find the same emotional cravings and thought-processes constantly
recurring, and the belief in miracles developing in much the same
way. The three founders of the great monotheistic Mediterranean
religion--Moses, Christ, and Mohammed--were equally regarded as
wonder-working prophets, having direct intercourse with God in virtue
of their special gifts, and transmitting his commands to men in the
shape of laws. The extraordinary authority they enjoy, which has
given so much prestige to the religions they founded, is grounded for
ordinary people on their miraculous powers--the healing of the sick,
the raising of the dead, the expulsion of devils, and so on. If we
examine the miracles of Christ as they are given in the gospels, they
run counter to the laws of nature and rational explanation just in
the same way as the similar miracles of Buddha and Brahma in Hindoo
mythology, or of Mohammed in the Koran. The same must be said of the
belief in the miracle of the bread and wine in the Lord's supper,
and the like. The Creed which was probably drawn up by the leaders
of the Christian communities of the second century, and received its
final and present form in the Church of South Gaul in the fourth
and fifth centuries, has been obligatory for Christians for fifteen
hundred years, and recognized by both Church and State as compulsory.
This Apostles' Creed was also recognized in Luther's catechism to
be fundamental, and is taught in all Protestant and Roman Catholic
schools (though not in the Greek Catholic) as the foundation of
religious instruction. This extraordinary prestige of the Apostles'
Creed, and its great influence on the education of the young, no less
than its glaring inconsistency with rational knowledge, compel us to
devote a few pages to a critical examination of its three articles.
The first article of the Creed deals with creation, and runs: "I
believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth."
The modern science of evolution has shown that there never was any
such creation, but that the universe is eternal and the law of
substance all-ruling. God himself is anthropomorphically conceived as
an "Almighty Creator" and the Father of man; heaven (in the sense of
the geocentric system) is imagined as a great blue vault spanning the
earth. The notion of this "personal God" as an intelligent, immaterial
being, creating the material world out of nothing, is wholly irrational
and meaningless. That Luther accepted this childish and scientifically
worthless idea is clear from his commentary on the first article--"What
is that?"
The second article of the Creed deals with the dogma of salvation
in the following words: "I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son,
our Lord, who was conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin
Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried,
descended into hell, on the third day rose again from the dead,
ascended into heaven, sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father
Almighty, whence he will come to judge the living and the dead." As
these dogmas of the second article contain the chief points of the
redemption theory, and are still treasured by millions of educated
people, it is necessary to point out their flagrant opposition to pure
reason. The chief evil of such creeds is that children, who are yet
incapable of reflecting, are forced to learn them by heart. They then
remain unchallenged as revealed truths.
The myth of the conception and birth of Jesus Christ is mere fiction,
and is at the same stage of superstition as a hundred other myths of
other religions. Of the three persons who are mysteriously blended
in the triune God, the son Christ is supposed to be begotten by both
Father and Holy Ghost, parthenogenetically through the Virgin Mary. I
have dealt with the physiology of parthenogenesis in the seventeenth
chapter of the _Riddle_. The curious adventures of Christ after his
death, the descent into hell, resurrection, and ascension, are also
fantastic myths due to the narrow geocentric ideas of an uneducated
people. Troelslund has admirably explained the strong influence they
have had in his interesting book, _The Idea of Heaven and of the
World_.[6] The idea of the "last judgment," with Christ sitting on the
right hand of the Father, as many famous mediæval pictures represent
(notably Michael Angelo's in the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican), is
another outcome of a thoroughly childish and anthropomorphic attitude.
It is remarkable that this second article of the Creed says nothing
about "redemption," which forms its heading [in Germany]. Luther has
dealt with it in his commentary. Christ is believed to have suffered a
painful death, like many thousand other martyrs, for his conviction of
the truth of his faith and teaching--which reminds one of the more than
a hundred thousand men who were done to death by the Inquisition and in
the religious wars of the Middle Ages; but not one of the millions of
ministers who preach on it every Sunday seems to have shown a rational
causal connection of this death with the alleged redemption from sin
and death. The whole of this story of redemption has sprung from the
primitive, obscure, ethical ideas of uneducated races, especially the
crude belief in the propitiatory power of human sacrifice. It has
no practical moral value except for those who believe in personal
immortality--a scientifically untenable dogma. Whoever builds on this
empty promise of a better life beyond may soothe himself with this
hope, and reconcile himself to the thousand ills and defects of this
world. But the man who studies this life as it really is will not
find that the belief in redemption has brought any real improvement.
Want and misery and sin are as prevalent as ever; indeed, our modern
civilization has, in many respects, increased them.
The third and last article of the Apostles' Creed runs: "I believe
in the Holy Ghost, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of
saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and
life everlasting." In the curious commentary that Luther made on
this article in his catechism, he said that "man cannot believe
of his own reason in Jesus Christ"--which is very true--but the
Holy Ghost must lead him thereto with his grace; but how the third
person of the Trinity effects this enlightenment and sanctification
he did not explain. What is meant by the "communion of saints" and
the "holy Catholic Church" must be gathered in the light of their
history--especially the history of Romanism. This most powerful and
still influential section of the Christian Church, which especially
claims the title of Catholic and "the one ark of salvation," is really
a most pitiful caricature of pure primitive Christianity. It has, with
consummate skill, succeeded in preaching the beneficent teaching of
Christ in theory and doing just the opposite in practice; we need only
recall the Inquisition, the dark history of the Middle Ages, and the
political hierarchy which still dominates so much of civilization.
However, by far the most important clause in the third article is
the final expression of belief in "the resurrection of the body and
life everlasting." That this greatest "wonder of life" was originally
conceived in a purely material form is evident from thousands of
pictures in which famous painters have realistically depicted the
resurrection of the dead, the aërial flight of the happy souls of the
blessed, and the torments of the damned in hell. It is thus conceived
still by the majority of believers who take eternal life to be an
"enlarged and improved edition" of life here below. This is equally
true of Christian and Mohammedan pictures and of the athanatist ideas
that prevailed in other religions long before Christ was born, even
of the first rudiments of the belief in primitive races. As long as
the geocentric theory prevailed, and the heavens were thought to be a
sort of blue glass bell, illumined by thousands of little stars and
the lamp of the sun, arching like a vault over the flat earth, and
the fires of hell burned in the cellars below, this barbaric notion
of a resurrection of the body and a last judgment could easily be
maintained. But its roots were destroyed when Copernicus refuted the
geocentric theory in 1545; and athanatism became quite untenable when
Darwin shattered the dogma of anthropocentricism. Not only the crude
older materialistic idea of eternal life, but also the refined new
spiritualistic version, has been rendered untenable by the progress of
science in the nineteenth century. I have shown this in the eleventh
chapter of the _Riddle_, which closes with the words: "If we take a
comprehensive glance at all that modern anthropology, psychology,
and cosmology teach with regard to athanatism, we are forced to this
definite conclusion. The belief in the immortality of the human soul
is in hopeless contradiction with the most solid empirical truths of
modern science."[7]
The great influence which has been exercised on civilized nations
by the Christian beliefs, supported by the practical exigencies of
the state, for thousands of years, was chiefly seen in the crude
superstition of the mass of the people. Confessions of faith became
as much a matter of routine as the latest fashion in dress or the
latest custom, etc. But even the majority of the philosophers were
more or less subordinated to the influence. It is true that a few
great thinkers freed themselves by the use of pure reason at an early
date from the prevalent superstition, and framed systems apart from
tradition and the priests. But most philosophers could not rise to
the altitude of these brave Free-thinkers; they remained "school-men"
in the literal sense, dependent on the dictation of authority, the
traditions of the school, and the dogmas of the Church. Philosophy
was the "handmaid" of theology and ecclesiasticism. If we examine the
history of philosophy in this light, we find in it a struggle for
twenty-five hundred years between two great tendencies--the dualism of
the majority (with theological and mystic leanings) and the monism of
the minority (with rationalistic and naturalistic disposition).
Especially notable are those great Free-thinkers of classic antiquity
who taught a monistic view of life in the sixth century before
Christ--the Ionic natural philosophers, Thales, Anaximander, and
Anaximenes; and a little later, Heraclitus, Empedocles, and Democritus.
They made the first thorough attempt to explain the world on rational
principles, independently of all mythological tradition and theological
dogmas. However, these remarkable efforts to found a primitive monism,
which found so finished an expression in the _De rerum natura_ of the
great poet-philosopher, Lucretius Carus (98-54 B.C.), were shortly
thrust out by the spread--through Plato's curious dualism--of the
belief in the immortality of the soul and the transcendental world of
ideas.
The Eleatics, Parmenides and Zeno, had foreshadowed in the fifth
century the division of philosophy into two branches; but Plato and
his pupil Aristotle (in the fourth century B.C.) succeeded in gaining
general acceptance for this dualism and antithesis of physics and
metaphysics. Physics devoted itself on the ground of experience to
the study of the phenomena of things, leaving their real essences (or
noumena) that lay behind the phenomena to metaphysics. These inner
essences are transcendental and inaccessible to empirical research;
they form the metaphysical world of eternal ideas, which is independent
of the real world, and has its highest unity in God, as the Absolute.
The soul, an eternal idea that dwells for a time in the passing human
body, is immortal. This consistent dualism of Plato's system, with
its sharp antithesis of this world and the next, of body and soul, of
world and God, is its chief characteristic. It became all the more
influential when Plato's pupil Aristotle blended it with his empirical
metaphysics, based on ample scientific experience, and pointed out the
idea in the entelechy, or purposively acting principle, of every being;
and especially when Christianity (three hundred years afterwards) found
in this dualism a welcome philosophic support of its own transcendental
tendency.
In the course of the thousand years which historians call the Middle
Ages, and which are usually dated from the fall of the Roman Empire
(476) to the discovery of America (1492), the superstition of civilized
races reached its highest development. The authority of Aristotle was
paramount in philosophy; it was used by the dominant Church for its
own purposes. But the influence of the Christian faith, with all the
gay coloring which the fairy-tales of the Bible added to its structure
of dogmas, was seen much more in practical life. In the foreground of
belief were the three central dogmas of metaphysics, to which Plato had
first given complete expression--the personal God as creator of the
world, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the human will.
As Christianity laid the greatest theoretical stress on the first two
dogmas and the greatest practical stress on the third, metaphysical
dualism soon prevailed on all sides. Especially inimical to scientific
inquiry was the Christian contempt of nature and its belittlement
of earthly life in view of the eternal life to come. As long as the
light of philosophical criticism in any form was extinguished, the
flower-garden of religious poetry flourished exceedingly and the idea
of miracle was taken as self-evident. We know what the practical result
of this superstition was from the ghastly history of the Middle Ages,
with its Inquisition, religious wars, instruments of torture, and
drowning of witches. In the face of the current enthusiasm for the
romantic side of mediævalism, the Crusades and Church art, we cannot
lay too much stress on these dark and bloody pages of its chronicles.
An impartial study of the immense progress made by science in the
course of the nineteenth century shows convincingly that the three
central metaphysical dogmas established by Plato have become untenable
for pure reason. Our clear modern insight into the regularity and
causative character of natural processes, and especially our knowledge
of the universal reign of the law of substance, are inconsistent with
belief in a personal God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom
of the will. If we find this threefold superstition still widely
prevalent, and even retained by academic philosophers as an unshakable
consequence of "critical philosophy," we must trace this remarkable
fact chiefly to the great prestige of Immanuel Kant. His so-called
critical system--really a hybrid product of the crossing of pure reason
with practical superstition--has enjoyed a greater popularity than any
other philosophy, and we must stop to consider it for a moment.
I have described in chapters xiv. and xx. of the _Riddle_ the profound
opposition between my monistic system and Kant's dualistic philosophy.
In the appendix to the popular edition, especially, I have pointed out
the glaring contradictions of his system, which other philosophers
have often detected and criticised. Whenever there is question of his
teaching one must ask: "Which Kant do you mean? Kant I., the founder of
the monistic cosmogony, the critical formulator of pure reason; or Kant
II., the author of the dualistic criticism of judgment, the dogmatic
discoverer of practical reason?" These contradictions are partly due
to the psychological metamorphoses which Kant underwent (_Riddle_,
chapter vi.), partly to the perennial conflict between his scientific
bias towards a mechanical explanation of this world and his religious
craving (an outcome of heredity and education) and mystic belief in a
life beyond. This culminates in the distinction between the world of
sense and the world of spirit. The sense world (_mundus sensibilis_)
lies open to our senses and our intellect, and is empirically knowable
within certain limits. But behind it there is the spiritual world
(_mundus intelligibilis_) of which we know, and can know, nothing;
its existence (as the thing in itself) is, however, assured by our
emotional needs. In this transcendental world dwells the power of
mysticism.
