36. The Battles over Haeckel's “Welträtsel”

In the last few months, we have seen an event unfold that has brought to the surface of the literary struggle opposites deeply rooted in the intellectual life of our time in their harshest form. The man who, almost four decades ago, developed Darwin's momentous ideas on the origin of living beings into a comprehensive world view with rare courage of thought, has come to the fore with a book entitled "Die Welträtsel, Gemeinverständliche Studien über monistische Philosophie" (The Enigma of the World, Studies in Monistic Philosophy). In this book, Ernst Haeckel wanted to provide a "critical illumination" of the scientific knowledge of our time for other educated circles and, on the basis of his rich research work, answer the question: "What stage in the knowledge of truth have we really reached at the end of the nineteenth century? And what progress towards our infinitely distant goal have we really made in the course of it?"¹ A battle has now arisen over the explanations of the pioneer of Darwin's way of thinking, the most striking characteristic of which is that it is not conducted in a tone of calm, passionless debate, but in a bitter, stormy manner. It is not logical aberrations, not unproven assertions, not errors of knowledge alone that Ernst Haeckel has been accused of, but his scientific conscience, his moral sense, his capacity for scientific research in general. Darwin said of Haeckel's "Natural History of Creation": "Had this book appeared before my work (on the "Descent of Man") was written, I would probably never have finished it; I find almost all the conclusions I have arrived at confirmed by this researcher, whose knowledge is in many points much richer than mine" (introduction to the work "Descent of Man"). And now, as this researcher, once honored in this way by the great reformer of natural science, draws the sum of his life's work in a concluding work, we see him presented in the most exaggerated manner from many sides as the type of thinker that he should not be. For the direction in which the whole battle is being waged is characterized by the words used by one of his opponents, the widely respected philosopher Friedrich Paulsen, in the July issue of the "Preußische Jahrbücher". "It was not pleasure in the content, it was rather indignation that drove me ... indignation at the frivolity with which serious matters were dealt with here. The fact that it was a man of renown who was speaking here, a man whom thousands admire as a leader, who himself proudly claims to lead the way and show the way for the new century, increased the indignation, and it was not lessened but sharpened by the fact that I often saw thoughts worthy of me recurring here in all kinds of distortions... I read this book with burning shame, with shame at the state of general education and the philosophical education of our people. That such a book was possible, that it could be written, printed, bought, read, admired, believed by the people who possess a Kant, a Goethe, a Schopenhauer, is painful."

One wonders: what has the man done who has such accusations hurled in his face? Anyone who reads through the "Welträtsel" calmly and dispassionately, allowing their judgment to be determined solely by the scientific results of the last forty years, must say to themselves: Haeckel has, admittedly with unreserved sharpness, but appropriately presented the confession that he has formed from his tireless research work. He has made a clear distinction between the ideas of those who form their "faith" on the basis of the laws of nature and those who recognize other sources for this. He himself becomes passionate when it comes to disputing centuries-old prejudices against the view he holds, but his passion is that of a personality who clings wholeheartedly, with a deep and comfortable attachment, to what he believes to be correct. Everything that Haeckel presents in the "Welträtseln" is nothing other than the result of what he had done five years earlier in a strictly scientific manner in his "Systematic Phylogeny", in a work for which he received one of the most important scientific awards of the present day, the "Bressa Prize", which was to be awarded to the scholar by the Turin Academy of Sciences, who "during the quadrennium 1895-1898 made the most important and useful invention or published the most sophisticated work in the field of physical and experimental sciences, natural history, pure and applied mathematics, chemistry, physiology and pathology, without excluding geology, history, geography and statistics". In the wide range of all these intellectual fields, the Academy of Sciences in Turin was therefore unable to find a more "solid" work, or indeed an invention, for the years 1895 to 1898 that was more important and useful than Haeckel's "Phylogeny". - If Ernst Haeckel could content himself with presenting his insights, which encompass all the phenomena of life from the point of view of contemporary science, in a way that is recognized by the "strict science" of our time as an "exact" and "objective" method, one would probably limit oneself to making the verdict of the Turin Academy a general one and calling him the most important biologist after Darwin. But Haeckel's intellectual character does not tolerate half measures. Like so many of his naturalist contemporaries, he was unable to say: here scientific thinking - here religious faith. He demands strict harmony between the two. What his reason recognized as the fundamental nature of the world, his mind also wanted to worship religiously. For him, science has been transformed in the most natural way into a religious creed. He cannot admit that one can "believe" what is not thought in terms of science. That is why he wages a ruthless battle against beliefs that he sees as contradictory to science. He has no sympathy for those who, in Kant's sense, only want to assign a limited, this-worldly area to knowledge so that faith can establish itself all the more securely in the field of the unknowable.

