living things.
With splendid clearness the speech then enumerates the Darwinian
principles: variation, heredity, the struggle for life, selection, and
adaptation. A vast duration is claimed for the geological epochs in the
sense of Lyell; and it is pointed out that there is a progressive
advance of forms throughout these periods. Special stress is laid on the
ever-advancing, ever-uplifting element in evolution. Man is again
introduced into the subject. He has “evolved” from the brutality of the
animal. Language itself has been naturally “developed.” (What a shrewd
perspective in such a brief phrase! How the philologists would stare!)
So the “law of advance” traverses the whole field of culture. A fiery
passage follows: “Reaction in political, social, moral, and scientific
life, such as the selfish efforts of priests and despots have brought
about at every period of history,” cannot permanently hinder this
advance. The “advance” is “a law of nature,” and “neither the weapons of
the tyrant nor the anathemas of the priest can ever suppress it.” We
hear again the older Sethe thundering his intrepid reply: “You will have
to shoot the law first.”
At the close he glances briefly at the difficulties the theory presents.
We must regard even the first beginnings of life as the outcome of
“evolution.” Naturally. Darwin’s God has no use for this prophet. But
how shall we conceive it? Was the thing that first developed from the
inorganic “a simple cell, such a being as those that now exist in such
numbers as independent beings on the ambiguous frontier of the animal
and vegetal worlds?” Or was it a particle of plasm merely, “like certain
amœboid organisms that do not seem to have attained yet the organisation
of a cell”? Again the simple question contained a whole programme.
Schleiden had first shown in 1838 that the body of any plant can be
dissolved into tiny living corpuscles, which he called “cells,” because
they often had the appearance of a filled honeycomb. A year later
Schwann proved, in Johannes Müller’s laboratory, that the higher animal
also is a product of these cells. The cell was recognised as the living
unit that composed the oak and the rose, the elephant and the worm. Man
himself, in fine, was but a pyramid of these cells—or, to speak more
accurately (as each cell has its own life), an immense community of
cells, a cell-state.
Virchow had, as we saw, laid the greatest stress on this last and most
important deduction from the cell-theory a short time before. He looked
upon every individual man as a mysterious plurality—a plurality of
cells. Pathology, the science of disease, must take account of this.
Health was the harmonious co-operation of the cell-state; disease was
the falling-away of some of the cells to special work that injured or
destroyed the whole community. This conception had inaugurated a new
epoch in medicine, making it a consciously ministering art in the
service of the living human natural organism. The Darwinian had now the
task of showing the validity of this conception in his own province. The
genealogical tree of the animals and plants must at once be drawn up in
the form of a genealogical tree of the cell. The cells had combined to
form higher and higher communities, and each higher species of animal or
plant was in reality one of these social constructions. But this
complexity was only found in the upper branches. The lower we descend,
the simpler we find organisms. The lowest forms of life represent
cruder, simpler, and more primitive cell-structures. And the final
conclusion was that all the cell-communities or states must have been
evolved from unattached individuals whose whole body consisted of a
single cell. We cannot strictly call these lowest forms of life either
animals or plants; they can only be likened to the single cell. Though
Haeckel himself did not know it at the time, all his pretty radiolaria
at Messina belonged to this category. The whole swarm of bacilli and
bacteria fell into this world of the “unicellulars.” Haeckel’s words
threw a brilliant light on the question. Not only the simplest forms of
life are unicellulars; the primitive forms also were. With them began
the colossal genealogical tree that branches out through the millions of
years of the earth’s history. If anything on the earth has arisen by
spontaneous generation out of dead matter, at the commencement of all
life, it must have been a cell, or a still simpler particle of living
plasm more or less resembling one. It is true that the point is put in
the form of a question; but the veil has been torn away. Given _one_
cell, the whole genealogical tree grows on, in virtue of Darwin’s laws,
until it reaches its highest point in man.
The conclusion of the speech greets Darwin as the Newton of the organic
world, a phrase that has often been repeated since.
* * * * *
Let us turn over a few pages more in the faded record of the sitting.
Fourteen years later he would speak again at a scientific congress, and
speak on Darwinism. He would then put it forward no longer as a hope but
a fulfilment, of which he showed one glittering facet. And no other than
Rudolf Virchow, his former teacher, would oppose him and deliver his
famous speech on the freedom of science in the modern State and its
abuse by Darwin’s followers. This was at Munich in 1877. The least of
his hearers would remember that Virchow had spoken, like Haeckel, at
Stettin fourteen years previously. But we must understand the
thirty-sixth speech if we are to understand the thirty-seventh.