It is said to be the chief merit of Kant's system that he first
clearly stated the problem: "How is knowledge possible?" In trying to
solve this problem introspectively, by a subtle analysis of his own
mental activity, he reached the conviction that the most important
and soundest of all knowledge--namely, mathematical--consists of
synthetic _a priori_ judgments, and that pure science is only possible
on condition that there are strict _a priori_ ideas, independent of
all experience, without _a posteriori_ judgments. Kant regarded this
highest faculty of the human mind as innate, and made no inquiry into
its development, its physiological mechanism, and its anatomic organ,
the brain. Seeing the very imperfect knowledge which human anatomy
had of the complicated structure of the brain at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, it was impossible to have at that time a correct
idea of its physiological function.
What seems to us to-day to be an innate capacity, or an _a priori_
quality, of our phronema, is really a phylogenetic result of a long
series of brain-adaptations, formed by _a posteriori_ sense-perceptions
and experiences.
Kant's much-lauded critical theory of knowledge is therefore just as
dogmatic as his idea of "the thing in itself," the unintelligible
entity that lurks behind the phenomena. This dogma is erroneously built
on the correct idea that our knowledge, obtained through the senses, is
imperfect; it extends only so far as the specific energy of the senses
and the structure of the phronema admit. But it by no means follows
that it is a mere illusion, and least of all that the external world
exists only in our ideas. All sound men believe, when they use their
senses of touch and space, that the stone they feel fills a certain
part of space, and this space does really exist. When all men who can
see agree that the sun rises and sets every day, this proves a relative
motion of the two heavenly bodies, and so the real existence of time.
Space and time are not merely necessary forms of intuition for human
knowledge, but real features of things, existing quite independently of
perception.
The increasing recognition of fixed natural laws which accompanied the
growth of science in the nineteenth century was bound to restrict more
and more the blind faith in miracles. There are three chief reasons
why we find this, nevertheless, still so prevalent--the continued
influence of dualistic metaphysics, the authority of the Christian
Church, and the pressure of the modern state in allying itself with
the Church. These three strong bulwarks of superstition are so hostile
to pure reason and the truth it seeks that we must devote special
attention to them. It is a question of the highest interests of
humanity. The struggle against superstition and ignorance is a fight
for civilization. Our modern civilization will only emerge from it in
triumph, and we shall only eliminate the last barbaric features from
our social and political life, when the light of true knowledge has
driven out the belief in miracles and the prejudices of dualism.
The remarkable history of philosophy in the nineteenth century, which
has not yet been written with complete impartiality and knowledge,
shows us in the first place an ever-increasing struggle between the
rising young sciences and the paramount authority of tradition and
dogma. In the first half of the century the various branches of biology
made progress without coming into direct collision with natural
philosophy. The great advance of comparative anatomy, physiology,
embryology, paleontology, the cell-theory, and classification,
provided scientists with such ample material that they attached
little importance to speculative metaphysics. It was otherwise in the
second half of the nineteenth century. Soon after its commencement
the controversy about the immortality of the soul broke out, in
which Moleschott (1852), Büchner, and Carl Vogt (1854) contended for
the physiological dependence of the soul on the brain, while Rudolph
Wagner endeavored to maintain the prevailing metaphysical idea of its
supernatural character. Then Darwin especially initiated in 1859 that
vast reform in biology which brought to light the natural origin of
species and shattered the miracle of creation. When the application
of the theory of descent and the biogenetic law to man was made by
anthropogeny (1874), and his evolution from a series of other mammals
was proved, the belief in the immortality of the soul, the freedom
of the will, and an anthropomorphic deity lost its last support.
Nevertheless, these three fundamental dogmas continued to find favor
in academic philosophy, which mostly followed the paths opened out by
Kant. Most of the representatives of philosophy at the universities
are narrow metaphysicians and idealists, who think more of the fiction
of the "intelligible world" than of the truth of the world of sense.
They ignore the vast progress made by modern biology, especially in
the science of evolution; and they endeavor to meet the difficulties
which it creates for their transcendental idealism by a sort of verbal
gymnastic and sophistry. Behind all these metaphysical struggles there
is still the personal element--the desire to save one's immortality
from the wreck. In this it comes into line with the prevailing
theology, which again builds on Kant. The pitiful condition of modern
psychology is a characteristic result of this state of things. While
the empirical physiology and pathology of the brain have made the
greatest discoveries, the comparative anatomy and histology of the
brain have thrown light on the details of its elaborate structure, and
the ontogeny and phylogeny of the brain have proved its natural origin,
the speculative philosophy of the schools stands aside from it all,
and in its introspective analysis of the functions of the brain will
not hear a word about the brain itself. It would explain the working
of a most complicated machine without paying any attention to its
structure. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that the dualistic
theories established by Kant flourish at our universities as they did
in the Middle Ages.
If the official philosophers, whose formal duty it is to study truth
and natural law, still cling to the belief in miracles in spite of
all the advance of empirical science, we shall not be surprised to
find this in the case of official theology. Nevertheless, the sense of
truth has prompted many unprejudiced and honorable theologians to look
critically at the venerable structure of dogma, and open their minds
to the streaming light of modern science. In the first third of the
nineteenth century a rationalistic section of the Protestant Church
attempted to rid itself of the fetters of dogma and reconcile its
ideas with pure reason. Its chief leader, Schleiermacher, of Berlin,
though an admirer of Plato and his dualist metaphysics, approached
very close to modern pantheism. Subsequent rationalistic theologians,
especially those of the Tübingen school (Baur, Zeller, etc.), devoted
themselves to the historical study of the gospels and their sources and
development, and thus more and more destroyed the base of Christian
superstition. Finally, the radical criticism of David Friedrich
Strauss showed, in his _Life of Jesus_ (1835), the mythological
character of the whole Christian system. In his famous work, _The Old
and New Faith_ (1872), this honorable and gifted theologian finally
abandoned the belief in miracles, and turned to natural knowledge and
the monistic philosophy for the construction of a rational view of
life on the basis of critical experience. This work has lately been
continued by Albert Kalthoff. Moreover, many modern theologians (such
as Savage, Nippold, Pfleiderer, and other liberal Protestants) have
endeavored in various ways to obtain a certain recognition for the
claims of progressive science, and reconcile them with theology, while
discarding the belief in the miraculous. However, these rationalistic
efforts, based on monistic or pantheistic views, are still isolated and
apparently without effect. The great majority of modern theologians
adhere to the traditional teaching of the Church, whose columns and
windows are still everywhere adorned with miracles. While a few liberal
Protestants restrict their faith to the three fundamental dogmas, most
of them still believe in the myths and legends which fill the pages of
the gospels. This orthodoxy is, moreover, encouraged of late by the
conservative and reactionary attitude taken up by many governments on
political grounds.
Most modern governments maintain the connection with the Church in the
idea that the traditional belief in the miraculous is the best security
for their own continuance. Throne and altar must protect and support
each other. However, this conservative-Christian policy meets two
obstacles in an increasing measure. On the one hand, the ecclesiastical
hierarchy is always trying to set its spiritual power above the secular
and make the state serve its own purposes; and, on the other hand, the
modern right of popular representation affords an opportunity to make
the voice of reason heard and oppose the reactionary conservatives
with opportune reforms. The chief rulers and the ministers of public
instruction, who have a great influence in this struggle, generally
favor the teaching of the Church, not out of conviction of its truth,
but because they think knowledge brings unrest, and because docile and
ignorant subjects are easier to rule than educated and independent
citizens. Hence it is that we now hear so much on every occasion, in
speeches from the throne and at banquets, at the opening of churches
and the unveiling of monuments, from able and influential speakers, of
the value of faith. They would give the palm to faith in its struggle
with knowledge. Thus we get this paradoxical situation in educated
countries (such as Prussia), that encouragement is given at once to
modern science and technical training and to the orthodox Church,
which is its deadly enemy. As a rule, it is not stated in these florid
orations to how many and what kind of miracles this precious faith must
extend. Nevertheless, we may yet, in view of the spread of intellectual
reaction in Germany, see it made obligatory for at least all priests,
teachers, and other servants of the state to profess a belief in the
three fundamental mysteries--the triune God of the catechism, the
personal immortality of the soul, and the absolute freedom of the human
will--and even in many of the other miracles which are found in the
gospels, sacred legends, and religious journals of our time.
The refined belief in the miraculous embodied in Kant's practical
philosophy assumed many different forms among his followers, the
Neo-Kantians, approaching sometimes more and sometimes less to the
conventional beliefs. Through a long series of variations, which still
continue to develop, it is gradually passing into the cruder form of
superstition which we find popular to-day as spiritism, and which
provides the basis for what is called occultism. Kant himself, in
spite of his subtle and clear critical faculty, had a decided leaning
to mysticism and positive dogmatism, which showed itself especially
in his later years. He thought a good deal of Swedenborg's idea of
the spirit world forming a universe apart, and compared this to his
_mundus intelligibilis_. Among the natural philosophers of the first
half of the nineteenth century, Schelling (in his later writings),
Schubert (in his _History of the Soul_ and _Observations on the Dark
Side of Science_), and Perty (in his mystic anthropology) especially
investigated the mysterious phenomena of mental action, and sought
to connect them with the physiological functions of the brain on the
one hand and supernatural spiritual agencies on the other. Modern
spook-seeking has no more value than mediæval magic, cabalism,
astrology, necromancy, dream-interpretation, and invocation of the
devil.
We must put at the same stage of superstition the spiritism and
occultism we find mentioned so much in modern literature. There are
always thousands of credulous folk in educated countries who are
taken in by the performances of the spiritists and their media, and
are ready to believe the unbelievable. Spirit-rapping, table-turning,
spirit-writing, the materialization and photographing of deceased
souls, find credit, not only among the uneducated masses, but even
among the most cultured, and sometimes among imaginative scientists.
It has been proved without avail by numbers of impartial observations
and experiments that these occultist performances depend partly on
conscious fraud and partly on careless self-deception. _Mundus vult
decipi_--"the world wishes to be taken in"--as the old saying has it.
This spiritistic fraud is particularly dangerous when it clothes itself
with the mantle of science, makes use of the physiological phenomena
of hypnotism, and even assumes a monistic character. Thus, for
instance, one of the best-known occultist writers, Karl du Prel, has
written, not only a _Philosophy of Mysticism and Studies of Scientific
Subjects_, but also (1888) a _Monistic Psychology_, which is dualistic
from beginning to end. In these popular writings lively imagination
and brilliant presentation are combined with a most flagrant lack of
critical sense and of knowledge of the elements of biology (_cf._
chapter xvi. of the _Riddle_). It seems that the hereditary bias
towards mysticism and superstition is not yet eliminated even from
the educated mind of our time. It is to be explained phylogenetically
by inheritance from prehistoric barbarians and savages, in whom
the earliest religious ideas were wholly dominated by animism and
fetichism.
IV
THE SCIENCE OF LIFE
Object of biology--Relation to the other sciences--General
and special biology--Natural philosophy--Monism:
hylozoism, materialism, dynamism--Naturalism--Nature and
spirit--Physics--Metaphysics--Dualism--Freedom and natural law--God
in biology--Realism--Idealism--Branches of biology--Morphology and
physiology--Anatomy and biogeny--Ergology and perilogy.
The broad realm of science has been vastly extended in the course of
the nineteenth century. Many new branches have established themselves
independently; many new and most fruitful methods of research have
been discovered, and have been applied with the greatest practical
success in furthering the advance of modern thought. But this enormous
expansion of the field of knowledge has its disadvantages. The
extensive division of labor it has involved has led to the growth
of a narrow specialism in many small sections; and in this way the
natural connection of the various provinces of knowledge, and their
relation to the comprehensive whole, have been partly or wholly lost
sight of. The importation of new terms which are used in different
senses by one-sided workers in the various fields of science has caused
a good deal of misunderstanding and confusion. The vast structure
of science tends more and more to become a tower of Babel, in the
labyrinthic passages of which few are at their ease and few any longer
understand the language of other workers. In these circumstances, it
seems advisable, at the commencement of our philosophic study of "the
wonders of life," to form a clear idea of our task. We must carefully
define the place of biology among the sciences, and the relation of
its various branches to each other and to the different systems of
philosophy.
In the broadest sense in which we can take it, biology is the whole
study of organisms or living beings. Hence not only botany (the science
of plants) and zoology (the science of animals), but also anthropology
(the science of man), fall within its domain. We then contrast with it
all the sciences which deal with inorganic or lifeless bodies, which
we may collectively call abiology (or anorganology); to this belong
astronomy, geology, mineralogy, hydrology, etc. This division of the
two great branches of science does not seem difficult in view of the
fact that the idea of life is sharply defined physiologically by its
metabolism and chemically by its plasm; but when we come to study the
question of abiogenesis (chapter xv.) we shall find that this division
is not absolute, and that organic life has been evolved from inorganic
nature. Moreover, biology and abiology are connected branches of
cosmology, or the science of the world.
While the idea of biology is now usually taken in this broad sense in
most scientific works and made to embrace the whole of living nature,
we often find (especially in Germany) a narrower application of the
term. Many authors (mostly physiologists) understand by it a section of
physiology--namely, the science of the relations of living organisms to
the external world, their habitat, customs, enemies, parasites, etc.
I proposed long ago to call this special part of biology œcology
(the science of home-relations), or bionomy. Twenty years later others
suggested the name of ethology. To call this special study any longer
biology in the narrower sense is very undesirable, because it is the
only name we have for the totality of the organic sciences.
Like every other science, biology has a general and a special part.
General biology contains general information about living nature;
this is the subject of the present study of the wonders of life. We
might also describe it as biological philosophy, since the aim of true
philosophy must be the comprehensive survey and rational interpretation
of all the general results of scientific research. The innumerable
discoveries of detailed facts which observation and experiment give
us, and which are combined into a general view of life in philosophy,
form the subject of empirical science. As the latter, on the side of
the organic world, or as empirical biology, forms the first object of
the science of life, and seeks to effect in the system of nature a
logical arrangement and summary grouping of the countless special forms
of life, this special biology is often wrongly called the science of
classification.
The first comprehensive attempt to reduce to order and unity the
ample biological material which systematic research had accumulated
in the eighteenth century was made by what we call "the older natural
philosophy" at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Reinhold
Treviranus (of Bremen) had made a suggestive effort to accomplish this
difficult task on monistic principles in his _Biology, or Philosophy of
Living Nature_ (1802). Special importance attaches to the year 1809, in
which Jean Lamarck (of Paris) published his _Philosophie Zoologique_,
and Lorentz Oken (of Jena) his _Manual of Natural Philosophy_. I have
fully appreciated the service of Lamarck, the founder of the theory
of descent, in my earlier writings. I have also recognized the great
merit of Lorentz Oken, who not only aroused a very wide interest in
this science by his _General Natural History_, but also put forward
some general observations of great value. His "infamous" theory of a
primitive slime, and the development of infusoria out of it, is merely
the fundamental idea of the theory of protoplasm and the cell which
was long afterwards fully recognized. These and other services of the
older natural philosophy were partly ignored and partly overlooked,
because they went far beyond the scientific horizon of the time, and
their authors to an extent lost themselves in airy and fantastic
speculations. The more scientists confined themselves in the following
half-century to empirical work and the observation and description of
separate facts, the more it became the fashion to look down on all
"natural philosophy." The most paradoxical feature of the situation was
that purely speculative philosophy and idealist metaphysics had a great
run at the same time, and their castles in the air, utterly destitute
of biological foundation, were much admired.
The magnificent reform of biology which Darwin initiated in 1859 by
his epoch-making _Origin of Species_ gave a fresh impulse to natural
philosophy. As this work not only used the rich collection of facts
already made in proof of the theory of descent, but gave it a new
foundation in the theory of selection (Darwinism properly so called),
everything seemed to call for the embodiment of the new conception of
nature in a monistic system. I made the first effort to do this in my
_General Morphology_ (1866). As this found few supporters among my
colleagues, I undertook in my _History of Creation_ (1868) to make
the chief points of the system accessible to the general reader. The
remarkable success of this book (a tenth edition of it appearing in
1902) emboldened me at the end of the nineteenth century to state the
general principles of my monistic philosophy in my _Riddle of the
Universe_. About the same time (1899) there appeared the work of the
Kiel botanist, Johannes Reinke, _The World as Reality_; and two years
afterwards he followed it up with a supplementary volume, _Introduction
to Theoretic Biology_. As Reinke treats the general problems of natural
philosophy from a purely mystic and dualistic point of view, his ideas
are diametrically opposed to my monistic and naturalistic principles.
The history of philosophy describes for us the infinite variety of
ideas that men have formulated during the last three thousand years
on the nature of the world and its phenomena. Überweg has given us,
in his excellent _History of Philosophy_, a thorough and impartial
account of these various systems. Fritz Schultze has published a
clear and compendious "tabulated outline" of them in thirty tables in
his genealogical tree of philosophy, and at the same time shown the
phylogeny of ideas. When we survey this enormous mass of philosophic
systems from the point of view of general biology, we find that we can
divide them into two main groups. The first and smaller group contains
the monistic philosophy, which traces all the phenomena of existence
to one single common principle. The second and larger group, to which
most philosophic systems belong, constitutes the dualistic philosophy,
according to which there are two totally distinct principles in the
universe. These are sometimes expressed as God and the world, sometimes
as the spiritual world and material world, sometimes as mind and
matter, and so on. In my opinion, this antithesis of monism and dualism
is the most important in the whole history of philosophy. All other
systems are only variations of one or the other of these, or a more or
less obscure combination of the two.
The form of monism which I take to be the most complete expression
of the general truth, and which I have advocated in my writings for
thirty-eight years, is now generally called hylozoism. This expresses
the fact that all substance has two fundamental attributes; as matter
(_hyle_) it occupies space, and as force or energy it is endowed with
sensation (_cf._ chapter xix.). Spinoza, who gave the most perfect
expression to this idea in his "philosophy of identity," and most
clearly treated the notion of substance (as the all-embracing essence
of the world), clothes it with two general attributes--extension
and thought. Extension is identical with real space, and thought
with (unconscious) sensation. The latter must not be confused with
conscious human thought; intelligence is not found in substance, but is
a special property of the higher animals and man. Spinoza identifies
his substance with nature and God, and his system is accordingly
called pantheism; but it must be understood that he rejects the
anthropomorphic, personal idea of deity.
A good deal of the infinite confusion that characterizes the conflicts
of philosophers over their systems is due to the obscurity and
ambiguity of many of their fundamental ideas. The words "substance"
and "God," "soul" and "spirit," "sensation" and "matter," are used
in the most different and changing senses. This is especially true
of the word "materialism," which is often wrongly taken to be
synonymous with monism. The moral bias of idealism against _practical_
materialism (or pure selfishness and sensualism) is forthwith
transferred to theoretical materialism, which has nothing to do with
it; and the strictures which are justly urged against the one are
most unjustifiably applied to the other. Hence it is important to
distinguish very carefully between these two meanings of materialism.
Theoretical materialism (or hylonism), as a realistic and monistic
philosophy, is right in so far as it conceives matter and force to be
inseparably connected, and denies the existence of immaterial forces.
But it is wrong when it denies all sensation to matter, and regards
actual energy as a function of dead matter. Thus, in ancient times
Democritus and Lucretius traced all phenomena to the movements of dead
atoms, as did also Holbach and Lamettrie in the eighteenth century.
This view is held to-day by most chemists and physicists. They regard
gravitation and chemical affinity as a mere mechanical movement of
atoms, and this, in turn, as the general source of all phenomena; but
they will not allow that these movements necessarily presuppose a
kind of (unconscious) sensation. In conversation with distinguished
physicists and chemists I have often found that they will not hear a
word about a "soul" in the atom. In my opinion, however, this must
necessarily be assumed to explain the simplest physical and chemical
processes. Naturally I am not thinking of anything like the elaborate
psychic action of man and the higher animals, which is often bound
up with consciousness; we must rather descend the long scale of the
development of consciousness until we reach the simplest protists,
the monera (chapter ix.). The psychic activity of these homogeneous
particles of plasm (for instance, the chromacea) rises very little
above that of crystals; as in the chemical synthesis in the moneron, so
in crystallization we are bound to assume that there is a low degree
of sensation (not of consciousness), in order to explain the orderly
arrangement of the moving molecules in a definite structure.
The prejudice against theoretical materialism (or materialistic monism)
which still prevails so much is partly due to its rejection of the
three central dogmas of dualist metaphysics, and partly to a confusion
of it with hedonism. This practical materialism in its extreme forms
(as Aristippus of Cyrene and the Cyrenaic school, and afterwards
Epicurus, taught it) finds the chief end of life in pleasure--at one
time crude, sensual pleasure, and at others spiritual pleasure. Up to a
certain point, this thirst for happiness and a pleasant and enjoyable
life is innate in every man and higher animal, and so far just; it only
began to be censured as sinful when Christianity directed the thoughts
of men to eternal life, and taught them that their life on earth was
only a preparation for the future. We shall see afterwards, when we
come to weigh the value of life (chapter xvii.), that this asceticism
is unjustifiable and unnatural. But as every legitimate enjoyment can
become wrong by excess, and every virtue be turned into vice, so a
narrow hedonism is to be condemned, especially when it allies itself
with egoism. However, we must point out that this excessive thirst for
pleasure is in no way connected with materialism, but is often found
among idealists. Many convinced supporters of theoretical materialism
(many scientists and physicians, for instance) lead very simple,
blameless lives, and are little disposed to material pleasures. On the
other hand, many priests, theologians, and idealist philosophers, who
preach theoretical idealism, are pronounced hedonists in practice.
In olden times many temples served at one and the same time for the
theoretic worship of the gods and for practical excesses in the way
of wine and love; and even in our day the luxurious and often vicious
lives of the higher clergy (at Rome, for instance) do not fall far
short of the ancient models. This paradoxical situation is due to the
special attractiveness of everything that is forbidden. But it is
utterly unjust to extend the natural feeling against excessive and
egoistic hedonism to theoretical materialism and to monism. Equally
unjust is the habit, still widely spread, of depreciating matter, as
such, in favor of spirit. Impartial biology has taught us of late years
that what we call "spirit" is--as Goethe said long ago--inseparably
bound up with matter. Experience has never yet discovered any spirit
apart from matter.
On the other hand, pure dynamism, now often called energism (and
often spiritualism), is just as one-sided as pure materialism. Just
as the latter takes one attribute of substance, matter, as the one
chief cause of phenomena, dynamism takes its second attribute, force
(_dynamis_). Leibnitz most consistently developed this system among
the older German philosophers; and Fechner and Zöllner have recently
adopted it in part. The latest development of it is found in Wilhelm
Ostwald's _Natural Philosophy_ (1902). This work is purely monistic,
and very ingeniously endeavors to show that the same forces are at
work in the whole of nature, organic and inorganic, and that these may
all be comprised under the general head of energy. It is especially
satisfactory that Ostwald has traced the highest functions of the
human mind (consciousness, thought, feeling, and will), as well as the
simplest physical and chemical processes (heat, electricity, chemical
affinity, etc.), to special forms of energy, or natural force. However,
he is wrong when he supposes that his energism is an entirely new
system. The chief points of it are found in Leibnitz; and other Leipzig
scientists, especially Fechner and Zöllner, had come very close to
similar spiritualistic views--the latter going into outright spiritism.
Ostwald's chief mistake is to take the terms "energy" and "substance"
to be synonymous. Certainly his universal, all-creating energy is, in
the main, the same as the substance of Spinoza, which we have also
adopted in our "law of substance." But Ostwald would deprive substance
of the attribute of matter altogether, and boasts of his _Refutation of
Materialism_ (1895). He would leave it only the one attribute, energy,
and reduce all matter to immaterial points of force. Nevertheless,
as chemist and physicist, he never gets rid of space-filling
substance--which is all we mean by "matter"--and has to treat it and
its parts, the physical molecules and chemical atoms (even if only
conceived as symbols), daily as "vehicles of energy." Ostwald would
reject even these in his pursuit of the illusion of a "science without
hypotheses." As a fact, he is forced every day, like every other exact
scientist, to assume and apply in practice the indispensable idea of
matter, and its separate particles, the molecules and atoms. Knowledge
is impossible without hypotheses.