It was the second sitting, on September 22nd. Virchow spoke on “the
alleged materialism of modern science.” The subject was not provoked by
Haeckel, but by Schleiden, the botanist, the parent of the cell-theory.
The controversy over materialism had raged furiously for many years. We
need only mention Büchner (whose _Force and Matter_ appeared in 1855)
and Carl Vogt. There was an element of necessity, but a good deal of
superficiality in the controversy, as it was then conducted. Friedrich
Albert Lange has given us a masterly history of it. At this moment it
was particularly instructive to point out the difference between general
philosophical skirmishing with words and a really able piece of work
that, though it had a technical look, suddenly added a new province to
philosophy on which every doubting Thomas could lay his hands. However,
Schleiden had not advanced. Curiously enough, he, the first discoverer
of the cell, attacked Virchow’s theory of man as a cell-state as a
typical materialist extravagance.
He had published a heated essay, and Virchow defended himself. He gave
such a remarkable and characteristic expression of his inmost feelings
that it is worth while disinterring it. It is a very rare thing for a
thoughtful man to give a natural-philosophical speech that begins with
crystalline clearness of logic and then makes a most curious _salto
mortale_ at the critical point.
[Illustration:
ERNST HAECKEL, 1880.
_Reproduced from the Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte._
]
He opens with a vigorous protest that there can be no quarrel about
the materialism of science with the “spiritual” and the
“privately-orthodox.” Such people must regard all investigation of
“this world” as aimless. The only thing of value for them is “the next
world”; the best attitude towards _this_ life is as crass an ignorance
as possible, and so all science is worthless. The words are so sharp
that he was interrupted and had to explain that he was not attacking
anybody personally. He was only speaking “with the candour of a
scientific worker, who is in the habit of calling things by their
proper names.” (At this point there was some applause.) Hence he is
not speaking of materialism, he says, on that account, but because of
certain objections from men of science, who said that philosophic
speculation led us out of our way. Schleiden had branded the theory of
man as a cell-state, the conception of man as, not an absolute, but a
federal unity, as materialism. But this conception is not a
philosophical theory at all; it is a fact. It is a piece of scientific
truth, like the law of gravitation. He recurred to the old and
often-quoted definition: the kind of research that brings such facts
to light has nothing whatever to do with philosophy. On the other
hand, “materialism,” in so far as it expresses a general theory of the
world, is a philosophy. Hence the simple investigation of facts as
such can neither be dubbed materialistic nor said to have a
philosophic tinge.
There are many objections to this strict delimitation of the provinces
of the human mind, as Virchow lays it down in the old style. It is true
that materialism is a real philosophy, especially in the form current at
the time and given to it by Vogt and Büchner. But it is a question
whether we see, observe, or investigate at all, if we completely exclude
philosophy; whether the philosophic thought can be really pumped out of
even the most rigorous and exact “observation of facts,” like air in the
air-pump; whether there are any such things as purely objective “facts”
in this sense in any human brain. And it is also a question whether the
facts, however objectively we regard them, do not arrange themselves,
when they are numerous, in logical series, which force us to draw
conclusions as to the unknown by the very laws of probability; in other
words, whether they do not always produce a “philosophy” in the long
run. However, these questions are all well within the pure atmosphere of
science. It is Virchow’s practical conclusions that are interesting; and
he goes on to draw them freely.
The man of science gives us no dogmatic philosophy of any kind, but
facts. But for these facts and for the research that leads to them he
must have an _absolutely free_ path. No power can legitimately stand in
his way that does not offer him more of what he regards as his
palladium—facts. And, curiously enough, when we think of later events,
the illustration that Virchow takes in 1863 to enforce this is—the
Darwinism that Haeckel had just put before them.
Haeckel and Virchow were friendly colleagues at the time. We have
already said that Haeckel was Virchow’s assistant at Würtzburg. Not only
as a man, but especially as a scientist, Virchow was then (and long
afterwards) greatly admired by him. The idea of the cell-state got into
his blood; it was one of the bases on which he built up the Darwinian
theory. Though he had never recognised this distinction between the mere
investigation of facts and philosophic reflection on them, he respected
Virchow as a master of methodological education. What was “method” at
the bottom but philosophy! Was not the method that expressly excluded
“miracles,” that sought always the natural law and the causal connection
and the continuous series, a “philosophy”? This was the only method
taught under Virchow as long as Haeckel worked with him. At the time the
divergence of their ideas was not shown more openly. The one called
“philosophy” what the other said was “the purely objective method of
investigating the truth.” The figure of Pilate rises up behind the
dilemma with his question: “What is truth?”
However, Virchow takes Darwinism by way of an example of which he
approves, a point that seems to be established in the province of pure
facts. In the Munich speech of 1877 there are polite references to “Herr
Haeckel.” “As Herr Haeckel says.” “As Herr Haeckel supposes.” At Stettin
we find Herr Haeckel described as “my friend Haeckel,” with whom “I
quite agree,” &c. Haeckel himself, by the way, was still convinced—in
his essay _On the Generation of Waves in Living Particles_—two years
before the schismatic Council of 1877 that Virchow had had a decisive
influence on his own Darwinian career. “If I have contributed anything
myself in an elementary way to the building-up of the idea of evolution,
I owe it for the most part to the cellular-biological views with which
Virchow’s teaching penetrated me twenty years ago.” “As Herr Haeckel
supposes,” was the cool repayment of this sincere expression of
gratitude. However, that is another matter. Let us return to Stettin. We
read, where “my friend Haeckel” comes in, that he has shown how
scientific research (the pure investigation of facts without the least
tincture of philosophy) has gone on to deal with “the great question of
the creation of man.” It is merely conceded that there are still certain
small outstanding difficulties, as, for instance, at the root of the
genealogical tree. According to Darwin it is conceivable that there were
four or five primitive forms of life. Haeckel is inclined to restrict
them to a single stem-cell. It seems to him (Virchow) that there may
have been a number of different beginnings of life. We have here the
opening of the controversy as to the monophyletic (from one root only)
or polyphyletic (from several roots) development of life, which is still
unsettled as far as the commencement of life is concerned, but a very
secondary question. It would be well if there had never been any more
serious difference between Haeckel and Virchow. The speaker himself
thinks it an unimportant matter beside the great question of freedom for
scientific inquiry. One thing is as clear to him as it is to Haeckel.
The biblical dogma of creation has broken down. It is impossible to take
seriously any longer the breathing of the breath of life into a lump of
clay, if these Darwinian ideas are sound. Once it is fully proved that
man descends from the ape, “no tradition in the world will ever suppress
the fact.” Scientific inquiry alone can correct itself. And what it
holds to be established must be respected beyond its frontiers as well.
What does he mean by “beyond its frontiers”? He means, as he makes it
clear here, the same as Haeckel himself. “Church and State,” he says,
must “reconcile themselves to the fact that with the advance of science
certain changes are bound to take place in the general ideas and beliefs
from which we build up our highest conceptions, and that no impediment
must be put in the way of these changes; in fact, the far-seeing
Government and the open-minded Church will always assimilate these
advancing and developing ideas and make them fruitful.” What more do we
want?
If this were the conclusion of Virchow’s speech, it would be merely a
confirmation of Haeckel’s—the kind of support that the older worker can
give to ardent youth, though on different grounds. But the cloven foot
has still to peep out. I believe that, in the pure struggle of ideas, we
can determine here, in 1863, precisely the point where Virchow
falls—falls into a line that has nothing in common with the ideal
struggle of the really free and liberating thought of humanity. We come
to the great _salto mortale_, which one must see from 1863 onward in
order to understand the Virchow of 1877.
The passage is the more interesting as it refers to one of the chief
stages in the development of Haeckel’s mind. The conception of man as a
cell-state, established by Virchow in so masterly a fashion, involved a
very curious conclusion. This conclusion, however we take it, came so
close to the roots of every philosophy that it justified Schleiden to
some extent when he protested that the whole cell-state theory was a
philosophical element.