Monism is best expressed as hylozoism, in so far as this removes
the antithesis of materialism and spiritualism (or mechanicism and
dynamism), and unites them in a natural and harmonious system. Our
monistic system has been charged with leading to pure naturalism;
one of its most vehement critics, Frederick Paulsen, attaches so
much importance to this stricture that he thinks it as dangerous
as dogmatic clericalism. We may, therefore, usefully consider the
idea of naturalism, and point out in what sense we accept it and
identify it with monism. The key to the position is in our monistic
anthropogeny, our unprejudiced conviction, supported by every branch
of anthropological research, of "man's place in nature," as we have
established it in the first section of the _Riddle_ (chapters ii.-v.).
Man is a purely natural being, a placental mammal of the order of
primates. He was phylogenetically evolved in the course of the
Tertiary Period from a series of the lower primates (directly from
the anthropoid apes, but earlier from the cynocephali and lemures).
Savage man, as we have him to-day in the Veddah or Australian negro, is
physiologically nearer to the apes than to highly civilized men.
Anthropology (in the widest sense) is only a particular branch of
zoology, to which we must assign a special position on account of its
extreme importance. Hence all the sciences which relate to man and his
psychic activity--especially what are called the moral sciences--must
be regarded from our monistic point of view as special branches of
zoology and as natural sciences. Human psychology is inseparably
connected with comparative animal psychology, and this again with
that of the plants and protists. Philology studies in human speech a
complicated natural phenomenon, which depends on the combined action
of the brain-cells of the phronema, the muscles of the tongue, and
the vocal cords of the larynx, as much as the cry of mammals and the
song of birds do. The history of mankind (which we, in our curious
anthropocentric mood, call the history of the world), and its highest
branch, the history of civilization, is connected by modern prehistoric
science directly with the stem-history of the primates and the other
mammals, and indirectly with the phylogeny of the lower vertebrates.
Hence, when we consider the subject without prejudice, we do not find
a single branch of human science that passes the limits of natural
science (in the broadest sense), any more than we find nature herself
to be supernatural.
Just as monism, or naturalism, embraces the totality of science, so on
our principles the idea of nature comprises the whole scientifically
knowable world. In the strict monistic sense of Spinoza the ideas
of God and Nature are synonymous for us. Whether there is a realm
of the supernatural and spiritual beyond nature we do not know. All
that is said of it in religious myths and legends, or metaphysical
speculations and dogmas, is mere poetry and an outcome of imagination.
The imagination of civilized man is ever seeking to produce unified
images in art and science, and when it meets with gaps in these in the
association of ideas it endeavors to fill them with its own creations.
These creations of the phronema with which we fill the gaps in our
knowledge are called _hypotheses_ when they are in harmony with the
empirically established facts, and _myths_ when they contradict the
facts: this is the case with religious myths, miracles, etc. Even
when people contrast mind with nature, this is only a result, as a
rule, of similar superstitions (animism, spiritism, etc.). But when we
speak of man's mind as a higher psychic function, we mean a special
physiological function of the brain, or that particular part of the
cortex of the brain which we call the phronema, or organ of thought.
This higher psychic function is a natural phenomenon, subject, like
all other natural phenomena, to the law of substance. The old Latin
word _natura_ (from _nasci_, to be born) stands, like the corresponding
Greek term _physis_ (from _phyo_--to grow), for the essence of the
world as an eternal "being and becoming"--a profound thought! Hence
physics, the science of the _physis_, is, in the broadest sense of the
word, "natural science."
The extensive division of labor which has taken place in science, on
account of the enormous growth of our knowledge in the nineteenth
century and the rise of many new disciplines, has very much altered
their relations to each other and to the whole, and has even given a
fresh meaning and connotation to the term. Hence by physics, as it is
now taught at the universities, is usually understood only that part of
inorganic science which deals with the molecular relations of substance
and the mechanism of mass and ether, without regard to the qualitative
differences of the elements, which are expressed in the atomic weight
of their smallest particles, the atoms. The study of the atoms and
their affinities and combinations belongs to chemistry. As this
province is very extensive and has its special methods of research,
it is usually put side by side with physics as of equal importance;
in reality, however, it is only a branch of physics--chemistry is
the physics of the atoms. Hence, when we speak of a physico-chemical
inquiry or phenomenon, we might justly describe it briefly as
_physical_ (in the wider sense). Physiology, again, a particularly
important branch of it, is in this sense the physics of living things,
or the physico-chemical study of the living body.
Since Aristotle dealt with the eternal phenomena of nature in the first
part of his works, and called this _physics_, and with their inner
nature in the second part, to which he gave the name of _metaphysics_,
the two terms have undergone many and considerable modifications. If
we restrict the term "physics" to the empirical study of phenomena (by
observation and experiment), we may give the name of metaphysics to
every hypothesis and theory that is introduced to fill up the gaps in
it. In this sense the indispensable theories of physics (such as the
assumption that matter is made up of molecules and atoms and electrons)
may be described as metaphysical; such also is our assumption that all
substance is endowed with sensation as well as extension (matter).
This monistic metaphysics, which recognizes the absolute dominion of
the law of substance in all phenomena, but confines itself to the
study of nature and abandons inquiry into the supernatural, is, with
all its theories and hypotheses, an indispensable part of any rational
philosophy of life. To claim, as Ostwald does, that science must be
free from hypotheses is to deprive it of its foundations. But it is
very different with the current dualistic metaphysics, which holds that
there are two distinct worlds, and which we find in a hundred forms as
philosophic dualism.
If we understand by metaphysics the science of the ultimate ground of
things, springing from the rational demand for causes, it can only
be regarded, from the physiological point of view, as a higher and
late-developed function of the phronema. It could only arise with the
complete development of the brain in civilized man. It is completely
lacking among savages, whose organ of thought rises very little
above that of the most intelligent animals. The laws of the psychic
life of the savage have been closely studied by modern ethnology. It
teaches us that the higher reason is not found in savages, and that
their power of abstract thought and of forming concepts is at a very
low level. Thus, for instance, the Veddahs, who live in the forests
of Ceylon, have not the general idea of trees, though they know and
give names to individual trees. Many savages cannot count up to five;
they never reflect on the ground of their existence or think of the
past or future. Hence it is a great error for Schopenhauer and other
philosophers to define man as a "metaphysical animal," and to seek
a profound distinction between man and the animal in the need for
a metaphysic. This craving has only been awakened and developed by
the progress of civilization. But even in civilized communities it
(like consciousness) is not found in early youth, and only gradually
emerges. The child has to learn to speak and think. In harmony with
our biogenetic law, the child reproduces in the various stages of its
mental development the whole of the gradations which lead from the
savage to the barbarian, and from the barbarian to the half-civilized,
and on to the fully educated man. If this historical development of
the higher human faculties had always been properly appreciated, and
psychology had been faithful to the comparative and genetic methods,
many of the errors of the current metaphysical systems would have been
avoided. Kant would not then have produced his theory of _a priori_
knowledge, but would have seen that all that now seems to be _a priori_
in civilized man was originally acquired by _a posteriori_ experiences
in the long evolution of civilization and science. Here we have the
root of the errors which are distinctive of dualism and the prevailing
metaphysical transcendentalism.
Like all science, biology is _realistic_--that is to say, it regards
its object, the organisms, as really existing things, the features of
which are to an extent knowable through our senses (_sensorium_) and
organ of thought (_phronema_). At the same time, we know that these
cognitive organs, and the knowledge they bring us, are imperfect, and
that there may be other features of organisms that lie beyond our means
of perception altogether. But it by no means follows from this that,
as our idealist opponents say, the organisms (and all other things)
exist only in our mind (in the images in our cortex). Our pure monism
(or hylozoism) agrees with realism in recognizing the unity of being
of each organism, and denying that there is any essential distinction
between its knowable phenomenon and its internal hidden essence (or
noumenon), whether the latter be called, with Plato, the eternal
"idea," or, with Kant, the "thing in itself." Realism is not identical
with materialism, and may even be definitely connected with the very
opposite, dynamism or energism.
As realism generally coincides with monism, so idealism is usually
identical with dualism. The two most influential representatives of
dualism, Plato and Kant, said that there were two totally distinct
worlds. Nature, or the empirical world, is alone accessible to our
experience, while the spiritual or transcendental world is not. The
existence of the latter is known to us only by the emotions or by
practical reason; but we can have no idea of its nature. The chief
error of this theoretical idealism is the assumption that the soul is
a peculiar, immaterial being, immortal and endowed with _a priori_
knowledge. The physiology and ontogeny of the brain (together with the
comparative anatomy and histology of the phronema) prove that the soul
of man is, like that of all other vertebrates, a function of the brain,
and inseparably bound up with this organ. Hence this idealist theory
of knowledge is just as inconsistent with realistic biology as is the
psycho-physical parallelism of Wundt or the psychomonism of more
recent physiologists, which in the end issues in a complete dualism of
body and mind. It is otherwise with _practical_ idealism. When this
presents the symbols or ideals of a personal God, an immortal soul, and
the free-will as ethical stimuli, and uses them for their pedagogical
worth in the education of the young, it may have a good influence for a
time, which is independent of their theoretical untenability.
The many branches of biology which have been developed independently
in the course of the nineteenth century ought to remain in touch
with one another, and co-operate with a clear apprehension of their
task, if they are to attain their high purpose of framing a unified
science embracing the whole field of organic life. Unfortunately, this
common aim is often lost sight of in the specialization of study;
the philosophical task is neglected in favor of the empirical. The
confusion that has ensued makes it desirable to determine the mutual
positions of the various biological disciplines. I went into this
somewhat fully in my academic speech on the development and aim of
zoology in 1869. But as this essay is little known, I will briefly
resume the chief points of it.
In correspondence with the long-established distinction between the
plant and the animal, the two chief branches of biology, zoology
and botany, have developed side by side, and are represented by
two different chairs in the universities. Independently of these,
there arose at the very beginning of scientific activity that field
of inquiry which deals with human life in all its aspects--the
anthropological disciplines and the so-called "mental sciences"
(history, philology, psychology, etc.). Since the theory of descent has
proved man's origin from vertebrate ancestors, and thus anthropology
has been recognized as a part of zoology, we have begun to understand
the inner historic connection between these various branches of
anthropology, and to combine them in a comprehensive science of man.
The immense extent and the great importance of this science have
justified the creation of late years of special chairs of anthropology.
It seems desirable to do the same for the science of the protists, or
unicellular organisms. The cell theory, or cytology, as an elementary
part of anatomy, has to be dealt with in both botany and zoology;
but the lowest unicellular representatives of both kingdoms, the
primitive plants (protophyta) and the primitive animals (protozoa), are
so intimately connected, and throw so great a light, as independent
rudimentary organisms, on the tissue cells in the _histon_, or
multicellular organism, that we must regard as a sign of progress the
recent proposal of Schaudinn to found a special institute and journal
for the science of protists. One very important section of it is
bacteriology.
The practical division of biology, according to the extent of the
organic kingdom, leads us to mark out four chief provinces of research:
protistology (the science of the unicellulars), botany (the science
of plants), zoology (the science of animals), and anthropology (the
science of man). In each of these four fields we may then distinguish
morphology (the science of forms) and physiology (the science of
functions) as the two chief divisions of scientific work. The special
methods and means of observation differ entirely in the two sections.
In morphology the work of description and comparison is the most
important as regards both outer form and inner structure. In physiology
the exact methods of physics and chemistry are especially demanded--the
observation of vital activities and the attempt to discover the
physical laws that govern them. As a correct knowledge of human anatomy
and physiology is indispensable for scientific medicine, and the work
requires a particularly large apparatus, these two sciences have long
been studied separately, and have been handed over to the medical
facility in the division of the academic curriculum.
The broad field of morphology may be divided into anatomy and
biogeny; the one deals with the fully developed, and the other
with the developing, organism. Anatomy, the study of the formed
organism, studies both the external form and the inner structure.
We may distinguish as its two branches the science of structures
(tectology) and the science of fundamental forms (promorphology).
Tectology investigates the features of the structure in the organic
_individual_, and the composition of the body out of various parts
(cells, tissues, and organs). Promorphology describes the real form of
these individual parts and of the whole body, and endeavors to reduce
them mathematically to certain fundamental forms (chapter viii.).
Biogeny, or the science of the evolution of organisms, is also divided
into two parts--the science of the individual (ontogeny) and of the
stem or species (phylogeny); each follows its own peculiar methods
and aims, but they are most intimately connected by the biogenetic
law. Ontogeny deals with the development of the individual organism
from the beginning of its existence to death; as embryology it
observes the growth of the individual within the fœtal membranes;
and as metamorphology (or the science of metamorphoses) it follows
the subsequent changes in post-fœtal life (chapter xvi.). The
task of phylogeny is to trace the evolution of the organic stem or
species--that is to say, of the chief divisions in the animal and
plant worlds, which we describe as classes, orders, etc.; in other
words, it traces the genealogy of species. It relies on the facts of
paleontology, and fills up the gaps in this by comparative anatomy and
ontogeny.
The science of the vital phenomena, which we call physiology, is for
the most part the physiology of work, or ergology; it investigates
the functions of the living organism, and has to reduce them as
closely as possible to physical and chemical laws. Vegetable ergology
deals with what are called the vegetative functions, nutrition and
reproduction; animal ergology studies the animal activities of movement
and sensation. Psychology is directly connected with the latter.
But the study of the relations of the organism to its environment,
organic and inorganic, also belongs to physiology in the wider sense;
we call this part of it perilogy, or the physiology of relations. To
this belong chorology, or the science of distribution (also called
biological geography, as it deals with geographical and topographical
distribution), and œcology or bionomy (also recently called
ethology), the science of the domestic side of organic life, of the
life-needs of organisms and their relations to other organisms with
which they live (biocenosis, symbiosis, parasitism).
THIRD TABLE
SYNOPSIS OF THE CHIEF BRANCHES OF BIOLOGY (1869)
BIOLOGY = THE SCIENCE OF LIFE
The four chief branches of systematic biology.
I. Protistology = the science of single cells--unicellular organisms.
II. Botany = the science of plants--tissue plants (metaphyta).
III. Zoology = the science of animals--tissue animals (metazoa).
IV. Anthropology = the science of man--speaking primates.
┌───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ A. MORPHOLOGY = THE SCIENCE OF FORMS. │
│ Anatomy and biogeny of organisms. │
├────────────────────────────────────┬──────────────────────────────────┤
│A I. ANATOMY. │A II. BIOGENY. │
│The science of structure. │The science of development. │
│1. TECTOLOGY. │3. PHYLOGENY. │
│The science of structure. │Stem history. │
│Cytology, science of cells. │Paleontology and genealogy. │
│Histology, science of tissues. │Transformism or theory of descent.│
│Organology, science of organs. │Natural classification. │
│Blastology, science of persons. │ ──── │
│Kormology, science of trunks. │ │
│ ──── │4. ONTOGENY. │
│2. PROMORPHOLOGY. │4_a_. Embryology. │
│The science of fundamental │(Development within the │
│forms. Knowledge of the geometrical │fœtal membranes.) │
│ideal forms (mathematically │4_b_. Metamorphology. │
│definable) in relation │(Modification of the organism │
│to the concrete real form of │after fœtal life.) │
│the individual. │ │
└────────────────────────────────────┴──────────────────────────────────┘
┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ B. PHYSIOLOGY = THE SCIENCE OF FUNCTIONS. │
│ Physics and chemistry of the organism. │
├─────────────────────────────┬────────────────────────────────────┤
│B I. ERGOLOGY. │B II. PERILOGY. │
│ Physiology of work. │Physiology of relations. │
│5. Vegetal ergology. │7. Chorology. │
│Physiology of the vegetative │The science of distribution. │
│functions. │Biological geography and topography.│
│5_a_. Trophonomy. │The science of migrations. │
│The science of metabolism. │ │
│5_b_. Gonimatology. │ ──── │
│The science of reproduction. │ │
│ ──── │ │
│6. Animal ergology. │8. ŒCOLOGY. │
│6_a_. Phoronomy. │(or bionomy or ethology). │
│The science of movement. │The science of domestic life. │
│6_b_. Sensonomy. │Biological economy. │
│The science of sensation. │Relations of the organism to │
│6_c_. Psychology. │the environment, and to other │
│ │organisms with which it lives. │
└─────────────────────────────┴────────────────────────────────────┘
V
DEATH
Life and death--Individual death--Immortality
of the unicellulars--Death of the protists and
tissue-organisms--Causes of physiological death--Using up
of the plasma--Regeneration--Biotonus--Perigenesis of the
plastidules: memory of the biogens--Regeneration of protists and
tissue-organisms--Senile debility--Disease--Necrobiosis--The lot
of death--Providence--Chance and fate--Eternal life--Optimism
and pessimism--Suicide and self-redemption--Redemption from
evil--Medicine and philosophy--Maintenance of life--Spartan selection.
Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux
of "being and becoming"! That is the broad lesson of the evolution
of the world, taken as a whole or in its various parts. Substance
alone is eternal and unchangeable, whether we call this all-embracing
world-being Nature, or Cosmos, or God, or World-spirit. The law of
substance teaches us that it reveals itself to us in an infinite
variety of forms, but that its essential attributes, matter and
energy, are constant. All individual forms of substance are doomed
to destruction. That will be the fate of the sun and its encircling
planets, and of the organisms that now people the earth--the fate
of the bacterium and of man. Just as the existence of every organic
individual had a beginning, it will also undeniably have an end. Life
and death are irrevocably united. However, philosophers and biologists
hold very different views as to the real causes of this destiny. Most
of their opinions are at once out of court, because they have not a
clear idea of the nature of life, and so can have no adequate idea of
its termination--death.
The inquiry into the nature of organic life which we instituted
in the second chapter has shown us that it is, in the ultimate
analysis, a chemical process. The "miracle of life" is in essence
nothing but the metabolism of the living matter, or of the plasm.
Recent physiologists, especially Max Verworn and Max Kassowitz, have
pointed out, in opposition to modern vitalism, that "life consists
in a continuous alternation between the upbuild and the decay of the
highly complicated chemical unities of the protoplasm. And if this
conception is admitted, we may rightly say that we know what we mean
by death. If death is the cessation of life, we must mean by that the
cessation of the alternation between the upbuild and the dissolution
of the molecules of protoplasm; and as each of the molecules of
protoplasm must break up again shortly after its formation, we have in
death to deal only with the definite cessation of reconstruction in
the destroyed plasma-molecules. Hence a living thing is not finally
dead--that is to say, absolutely incompetent to discharge any further
vital function--until the whole of its plasma-molecules are destroyed."
In the exhaustive justification with which Kassowitz follows up this
definition in the fifteenth chapter of his _General Biology_, the
natural causes of physiological death are fully described.
Among the numerous and contradictory views of recent biologists on
the nature of death we find many errors and misunderstandings, due
to a lack of clear distinction between the duration of the living
matter in general and that of the individual life-form. This is
particularly noticeable in the contradictory views which have been
elicited by August Weismann's theory (1882) of the immortality of the
unicellulars. I have shown in the eleventh chapter of the _Riddle_ that
it is untenable. But as the distinguished zoologist has again taken
up his theory with energy in his instructive _Lectures on the Theory
of the Descent_ (1902), and has added to it erroneous observations on
the nature of death, I am obliged to return to the point. Precisely
because this interesting work gives most valuable support to the
theory of evolution, and maintains Darwin's theory of selection and
its consequences with great effect, I feel it is necessary to point
out considerable weaknesses and dangerous errors in it. The chief of
these is the important theory of the germ-plasm and the consequent
opposition to the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Weismann
deduces from this a radical distinction between the unicellular and
the multicellular organisms. The latter alone are mortal, the former
immortal; "between the unicellular and the multicellular lies the
introduction of physiological--that is to say, normal--death." We
must say, in opposition to this, that the physiological individuals
(_bionta_) among the protista are just as limited in their duration as
among the histona. But if the chief stress in the question is laid,
not on the individuality of the living matter, but on the continuity
of the metabolic life-movement through a series of generations, it is
just as correct to affirm a partial immortality of the plasm for the
multicellulars as for the unicellulars.
The immortality of the unicellulars, on which Weismann has laid so much
stress, can only be sustained for a small part of the protists even in
his own sense--namely, for those which simply propagate by cleavage,
the chromacea and bacteria among the monera (chapter ix.), the diatomes
and paulotomes among the protophyta, and a part of the infusoria and
rhizopods among the protozoa. Strictly speaking, the individual life is
destroyed when a cell splits into two daughter-cells. One might reply
with Weismann that in this case the dividing unicellular organism
lives on as a whole in its offspring, and that we have no corpse, no
dead remains of the living matter, left behind. But that is not true of
the majority of the protozoa. In the highly developed ciliata the chief
nucleus is lost, and there must be from time to time a conjugation of
two cells and a mutual fertilization of their secondary nuclei, before
there can be any further multiplication by simple cleavage. However,
in most of the sporozoa and rhizopoda, which generally propagate by
spore formation, only one portion of the unicellular organism is used
for this; the other portion dies, and forms a "corpse." In the large
rhizopods (thalamophora and radiolaria) the spore-forming inner part,
which lives on in the offspring, is smaller than the decaying outer
portion, which becomes the corpse.
Weismann's view of the secondary "introduction of physiological death
in the multicellulars" is just as untenable as his theory of the
immortality of the unicellulars. According to this opinion, the death
of the histona--both the metaphyta and metazoa--is a purposive outcome
of adaptation, only introduced by selection when the multicellular
organism has reached a certain stage of complexity of structure, which
is incompatible with its original immortality. Natural selection would
thus kill the immortal and preserve only the mortal; it would interfere
with the multiplication of the immortals in the bloom of their years,
and only use the mortal for rearing posterity. The curious conclusions
which Weismann reached in developing this theory of death, and the
striking contradictions to his own theory of the germ-plasm which
he fell into, have been pointed out by Kassowitz in the forty-ninth
chapter of his _General Biology_. In my opinion, this paradoxical
theory of death has no more basis than the germ-plasm theory he has
ingeniously connected with it. We may admire the subtlety and depth
of the speculations with which Weismann has worked out his elaborate
molecular theory. But the nearer we get to its foundations the less
solid we find them. Moreover, not one of the many supporters of the
theory of germ-plasm has been able to make profitable use of it in the
twenty years since it was first published. On the other hand, it has
had an evil influence in so far as it denied the inheriting of acquired
characters, which I hold, with Lamarck and Darwin, to be one of the
soundest and most indispensable supports of the theory of descent.
In discussing the question of the real causes of death, we confine our
attention to normal or physiological death without considering the
innumerable causes of accidental or pathological death, by illness,
parasites, mishaps, etc. Normal death takes place in all organisms when
the limit of the hereditary term of life is reached. This limit varies
enormously in different classes of organisms. Many of the unicellular
protophyta and protozoa live only a few hours, others several months
or years; many one-year plants and lower animals live only a summer in
our temperate climate, and only a few weeks or months in the arctic
circle or on the snow-covered Alps. On the other hand, the larger
vertebrates are not uncommonly a hundred years old, and many trees live
for a thousand years. The normal span of life has been determined in
all species in the course of their evolution by adaptation to special
conditions, and has then been transmitted to offspring by heredity. In
the latter, however, it is often subject to considerable modifications.
The organism has been compared, on the modern "machine theory" of life,
to an artificially constructed mechanism, or an apparatus in which the
human intelligence has put together various parts for the attainment of
a certain end. This comparison is inapplicable to the lowest organisms,
the monera, which are devoid of such a mechanical structure. In these
primitive "organisms without organs" (chromacea and bacteria) the sole
cause of life is the invisible chemical structure of the plasm and the
metabolism effected by this. As soon as this ceases death takes place
(_cf._ chapter ix.). In the case of all other organisms the comparison
is useful in so far as the orderly co-operation of the various organs
or parts accomplishes a certain task by the conversion of virtual
into active force. But the great difference between the two is that
in the case of the machine the regularity is due to the purposive and
consciously acting will of man, whereas in the case of the organism it
is produced by unconscious natural selection without any design. On
the other hand, the two have another important feature in common in
the limited span of life which is involved in their being used up. A
locomotive, ship, telegraph, or piano, will last only a certain number
of years. All their parts are worn out by long use, and, in spite of
all repairing, become at last useless. So in the case of all organisms,
the various parts are sooner or later worn out and rendered useless;
this is equally true of the organella of the protist and the organs of
the histon. It is true that the parts may be repaired or regenerated;
but sooner or later they cease to be of service, and become the cause
of death.
When we take the idea of regeneration, or the recuperation of parts
that have been rendered useless, in the widest sense, we find it to
be a universal vital function of the greatest importance. The whole
metabolism of the living organism consists in the assimilation of
plasm, or the replacing of the plasma-particles which are constantly
used up by dissimilation (_cf._ chapter x.). Verworn has given the name
of _biogens_ to the hypothetical molecules of living matter--which
I regard with Hering as endowed with memory, and (1875) have called
plastidules. He says: "The biogens are the real vehicles of life.