If the human body is composed of millions of cells; if all the processes
and functions, the whole life of the body in Virchow’s sense, are merely
the sum of the vital processes and functions of these millions of
individual cells; is not what we call “the soul” really the product of
the millions upon millions of separate souls of these cells? Is not
man’s soul merely the state-soul, the general spirit of this gigantic
complex of tiny cell-souls? The lowest living things we spoke of, which
consist of a single cell, showed unmistakable signs of having a psychic
life. There was nothing to prevent us from thinking that in the
combination of these various cells into communities each of them brought
with it its little psychic individuality. And just as the individual
bodies of the cells combined externally to form the new individual of
the human body, so the cell-souls would enter into a spiritual
combination to form the new psychic individuality of the human mind. I
say there was nothing to prevent us from thinking this, in the line of
deductions from the plain principles of the cell-state theory which
Virchow claimed to be a naked “fact.” Philosophically, however, an
immense number of questions, problems, doubts, and hopes lurked behind
it. The whole conception of individuality took on a new aspect. First,
in the material sense; the individual human being seemed to be, bodily,
only the connecting bracket, as it were, of countless deeper
individuals, the cells. But it was more significant on the spiritual
side. The individual human soul could be analysed into millions of
smaller psychic individualities, the cell-souls, of which it was the
sum. The unified ego, the consciousness of self and unity of the psychic
clamp, “man,” remained as the connection of all the cell-souls. A ray of
light was thrown on the deep mystery of the _origin_ of individualities,
material and spiritual. Haeckel devoted himself afterwards to the
question with all his energy. But at the time it was Virchow who,
unconsciously enough, started the great wave that welled up from the
depths of his theory.
He had marked out his path very clearly in the first part of his speech.
Scientific research collects facts. It puts them before us without any
reference to philosophy. The less philosophy there is in the
investigation of facts the better. But the other side of the matter is
that no power in heaven or on earth has anything to say as regards its
work on things that it holds to be facts. The only possible logical
conclusion from this, with reference to the question of the cell-soul,
was for the investigator of facts to say: Even in respect of the psychic
life we go our way and look neither to right nor left, whatever
conclusions and assumptions the philosopher makes. Virchow acted very
differently.
He first grants that this dissolution of man into a federal unity of
countless cells _must_ somehow affect the “unified soul.” We are
compelled “to set up a plurality even in the psychic life.” He has
reached the limit of his radicalism. We expect him to continue: Hence,
as in the case of the Mosaic story of creation, of Darwinism, of the
cell-theory as a whole, so here we men of science go our way unmoved;
even if the whole of the teaching that has hitherto prevailed in
philosophy and theology in regard to the soul breaks down, we simply go
our way, and do not ask anybody’s permission. This he does not do. Take
one step further, he says, and we “can easily believe that it is
necessary to split up our whole psychic life in this way and ascribe a
soul to each individual cell.” Haeckel believed a little later that this
_was_ necessary; that the most rigorous logic compelled us to do it.
But, says Virchow suddenly, we must protest most vigorously against
this. This deduction from the cell-state theory reaches a point where
“science is incompetent,” namely, “the facts of consciousness.” Taboo!
The path of the scientific inquirer is barricaded. What follows rests on
no scientific grounds, but is a sort of confession. Up to the present
natural science has not been able to say anything as to the real nature,
the locality, and the ground of consciousness. “Hence I have always said
that it is wrong to refuse to recognise the peculiar character of these
facts of consciousness that dominate our whole higher life, and to yield
to the personal craving to bring these facts of consciousness into
accord with an independent soul, a spiritual force, and let the
individual formulate his religious feeling according to his conscience
and disposition. That is, I think, the point where science makes its
compromise with the Churches, recognising that this is a province that
each can survey as he will, either putting his own interpretation on it
or accepting the traditional ideas; and it must be sacred to others.”
The direction of the logic is clear enough. The application of the
cell-state theory to psychic life must lead to the problem of
consciousness. But we must not follow it, because science has never yet
penetrated into this province. It is the province of peaceful compromise
with “the Church,” and we must respect it.
It seems to me that the explanation is clear. The whole field of
conflict that Haeckel found _within_ the science of his time is opened
out, though Virchow was by no means disposed at that time to take
Darwinism as an example of the thing to be avoided, as he did at Munich
fourteen years afterwards. The kind of scientific inquiry that Virchow
advocated is what was called “exact” at a later period. It kept clear of
all philosophical speculation, and repeated over and over again that it
was only concerned with facts. It had, however, another card to
play—peace with “the Churches.”