In their constant decay and reconstruction consists the process of
life, which expresses itself in the great variety of vital phenomena."
The relation of assimilation (the building-up of the biogens) to
dissimilation (the decay of the biogens) may be expressed by a fraction
to which the name _biotonus_ is given A/D. It is of radical importance
in the various phenomena of life. The variations in the size of this
fraction are the cause of all change in the life-expression of every
organism. When the biotone increases, and the metabolism quotient
becomes more than one, we have growth; when, on the other hand, it
falls below one, and the biotone decreases, we have atrophy, and
finally death. New biogens are constructed in _regeneration_. In
_generation_ or reproduction groups of biogens (as germ-plasm) are
released from the parent in consequence of redundant growth, and form
the foundation of new individuals.
The phenomena of regeneration are extremely varied, and have of
late years been made the subject of a good deal of comprehensive
experiment, especially on the side of what is called "mechanical
embryology." Many of these experimental embryologists have drawn
far-reaching conclusions from their somewhat narrow experiments, and
have partly urged them as objections to Darwinism. They imagine that
they have disproved the theory of selection. Most of these efforts
betray a notable lack of general physiological and morphological
knowledge. As they also generally ignore the biogenetic law, and
take no account of the fundamental correlation of embryology and
stem history, we can hardly wonder that they reach the most absurd
and contradictory conclusions. Many examples of this will be found
in the _Archiv für Entwickelungsmechanik_. When, however, we make
a comprehensive survey of the interesting field of regeneration
processes, we discover a continuous series of development from
the simplest repair of plasm in the unicellular protists to the
sexual generation of the higher histona. The sperm-cells and ova
of the latter are redundant growth-products, which have the power
of regenerating the whole multicellular organism. But many of the
higher histona have also the capacity to produce new individuals by
regeneration from detached pieces of tissue, or even single cells.
In the peculiar mode of metabolism and growth which accompanies
these processes of regeneration, the memory of the plastidule, or
the unconscious retentive power of the biogens, plays the chief part
(_cf._ my _Perigenesis of the Plastidule_, 1875). In the most primitive
kinds of the unicellular protists we find the phenomena of death and
regeneration in the simplest form. When an unnucleated moneron (a
chromaceum or bacterium) divides into two equal halves, the existence
of the dividing individual comes to an end. Each half regenerates
itself in the simplest conceivable way by assimilation and growth,
until it, in turn, reaches the size of the parent organism. In the
nucleated cells of most of the protophyta and protozoa it is more
complicated, as the nucleus becomes active as the central organ and
regulator of the metabolism. If an infusorium is cut into two pieces,
only one of which contains the nucleus, this one alone grows into a
complete nucleated cell; the unnucleated portion dies, being unable to
regenerate itself.
In the multicellular body of the tissue-forming organisms we must
distinguish between the partial death of the various cells and the
total death of the whole organism, or cell-state, which they make up.
In many of the lower tissue-plants and tissue-animals the communal
link is very loose and the centralization slight. Odd cells or groups
of cells may be set loose, without any danger to the life of the
whole histon, and grow into new individuals. In many of the algæ
and liverworts (even in the _bryophyllum_, closely related to the
stone-crop, or _sedum_)--as well as in the common fresh-water polyp,
hydra, and other polyps--every bit that is cut off is capable of
growing into a complete individual. But the higher the organization
is developed and the closer the correlation of the parts and their
co-operation in the life of the centralized stock or person, the
slighter we find the regenerative faculty of the several organs. Even
then, however, many used-up cells may be removed and replaced by
regenerated new cells. In our own human organism, as in that of the
higher animals, thousands of cells die every day, and are replaced
by new cells of the same kind, as, for instance, epidermic cells at
the surface of the skin, the cells of the salivary glands or the
mucous lining of the stomach, the blood-cells, and so on. On the other
hand, there are tissues that have little or nothing of this repairing
power, such as many of the nerve-cells, sense-cells, muscle-cells,
etc. In these cases a number of constant cell-individuals remain with
their nucleus throughout life, although a used-up portion of their
cell-body may be replaced by regeneration from the cytoplasm. Thus
our human body, like that of all the higher animals and plants, is a
"cell-state" in another sense. Every day, nay, every hour, thousands
of its citizens, the tissue-cells, pass away, and are replaced by
others that have arisen by cleavage of similar cells. Nevertheless,
this uninterrupted change of our personality is never complete or
general. There is always a solid groundwork of conservative cells, the
descendants of which secure the further regeneration.
Most organisms meet their death through external or accidental
causes--lack of sufficient food, isolation from their necessary
environment, parasites and other enemies, accidents and disease. The
few individuals who escape these accidental causes of death find the
end of life in old age or senility, by the gradual decay of the organs
and dwindling of their functions. The cause of this senility and the
ensuing natural death is determined for each species of organisms by
the specific nature of their plasm. As Kassowitz has lately pointed
out, the senility of individuals consists in the inevitable increase
in the decay of protoplasm and the metaplastic parts of the body
which this produces. Each metaplasm in the body favors the inactive
break-up of protoplasm, and so also the formation of new metaplasms.
The death of the cells follows, because the chemical energy of the
plasm gradually falls off from a certain height, the acme, of life.
The plasm loses more and more the power to replace by regeneration the
losses it sustains by the vital functions. As, in the mental life, the
receptivity of the brain and the acuteness of the senses gradually
decay, so the muscles lose their energy, the bones become fragile, the
skin dry and withered, the elasticity and endurance of the movements
decrease. All these normal processes of senile decay are caused by
chemical changes in the plasm, in which dissimilation gains constantly
on assimilation. In the end they inevitably lead to normal death.
While the gradual decay of the bodily forces and the senile
degeneration of the organs must necessarily cause the death of the
soundest organism in the end, the great majority of men pass away
through illness long before this normal term of life is reached. The
external causes of this are the attacks of enemies and parasites,
accidents, and unfavorable conditions of life. These cause changes
in the tissues and their component cells, which first occasion the
partial death of particular sections, and then the total death of the
whole individual. The modifications of the living matter which produce
disease and premature death are called _necrobioses_. They consist
partly of _histolyses_--that is to say, degeneration of the cells by
atrophy, dissolution, withering (mortification), or colliquation; and
partly of _metaplasmosisms_, or metamorphoses of the plasm--fatty,
mucous, chalky, or amyloid metamorphoses of the cells. It was the great
merit of Rudolph Virchow that he proved, in his epoch-making _Cellular
Pathology_ (1858), that all diseases in man and other organisms may be
reduced to such modifications of the cells which make up the tissues.
Hence disease, with its pain, is a physiological process, a life under
injurious and dangerous conditions. As in all normal vital phenomena,
so in abnormal or pathological, the ultimate ground must be sought in
the physical and chemical processes in the plasm. Pathology is a part
of physiology. This discovery has cut the ground from under the older
notion of disease as a special entity, a devil, or a divine punishment.
The natural physical explanation of death, which has been made possible
by modern physiology and pathology, has shattered, not only all the
old superstitious ideas about disease and death, but also a number of
important metaphysical dogmas which built upon them. Such was, for
instance, the naïve belief in a conscious Providence, controlling
the fate of individuals and determining their death. I do not fail
to appreciate the great subjective value which such a trust in a
protecting Providence has for men amid their countless dangers. We may
envy the childish temper for the confidence and hope which it derives
from this belief. But as we do not seek to have our emotions gratified
by poetic fictions, we are bound to point out that reason cannot detect
the shadow of a proof of the existence and action of this conscious
Providence, or "loving Father in heaven." We read daily in our journals
of accidents and crimes of all kinds that cause the unexpected death
of happy human beings. Every year we read with horror the statistics
of the thousands of deaths from shipwreck and railway accidents,
earthquakes and landslips, wars and epidemics. And then we are asked
to believe in a loving Providence that has decreed the death of each
of these poor mortals! We are asked to console ourselves in face of
the tragedy with the hollow phrases: "God's will be done," or "God's
ways are wonderful." Simple children and dull believers may soothe
themselves with such phrases. They no longer impose on educated people
in the twentieth century, who prefer a full and fearless knowledge of
the truth.
When our monistic and rational conception of death is described as
dreary and hopeless, we may answer that the prevalent dualistic view is
merely an outcome of hereditary habits of thought and mystic training
in early youth. When these are displaced by progressive culture and
science, it will be clear that man has lost nothing, but gained much,
as regards his life on earth. Convinced that there is no eternal life
awaiting him, he will strive all the more to brighten his life on
earth and rationally improve his condition in harmony with that of his
fellows. If it is objected that then everything will depend on mere
"chance," instead of being controlled by a conscious Providence or a
moral order of the world, I must refer the reader for my reply to the
close of the fourteenth chapter of the _Riddle_, where I have dealt
with fate, providence, end, aim, and chance. And if it is further
claimed that our realistic view of life leads to pessimism, there is no
better ground for such an accusation.
I have given, in the eleventh chapter of the _Riddle_, the scientific
reasons which forbid us to accept the personal immortality of the soul.
But as the most vehement attacks have been made on this chapter by
metaphysicians of the prevailing school and by Christian theologians,
I must return to the question here. I am convinced, from numbers of
letters I have received and conversation with educated people of all
classes, that no other dogma is so firmly established and highly valued
as athanatism, or the belief in personal immortality. Most men will not
give up at any price the hope that a better life awaits them beyond
the grave, which will compensate them for all the pain and suffering
they endure here. In the picturing of this future life the mediæval
geocentric idea still forms the chief feature. Troelslund has shown, in
his _Idea of Heaven and of the World_, how this theory still dominates
the metaphysics of the majority of men; in spite of Copernicus and
Laplace, heaven is still for most people the semicircular blue glass
bell that overarches the earth. We still hear the praises of our life
in this heaven sung daily in sermons and speeches and festive orations.
The orator extends his right hand "upward" to the infinite starry
space of heaven, forgetting that the radius of the direction he is
pointing towards changes every second, and in twelve hours reaches the
precisely opposite direction, and becomes "downward." Other believers
endeavor to be still more concrete, and point out definite celestial
bodies as the homes of immortal souls. Modern cosmology, astronomy, and
geology entirely exclude these pretty fictions from science; and modern
psychology, physiology, ontogeny, and phylogeny rigorously refuse an
inch of ground for athanatism.
Optimism regards the world on its good and bright and admirable
side: pessimism looks to the shades and tragedies of life. In some
philosophic and religious systems one or other of these tendencies
is consistently and exclusively worked out; but in most systems the
two are mingled. Pure and consistent realism is generally neither
optimistic nor pessimistic. It takes the world as it is, a unified
whole, the nature of which is neither good nor bad. Dualistic idealism,
however, generally combines the two, and distributes them between
its two worlds; it describes this world as a "vale of tears," and
the next as a glorious city of joy and happiness. This view is a
conspicuous feature in most of the dualistic religions, and has still
a considerable influence, both practically and theoretically, on the
minds of educated people.
The founder of systematic optimism was Gottfried Leibnitz, whose
philosophy sought to achieve an ingenious harmony between divergent
systems, but is really a form of dynamism, or a monism somewhat akin to
the energism of Ostwald. Leibnitz gave a compendious statement of his
system in his _Monadology_ (1714). He taught that the world consists of
an infinite number of monads (which almost correspond to our psychic
atoms), but this pluralism was converted into a monism by making God,
as the central monad, bind all together in a substantial unity. In
his _Theodicy_ (1710) he taught that God (the "all-wise, all-good,
and almighty creator of the world") had with perfect consciousness
created "the best of all possible worlds"; that his infinite goodness,
wisdom, and power are seen everywhere in the pre-established harmony
of things; but that the individual human being, and humanity taken as
a whole, have only a limited capacity for development. The man who
knows the real features of the world, who has honestly confronted the
tragic struggle for life that rules throughout living nature, who has
sympathy for the infinite sum of misery and want of every kind in the
life of men, can scarcely understand how an acute and informed thinker
like Leibnitz could entertain such optimism as this. It would be more
intelligible in the case of a one-sided and nebulous metaphysician like
Hegel, who held that "all that is real is rational and all that is
rational is real."
Pessimism is the direct opposite of systematic optimism. While the
one holds the universe to be the best, the other regards it as the
worst, of all possible worlds. This pessimistic conception has found
expression in the oldest and most popular religions of Asia, Brahmanism
and Buddhism. Both these Hindoo religions were originally pessimistic,
and at the same time atheistic and idealistic. Schopenhauer especially
pointed out this, declaring that they were the most perfect of all
religions, and importing their leading ideas into his own system. He
considers it "a glaring absurdity to attempt to prove this miserable
world the best of all possible ones--this cock-pit of tortured and
suffering beings, who can only survive by destroying one another, in
which the capacity for pain grows with knowledge, and so reaches its
height in man. Truly optimism cuts so sorry a figure in this theatre of
sin, suffering, and death that we should have to regard it as a piece
of sarcasm if Hume had not given us an explanation of its origin (the
wish to flatter God and hope for some result from it). To the palpable
sophistry of Leibnitz, who would prove this world the best of all
possible, we can oppose a strict and honest proof that it is the worst
of all possible." However, neither Schopenhauer nor the most important
of modern pessimists, Edward Hartmann, has drawn the strict practical
conclusion from pessimism. That would be to deny the will to live, and
put an end to suffering by suicide.
The mention of suicide as the logical consequence of pessimism may
serve as an occasion to glance at the curious and contradictory views
that are expressed about it. There are few problems of life (apart
from immortality and the freedom of the will) on which such absurd
and contradictory things have been said even down to our own time.
The theist who regards life as a gift of God may hesitate to reject
or return it--although the offering of one's self as a victim for
other men is considered a high virtue. Most educated people still look
upon suicide as a great sin, and in some countries (such as England)
the attempt is punished by law. In the Middle Ages, when a hundred
thousand men were burned alive for heresy or witchcraft, suicides
were punished by a disgraceful burial. As Schopenhauer says: "Clearly
there is nothing in the world to which a man has a plainer right than
his own life and person. It is simply ridiculous for criminal justice
to deal with suicide." The advance of embryology in the last thirty
years has made it clear that the individual life of a man (and all
other vertebrates) begins at the moment when the male sperm-cell and
the maternal ovum coalesce. In this blind chance plays an important
part, as in so many other important aspects of life--taking "chance"
in the scientific sense, which I have explained in chapter xiv. of
the _Riddle_. Hence, the real cause of personal existence is not the
favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents;
very often this consequence of the act of love has been anything but
desired. If, then, the circumstances of life come to press too hard
on the poor being who has thus developed, without any fault of his,
from the fertilized ovum--if, instead of the hoped-for good, there
come only care and need, sickness and misery of every kind--he has the
unquestionable right to put an end to his sufferings by death. Every
religion assents to this under certain conditions, even Christianity
when it says: "If thine eye scandalize thee, cast it from thee." It
is true that the conventional morality condemns suicide under any
circumstances; but the reasons it alleges are ridiculously slight, and
are not improved by having the mantle of religion wrapped about them.
The voluntary death by which a man puts an end to intolerable suffering
is really an act of redemption. We should, therefore, describe it as
self-redemption, and look on it with Christian sympathy, not brand it
pharisaically as "self-murder." As a fact, this contemptuous phrase
has no meaning, since murder is the taking away of a man's life against
his will, while the suicide dies voluntarily. Hence, he usually
deserves our sympathy, not contempt, and certainly not punishment.
Our conventional morality is, as so often happens, full of senseless
contradictions. Modern states have introduced conscription; they demand
that every citizen shall give up his life for his country on command,
and kill as many other men as he can (an admirable commentary on the
Scriptural "Love your enemies") for some political reason or other.
But they never secure to each citizen the means of honorable existence
and free development of his personality--not even the right to work by
which he may maintain himself and his family.
I fully recognize the advance that social politics has made in
improving the conditions of the poorer classes, the promotion of
hygiene and education and the bodily and mental welfare of citizens;
but we are still very far from the attainable ideal of general
prosperity and happiness which reason dictates to every civilized
nation. Misery and want are increasing among the poor, as the division
of labor and over-population increase. Thousands of strong and active
men come to grief every year without any fault of theirs, often
precisely because they were quiet and honest; thousands are hungry
because, with the best will in the world, they cannot find work;
thousands are sacrificed to the heartless demands of our iron age of
machinery with its exacting technical and industrial requirements. On
the other hand, we see thousands of contemptible characters prospering
because they have been able to deceive their fellows by unscrupulous
speculations, or because they have flattered and served the higher
authorities. It is no wonder that the statistics of suicide increase so
much in the more civilized communities. No feeling man who has any real
"Christian love of his neighbor" will grudge his suffering brother the
eternal rest and the freedom from pain which he has obtained by his
self-redemption.
The seventh petition of the Lord's Prayer, which is repeated daily by
millions of Christians, is: "Deliver us from evil." Luther explains
this as a prayer to be saved "from all evil of body and soul" in
this life and the next. When we consider this in the light of our
monistic principles, we have naturally to set aside the superstitious
ideas of the Middle Ages regarding the future life, and deal only
with the petition as regards this life. The number and variety and
gravity of these evils have grown in civilized communities in the
nineteenth century, notwithstanding all the progress we have made in
art and science and the rational reform of our personal and social
life. Civilization has gained infinitely in value by the change we
have made in our conceptions of time and space in this age of steam
and electricity. We can make our domestic and public life much
pleasanter, and avail ourselves of a far greater number of luxuries,
than was possible to our grandfathers a hundred years ago. But all
this has caused a much greater expenditure of nerve-energy. The brain
has to bear a much greater strain, and is worn out earlier, the body
is more stimulated and overworked than it was a hundred years ago.
Many diseases of modern civilization are making appalling progress;
neurasthenia, especially, and other diseases of the nerves, carry off
more victims every year. Our asylums grow bigger and more numerous
every year, and we have sanatoria on every side in which the baited
victim of modern civilization seeks refuge from his evils. Some of
these evils are quite incurable, and the sufferers have to meet a
certain death in terrible pain. Many of these poor creatures look
forward to their redemption from evil and the end of their miserable
lives. The important question arises whether, as compassionate men,
we should be justified in carrying out their wish and ending their
sufferings by a painless death.
This question is of great importance, both in practical philosophy
and in juridical and medical practice, and, as opinions differ very
much on the subject, it seems advisable to deal with it here. I start
from my own personal opinion, that sympathy is not only one of the
noblest and finest functions of the human brain, but also one of
the first conditions of the social life of the higher animals. The
precepts of Christian charity which the gospels rightly place in the
very foreground of morality, were not first discovered by Christ, but
they were successfully urged by him and his followers at a time when
refined selfishness threatened the Roman civilization with decay.
These natural principles of sympathy and altruism had arisen thousands
of years before in human society, and are even found among all the
higher animals that live a social life. They have their first roots
in the sexual reproduction of the lower animals, the sexual love and
the care of the young on which the maintenance of the species depends.
Hence the modern prophets of pure egoism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max
Stirner, etc., commit a biological error when they would substitute
their morality of the strong for universal charity, and when they
ridicule sympathy as a weakness of character or an ethical blunder
of Christianity. It is just in its insistence on sympathy that the
Christian teaching is most valuable, and this part of its system
will survive long after its dogmas have sunk into oblivion. However,
this lofty duty must not be confined to men, but extended to "our
relations," the higher vertebrates, and, in fact, to all animals whose
brain-organization seems to point to the possession of sensation and
a consciousness of pleasure and pain. Thus, for instance, in the case
of the domestic animals which we use daily in our service, and which
have an undoubted psychic affinity to ourselves, we must take care
to increase their pleasures and mitigate their sufferings. Faithful
dogs and noble horses, with which we have lived for years and which
we love, are rightly put to death and relieved from pain when they
fall hopelessly ill in old age. In the same way we have the right, if
not the duty, to put an end to the sufferings of our fellow-men. Some
severe and incurable disease makes life unbearable for them, and they
ask for redemption from evil. However, medical men hold very different
opinions on the matter, as I have found in conversation with them.
Many experienced physicians, who practise their profession in a spirit
of sympathy and without dogmatic prejudice, have no scruple about
cutting short the sufferings of the incurable by a dose of morphia or
cyanide of potassium when they desire it; very often this painless
end is a blessing both to the invalids and their families. However,
other physicians and most jurists are of opinion that this act of
sympathy is not right, or is even a crime; that it is the duty of the
physician to maintain the life of his patients as long as he can in all
circumstances. I should like to know why.
While I am dealing with this important and--for the medical
conscience--difficult question of social ethics, I may take the
opportunity to consider the general attitude of physicians to the
monistic philosophy. It is now half a century since I visited the
wards in the Julius hospital at Würtzburg as a medical student. It is
true that--happily for me and my patients!--I practised the profession
only for a short time after I had passed my examinations in 1857;
but the thorough acquaintance with the human organism, its anatomic
structure and physiological functions, which I then obtained has been
of incalculable service to me. I owe to it not only the solid empirical
foundation of the special study of my life, zoology, but also the
monistic tendency of my whole system. As the medical training in its
widest sense includes anthropology--and so should include psychology
also--its value for speculative philosophy cannot be exaggerated. The
scholastic metaphysicians who still regard the chairs of philosophy at
our universities as their monopoly would have avoided most of their
dualistic errors if they had had a thorough training in human anatomy,
physiology, ontogeny, and phylogeny. Even pathology, the science of
the diseased organism, is very instructive for the philosopher. The
psychologist especially acquires, by the study of mental disease and
the visiting of the asylum wards, a profound insight into the mental
life which no speculative philosophy could give him. There are few
experienced and thoughtful physicians who retain the conventional
belief in the immortality of the soul and God. What would the immortal
soul do on the other side of eternity when it is already utterly
ruined in this life, or was even born as an idiot? How can a just God
condemn the criminal to the fires of hell when he himself has tainted
the man with an hereditary bias, or has placed him in an environment
in which, seeing the absence of free-will, crime was a necessity for
him? And how can this all-loving God answer for the immeasurable sum of
want and misery, and pain and unhappiness, which he sees accumulated
before him every year in the lives of families and states, cities and
hospitals? It is no wonder that the old saying ran: _Ubi tres medici,
duo sunt athei_ (Of three doctors two are sure to be atheists). One
of my medical colleagues was an old, experienced, and sympathetic
physician who had travelled all over the world, and had then, as
director of a large hospital, been a close witness of the sufferings of
humanity. Religiously educated by pious parents, and endowed with keen
sensitiveness, he was, after long struggles, forced by his medical
studies to part with the faith of his boyhood--like myself, in his
twenty-first year. We were talking about the great mysteries of life
shortly before his death, and he said to me: "I have been unable to
reconcile belief in the immortality of the soul and the freedom of the
will with my psychological experiences, and I have been just as unable
to discover throughout the whole world a single trace of a moral order
or a beneficent providence. If it is true that an intelligent Deity
rules the world, he cannot be a God of love, but an all-powerful demon,
whose constant entertainment is an eternal and merciless play of being
and becoming, building up and destroying." However, we do still find
here and there informed and intelligent physicians who adhere to the
three central dogmas of metaphysics--a proof of the immense power of
dogmatic tradition and religious prejudice.
We must class as a traditional dogma the wide-spread belief that
man is bound under all circumstances to maintain and prolong life,
even when it has become utterly useless--a source of pain to the
incurable and of endless trouble to his friends. Hundreds of thousands
of incurables--lunatics, lepers, people with cancer, etc.--are
artificially kept alive in our modern communities, and their sufferings
are carefully prolonged, without the slightest profit to themselves or
the general body. We have a strong proof of this in the statistics of
lunacy and the growth of asylums and nerve-sanatoria. In Prussia alone
there were 51,048 lunatics cared for in the asylums (six thousand in
Berlin) in 1890; more than one-tenth of them were quite incurable (four
thousand of them suffering from paralysis). In France, in 1871, there
were 49,589 in the asylums (or 13.8 per thousand of the population),
and in 1888 there were 70,443 (or 18.2 per thousand); thus, in the
course of seventeen years, the absolute number of the unsound rose
nearly 30 per cent. (29.6), while the total population only increased
5.6 per cent. In our day the number of lunatics in civilized countries
is, on the average, five-sixths per thousand. If the total population
of Europe is put at three hundred and ninety to four hundred millions,
we have at least two million lunatics among them, and of these more
than two hundred thousand are incurable. What an enormous mass of
suffering these figures indicate for the invalids themselves, and what
a vast amount of trouble and sorrow for their families, what a huge
private and public expenditure! How much of this pain and expense could
be spared if people could make up their minds to free the incurable
from their indescribable torments by a dose of morphia! Naturally
this act of kindness should not be left to the discretion of an
individual physician, but be determined by a commission of competent
and conscientious medical men. So, in the case of other incurables
and great sufferers (from cancer, for instance), the "redemption from
evil" should only be accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid
poison when they have expressed a deliberate wish (to be afterwards
juridically proved) for this, and under the control of an authoritative
commission.