Philosophy was shunned in order to leave a free field for the Churches
to build in. Then the exact scientist took his hat and said, I am afraid
I am incompetent, and the philosopher is incompetent, to do anything
here; let the Church take the vacant chair, with my compliments. No
philosophy: on this we will make war to the knife. This is “a point
where science makes its compromise with the Churches.” No one can
understand Haeckel’s career who does not grasp this antithesis. The
contrast between Haeckel and Virchow, known to all the world since 1877,
is clearly indicated. Virchow’s speech in 1877 is obscure. We must go
back to 1863 to get behind the veil—the veil that hides Virchow, that is
to say, the most prominent representative of the hostility to Haeckel.
We cannot understand otherwise how this yawning gulf came about between
Haeckel’s ideas and a school that professed to follow “exact” research.
Haeckel was building up a natural philosophy which, starting from the
solid foundation of scientific research and its results, went on to
further, and greater, and more far-reaching issues, that could not be
seen, but could be reached philosophically by more or less happy
deductions from the scientific data. It might or might not have lasting
value in points of detail. He was subject to the law of evolution. He
worked with analogy, and the things he compared thereto were ever
changing. It was all the same to him. In any case the dawning glimmer of
the perfect light broadened out and lit up vague outlines even in the
cloud-wreathed unknown. The others worked in such a way as to leave
beside them provinces of a virgin whiteness, untouched by thought or
logic. At times they slipped into these provinces, and celebrated their
reconciliation-festival with “the Churches.” The layman continued to
think that the Churches wielded an absolute authority; that the
scientist, abandoning his natural philosophy, came to pay them tribute.
This situation has done infinite mischief, more than the wildest and
even obviously perverse philosophy ever did. It put the scientist in the
position of a tolerated vassal in the world of thought—the world that
the Churches had held in chains for ages. Woe to the man who ventured to
discuss “consciousness”! Not because science had but the slender
proportions of a pioneer in that field, and because there was a danger
of it making great mistakes with its natural philosophy. No, but because
the white neutral field began here that we had agreed to respect—we
“exact” scientists and “the Churches.” This was the real reason why
Virchow and so many others who advocated the strict investigation of
facts had forfeited the right to oppose Haeckel’s bolder natural
philosophy and its conclusion—will have forfeited the right, at least,
in the judgment of a future and more impartial generation. They did not
oppose him on the lines of an equal zeal for the truth, but on much
lower and reactionary lines. Their concern was not for the absolute
triumph of truth, but for a compromise with certain forces in public
life whose supremacy was not grounded on logic but on inherited external
power. It required a certain amount of diplomatic shrewdness to enter
into this compromise, in view of the practical power of those forces.
Haeckel never had this “shrewdness.” We grant that. But it is certainly
a confusion of all standards when the shrewdness of the individual tries
to entrench itself behind ostensible claims of scientific method; when
research abandons all advance on certain sides on the plea of
“exactness” instead of philosophising—and then itself makes use of this
exactness for compromising with an ecclesiastical tradition that only
differs from real philosophy in its antiquity and rigidity, its disdain
of rational argument, and its employment of secular weapons that certain
historical events have put in its hand without any merit on its own
part.
The darkest cloud that hung menacingly on the horizon of Darwinism came
from this quarter. At the moment we are dealing with it did not cause
much concern. This early Darwinism thrilled with optimism as with the
magic of spring. Haeckel had to speak once more in the course of the
Congress. The geologist, Otto Volger, made a polite but energetic
protest against the new theory in the final sitting. It was a curious
connection of things that brought Volger into such a position.
Volger is the man who saved for Germany the venerable Goethe-house at
Frankfort-on-the-Main. The Free German Chapter received it from him as a
gift. The action has nothing to do with geology, but it stands in the
annals of culture. Thus the shadow of Goethe came to Stettin, to be
present at the open birth of German Darwinism—Goethe, who had once stood
on the very brink of the evolutionary ideas. And the man who brought him
was a geologist who felt moved to attack the ideas of Darwin and
Haeckel!
No part of science became in the succeeding decades so fruitful for
Darwinistic purposes as geology. It might very well be called a
continuous argument for Darwin; from the little slab of Solenhofen
Jurassic schist that yielded, in 1861, the first impression of the
archeopteryx, the real connecting link between the lizard and the bird,
to the incomparable discoveries of Othniel Marsh, Cope, and Ameghino in
America, which put whole sections of the genealogical tree of the
mammals before us, on to the skull and thighbone of the ape-man
(pithecanthropus) of Java, found by Eugen Dubois, which brings so
vividly home to us the transition from the gibbon to man. But, as if it
had been scared away by the new idea of evolution and its demand for
proof, the most and the best of this material was not forthcoming until
after Darwin was pretty firmly established everywhere. At the earlier
date we are dealing with it was quite possible for a geologist to play
the sceptic with a shadow of justification. We need not go into the
point to-day. It is ancient history. But there is an incidental point in
Volger’s criticism and the reply it provoked from Haeckel that calls for
notice.
Volger declared that Darwinism in general was an unsupported hypothesis,
but he made a concession. The species of animals and plants need not be
absolutely unchangeable. The only thing that is impossible is a
continuous upward direction in evolution. All the groups of living
things, even the highest, may have been present together from the
earliest days. Local changes in the distribution of land and water, &c.,
must have brought about a certain amount of variation in life-forms. But
after brief divergences all would return to the original type. The
proper symbol of the story of life is the wave that rises out of the sea
and sinks back into it. There was no such thing as a steady advance, a
wave that never sank back into the water. The real image of human life
is the analogy of its obvious development: youth, maturity, then old age
and back once more. The speaker urged in plausible terms that this
conception retained the idea of an “eternal becoming,” which is better
than a rigid fulfilment. As if an eternally advancing evolution did not
include this “eternal becoming.” Haeckel spoke immediately after Volger.
He not only attacked the weak points of the geologist, but went on to
the deeper philosophic question. The notion of a “perennial circular
movement” is “inconsistent with all the facts of human history.” “If we
appeal to sentiment, I must say that this circular theory has no
attraction for me, whereas the Darwinian idea of a progressive evolution
seems the only one consistent with the nature of man.” The story of the
animals and plants is subject to “the law of progress” just as much as
human history.
In these words of Haeckel’s we have a clear indication of the optimistic
temper of Darwinism at the time. They touch a question of fundamental
importance for the value of the new theory: the question whether, in
spite of all it destroyed, in spite of its disseverance from the idea of
God, it brought with it a new ground of conciliation, a conviction of
the ever-advancing growth of the world and ever greater achievements?
God was replaced by natural law. There was no longer any “design” beyond
the simple and unchanging course of natural laws. Well, what were these
natural laws going to do for us? Were they giving us a world that would
become more and more harmonious, that was on the whole an advancing
organism, that would be an increasing embodiment of God—the God within
nature, not without, God at the end of things, after æons of worlds that
seemed to break up like the individual in the struggle for existence,
yet were eternal in the mighty essence that was tossed on from world to
world like a grain of dust and was made the starting-point of infinitely
new and more complex movements? Or—was the work of these natural laws
but a ceaseless poking and thrusting and bubble-blowing without any
inner meaning? Was it the play of waves that rise and fall, and rise and
fall again, in the ocean, an eternal melting into smoke and nothingness?
Was the whole of “evolution” an absolutely meaningless play of
innumerable tendencies, not one of which would ever come to anything?
This note also was found in the first melody. Something would have been
lacking if it had not been struck. Here again there could be a parting
of ways, not only in the crowd, but amongst the thoughtful. The whole
struggle of optimism and pessimism might be dragged in. At all events,
the problem was bound to be pointed out from the start.
When Volger, not a bad opponent at the bottom, and Haeckel had made
their speeches, indicating at once certain lasting antitheses within the
subtle philosophy of Darwinism, Virchow closes the debates and the
Congress with a most dangerous blessing. In essentials he is once more
on the side of Haeckel. He suggests that geology should be allowed to
mature a little before final judgment is passed. The strongest evidence
for evolution is found in embryology (the science of the embryonic forms
and uterine development of living species of animals). The prophecy was
fulfilled, if ever prophecy was, and in Haeckel’s own most particular
field of work. But, in fine—he returns to his point—the main thing is
the “pursuit of truth.” And since “the most earnest ecclesiastical
teachers” declared that “God is truth,” he could not do better than
close with a reminder (I quote him _verbatim_) of “the compromise that
may be effected between science and the Church.” Translated into plain
language, that means: My dear children, fight it out as you will, but
respect the Church always as the main thing, and you will do well,
however much you differ. Thus closed this remarkable Scientific
Congress—as quietly as a bomb that smokes noiselessly, like a whiff from
a tobacco pipe. But one day it will burst.
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