The ancient Spartans owed a good deal of their famous bravery, their
bodily strength and beauty, as well as their mental energy and
capacity, to the old custom of doing away with new-born children who
were born weakly or crippled. We find the same custom to-day among
many savage races. When I pointed out the advantages of this Spartan
selection for the improvement of the race in 1868 (chapter vii. of
the _History of Creation_) there was a storm of pious indignation in
the religious journals, as always happens when pure reason ventures
to oppose the current prejudices and traditional beliefs. But I ask:
What good does it do to humanity to maintain artificially and rear the
thousands of cripples, deaf-mutes, idiots, etc., who are born every
year with an hereditary burden of incurable disease? Is it not better
and more rational to cut off from the first this unavoidable misery
which their poor lives will bring to themselves and their families? It
is no use to reply that religion forbids it. Christianity also bids us
give up our life for our brethren, and to cast it from us when it hurts
us--that is to say, when it only causes useless pain to us and our
friends. The truth is, the opposition is only due to sentiment and the
power of conventional morality--that is to say, to the hereditary bias
which is clothed in early youth with the mantle of religion, however
irrational and superstitious be its foundation. Pious morality of this
sort is often really the deepest immorality. "Laws and rights creep on
like an eternal sickness;" this is equally true of the social customs
and morals on which laws and rights are founded. Sentiment should
never be allowed to usurp the place of reason in these weighty ethical
questions. As I pointed out in the first chapter of the _Riddle_,
sentiment is a very amiable, but a very dangerous, function of the
brain. It has no more to do with the attainment of the truth than what
is called revelation. That is well seen in Kant's dualism, for his
_mundus intelligibilis_ is essentially an outcome of his religious
sentimentality
VI
PLASM
Plasm is the universal living substance--Definition of protoplasm,
chemically and morphologically--Physical character--Viscous
condition--Chemical analysis--Colloid character of
albumin--Albuminoid molecules--Elementary structure of plasm--Work
of plasm--Protoplasm and metaplasm--Structures of metaplasm--Frothy
structure--Skeletal structure--Fibrous structure--Granular
structure--Molecular structure--Plasma molecules--Plastidules and
biogens--Micella and biophora--Caryoplasm and cytoplasm--Nuclear
matter--Chromatin and achromin--Nucleolus and centrosoma--Caryotheka
and caryolymph--Cellular matter--Plasma products--Internal plasma
products--External plasma products--Cell membranes--Intercellular
matter--Cuticular matter.
By plasm, in the widest sense of the word, we mean the living matter,
or all bodies that are found to constitute the material foundations
of the phenomena of life. It is usual to give this matter the name
of protoplasm; but this older and historically important designation
has suffered so many changes of meaning through the variety of its
applications that it is better now to use it only in the narrower
sense. Moreover, recent research on protoplasm has been greatly
developed, and several new names have been invented, which are formed
from the word "plasm" with a qualifying prefix. These are special
varieties of the general idea of plasm, or special modifications of the
general matter, such as metaplasm, archiplasm, and so on.
The botanist, Hugo Mohl, who first introduced the name "protoplasm"
in 1846, used it to designate a part of the contents of the ordinary
plant-cell--namely, the viscous matter that Schleiden called
"cell-mucus," which is found on the inner surface of the cell-wall,
and often forms a varying net-work or skeleton in the watery fluid in
the cell, and exhibits characteristic movements. Mohl gave the name of
"primordial skin" to this important wall-layer (the chief element of
the plant-cell), and called the material of it, as being chemically
different from the other parts of the cell, _protoplasm_--that is to
say, the first (_proton_) or earliest formation of the organism. It is
important to notice that Mohl, the author of the name, conceived it in
a purely chemical, not a morphological, sense, like Oscar Hertwig and
other recent cytologists. I intend to retain this early chemical idea
of protoplasm--or, briefly, plasm. It was also taken in this sense by
Max Schultze, who pointed out (in 1860) its extreme significance and
wide distribution in all living cells, and introduced an important
reform of the cell-theory which we will see later.
The mixing of the chemical and the morphological ideas of protoplasm
has been very mischievous in recent biology, and has led to great
confusion. It generally comes from a failure to formulate clearly the
difference between the two essential elements of the modern notion of
the cell--the anatomic distinction between the nucleus and the body
of the cell. The internal nucleus (or _caryon_) had the appearance of
a solid, definite, morphologically distinct constituent of the cell;
the outer and softer mass which we now call the cell-body (_celleus_
or _cytosoma_) seemed to be a formless and only chemically definable
protoplasm. It was only discovered at a later date that the chemical
composition of the nucleus is closely akin to that of the cell-body,
and that we may properly associate the _caryoplasm_ of the one with the
_cytoplasm_ of the other under the general heading of _plasm_. All the
other materials that we find in the living organism are products or
derivatives of the active plasm.
In view of the extraordinary significance which we must assign to the
plasm--as the universal vehicle of all the vital phenomena (or "the
physical basis of life," as Huxley said)--it is very important to
understand clearly all its properties, especially the chemical ones.
This is rendered somewhat difficult from the circumstance that the
plasm is, in most of the organic cells, closely bound up with other
substances--the various plasma products; it can rarely be isolated in
its purity, and can never be had pure in any quantity. Hence we are for
the most part dependent on the imperfect, and often ambiguous, results
of microscopic and microchemical research.
In every case where we have with great difficulty succeeded in
examining the plasm as far as possible and separating it from the
plasma-products, it has the appearance of a colorless, viscous
substance, the chief physical property of which is its peculiar
thickness and consistency. The physicist distinguishes three conditions
of inorganic matter--solid, fluid, and gaseous. Active living
protoplasm cannot strictly be described as either fluid or solid in the
physical sense. It presents an intermediate stage between the two which
is best described as viscous; it is best compared to a cold jelly or
solution of glue. Just as we find the latter substance in all stages
between the solid and the fluid, so we find in the case of protoplasm.
The cause of this softness is the quantity of water contained in the
living matter, which generally amounts to a half of its volume and
weight. The water is distributed between the plasma molecules, or the
ultimate particles of living matter, in much the same way as it is in
the crystals of salts, but with the important difference that it is
very variable in quantity in the plasm. On this depends the capacity
for absorption or imbibition in the plasm, and the mobility of its
molecules, which is very important for the performance of the vital
actions. However, this capacity of absorption has definite limits
in each variety of plasm; living plasm is not soluble in water, but
absolutely resists the penetration of any water beyond this limit.
The chemistry of living matter is the most important and interesting,
but at the same time the most difficult and obscure, part of the whole
of biological chemistry. In spite of the innumerable and careful
investigations which have been made of it by the ablest physiologists
and chemists in the second half of the nineteenth century, we are
still far from a satisfactory solution of this fundamental problem
of biology. This is due partly to the extraordinary difficulty of
isolating pure living plasm and subjecting it to chemical analysis,
and partly to the many errors and misunderstandings that have arisen
through one-sided treatment of the subject, and especially through
confusion of the chemical and morphological features of plasm. We can
thus understand the contradictory views that are still put forward by
distinguished chemists and physiologists, zoologists and botanists.
As I cannot deal here with the very extensive, elaborate, and
contradictory literature of the subject, I must be content to give a
brief summary of the conclusions I have reached by my reading and my
own studies of plasm (begun in 1859).
To begin with, we must clearly understand that protoplasm--in the most
general sense in which we here take it--is a _chemical_ substance, not
a "mixture of different substances," or a "mixture of a small quantity
of solid matter with a good deal of fluid." As Richard Neumeister
very well observes: "We seek the nature of protoplasm in the peculiar
processes which take place in its constituent matter. Protoplasm is
for us a chemical matter, so pronounced, in fact, that the highest
chemical actions that we know of are embodied in it." I must, from my
point of view, entirely reject Oscar Hertwig's conception of living
matter as a "mixture" of a number of chemical elements; because
chemistry applies this phrase to various gases and powdery substances
which are completely indifferent to each other--a property which we
certainly do not find in the constituents of protoplasm. When we speak
of the living matter or protoplasm, the general phrase does not imply
that the substance may not have a distinctive composition in each
particular case. And when we find many biologists still conceiving
protoplasm as a mixture of various substances, the error is generally
due to a confusion of the chemical idea with the morphological, and to
a belief that certain structural features of the plasm are primary,
whereas they are only secondary, products of the vital process itself
in the cell-body.
The older biologists who first introduced the name protoplasm and
studied it carefully recognized that this living matter belonged
to the albuminous (or proteid) group. The many characteristics
which distinguish these nitrogenous carbon-compounds from all
other chemical compounds--their behavior towards acids and bases,
their peculiar color-reaction towards certain salts, their
decomposition-products, etc.--are found in all the plasma-substances,
and in all the other albuminoids. This is quite in agreement with
the results of quantitative analysis. However differently the
various plasma-substances behave in detail, they always exhibit the
same general composition as the other albuminoids out of the five
"organogenetic elements"--namely, in point of weight, fifty-one to
fifty-four per cent. carbon, twenty-one to twenty-three per cent.
oxygen, fifteen to seventeen per cent. nitrogen, six to seven per
cent. hydrogen, and one to two per cent. sulphur. However, there is
a good deal of variety and complication in the way in which the atoms
of these five elements are combined in albumin and their molecules
are grouped. Hence the question of the chemical nature of the
plasma-substances compels us now to look for a moment at the larger
group of albuminoids to which they belong.
The carbon-compounds which we comprise under the chemical title of the
albumins or proteids are the most remarkable, but also, unfortunately,
the least known, of all bodies. The attempt to examine them closely
encounters extraordinary difficulties, greater than in any other group
of chemical compounds. Everybody is familiar with the appearance of
ordinary albumin, from the transparent viscous albumin that surrounds
the yolk in the hen's egg, and which becomes a white, opaque, and solid
mass when it is cooked. However, this special form of albumin, which we
can get so easily in any quantity from the eggs of birds and reptiles,
is only one of the innumerable kinds of albumin, or species of protein,
that are to be found in the bodies of the various animals and plants.
Chemists have hitherto tried in vain to master the chemical structure
of these obscure protein-compounds. They are only rarely to be found in
chemically pure form as crystals. As a rule, they are in the colloid
form, or uncrystallized jelly-like masses, which offer a much greater
resistance than crystals to the passage through a porous medium by
diosmosis (see p. 39). However, although we have not yet succeeded in
penetrating the molecular constitution of the albumins, the laborious
research of chemists has yielded some general results which are of
great importance for our purpose. We have, in the first place, a
general idea of their molecular constitution.
Molecules are the smallest homogeneous parts into which a body can be
divided without altering its chemical character. Hence the molecules of
every chemical compound are made up of two or more atoms of different
kinds. The greater the number of atoms in each compound, the higher
is its molecular weight. The space between the molecules and their
component atoms is filled with imponderable and highly elastic ether.
As even the largest molecules occupy only a very tiny space, and
remain far below the range of the most powerful microscope, all our
ideas of their composition depend on general physical theories and
special chemical hypotheses. Nevertheless, stereochemistry, the modern
science of the molecular structure of chemical compounds, is not only
a perfectly legitimate section of natural philosophy, but it yields
the most important conclusions as to the mutual attractions of the
elements and the invisible movements of the atoms in combining. It
further enables us to calculate approximately the relative size of the
molecules and the number of atoms that are grouped together in them.
However, the albuminoids present the greatest difficulty of all in this
calculation, and their structural features are still very obscure.
Nevertheless, science has reached certain general conclusions, which we
may formulate in the following propositions:
1. The molecule of albumin is unusually large, and therefore its
molecular weight is very high (higher than in most or all other
compounds).
2. The number of atoms composing it is very large (probably much more
than a thousand).
3. The disposition of the atoms and groups of atoms in the albuminous
molecule is very complicated, and at the same time very unstable--that
is to say, very changeable and easily altered.
These characters, which are ascribed to all albuminous bodies by
modern chemistry, hold good of all plasma-substances; and, in fact,
are true in a higher degree of these, as the metabolism of the living
matter causes a constant displacement of the atoms. This is caused,
according to the view of Franz Hofmeister and others, by the formation
of ferments or enzyma--in other words, by catalysators of a colloidal
structure. Verworn has, on physiological grounds, given the name of
biogens to these plasma-molecules.