Ernst Haeckel is a natural scientist, not a specialist philosopher. It cannot be denied that he sometimes does violence to philosophical concepts when he uses them. Of course, it is easy for a well-trained person well versed in the history of philosophy to prove Haeckel's errors with regard to the ideas of philosophers whom he agrees with - like Spinoza - or whom he opposes - like Kant. Paulsen then chides him for his misunderstandings with regard to Kant. Another philosophical thinker, Richard Hönigswald, has tried to prove in his book "Ernst Haeckel, the monistic philosopher" how little the terms "monism", "dualism", "substance" and so on used by Haeckel can pass the test of the usual philosophical disciplines. It is completely superfluous to get involved with such opposing arguments. All these gentlemen are right in a certain sense from their point of view. They have spun themselves into a certain conceptual web, and what Haeckel says is not correct. And he often does not exactly capture the meaning of philosophical ideas when he talks about them. But can it be the task of philosophical criticism at all to school a researcher who adheres strictly to observation from the point of view of traditional ideas? In all cases where Haeckel combats such ideas, he has a sure feeling that they are useless with regard to the real laws of nature. His attacks are not always logically correct. In such cases, however, the philosophers would have the task of understanding the naturalist in his sense, of showing how he uses the terms. Then they would sometimes find that one can say some things philosophically more sharply, more logically in the strict sense of the word than he can, but not that he is factually wrong.

One does not get a favorable idea of the official representatives of philosophy today when one sees how they misjudge their task. Haeckel calls his world view "monism". Would it not be a more worthy task to show in what sense Haeckel understands this word than to insist again and again that he assumes substance and force, i.e. a duality, and is therefore not a "monist"? Haeckel does not want any other methods of explanation for the organic world and for spiritual life than those which we apply to inorganic nature. He is of the opinion that with the same necessity with which hydrogen and oxygen combine under certain conditions to form water, carbon, nitrogen and other elements also become a living being under certain circumstances; and furthermore, that by the same kind of lawfulness by which the material world is governed, the "spirit" is also conditioned. If someone comes to him with a concept such as "raw, inanimate matter, which can never ever become spirit", Haeckel will reply: look at this matter, bring substances together under certain conditions in the retort and think logically, then you will no longer say: matter cannot become spirit, but your concept of "raw, inanimate matter" is precisely a false one, one that has no relation to reality. Unity in the whole explanation of the world: that is what Haeckel demands. And he calls this unity monistic. In view of the struggle we have witnessed in recent months, we can say that anyone who wants to understand the natural scientist must go to the natural scientist's country. It is not important that Paulsen, as he assures us, does not believe in any "special, immortal soul substance" or that "the world was once produced by a human-like individual being in a similar way to a product of human art". Rather, it is important to form such ideas about natural processes that the contradictory "special, immortal soul substance" and the "human-like being" really become dispensable within the explanation of nature.

And Haeckel presents such ideas in his book of confessions. He found himself compelled to settle accounts mercilessly with everything that belongs to other, contradictory ideas. Anyone who judges impartially must feel uplifted by the courageous consistency with which he carries out this reckoning in the chapter on "Science and Christianity". Perhaps one will not find everything in this section of the book tasteful, one will be able to admit that a different tone could have been found for many things, even that some things need not have been said at all in order to strengthen the monistic world view. But is there no longer any psychological sense in our contemporary philosophers? Is it so incomprehensible that one of the first proclaimers of a world view becomes too passionate in his explanations, that he is more than "objective", enthusiastic about a world of ideas that he has fought for step by step in tireless research and thinking? Anyone who does not find this incomprehensible will not be able to agree with Paulsen's outburst of anger at the "extremely embarrassing tendency (of Haeckel) to drag down what has been sacred for centuries into the dirt of ugly anecdotes and low jokes". However, such a person would be even less likely to have any sympathy for a writing such as that of the church historian Loofs in Halle: "Anti-Haeckel. A Replica and Supplements." Loofs takes a standpoint that has nothing whatsoever to do with Haeckel's world view, but which is as suitable as possible to divert attention from the main issue and, under the pretense that Haeckel had committed a serious injustice in a minor matter, to evoke the idea that he was a completely unscientific spirit that contradicted all true method. In his remarks on Christian church history, Haeckel relies on the work of an English thinker (Stewart Roß), which was published under the pseudonym Saladin and is available in German translation under the title "Jehovas gesammelte Werke, eine kritische Untersuchung des jüdisch-christlichen Religionsgebäudes auf Grund der Bibelforschung". Loofs presents the matter as if it were a desolate pamphlet against Christianity written by a complete ignoramus and dirty fellow, written to the exclusion of all knowledge of recent Bible research and church history. And what Loofs brings forward from the book and what he says about it is, however, only too apt to mislead those who do not take the Englishman's book to hand. They must believe that Haeckel, in his ignorance and recklessness, would really have gone so far as to refer to a diatribe of which Loofs assures us that it would be easier to "pick the fleas off a neglected dog than to collect the scientific follies contained in the book". But only those who do not know Saladın's work can make such a judgment. Anyone who reads only a little of it will soon find that he is dealing with an honest seeker of truth, even if he is not completely unimpeachable from the point of view of the opinions of church history that happen to be considered correct at the time, to whom everything else is closer than speaking in a frivolous manner about something that is sacred to people. Even if one might wish the book a more tasteful form of expression, one must nevertheless feel the deepest sympathy with the author, who wages a bold battle, which everywhere testifies to a deep mind, against ideas and institutions which he considers wrong, harmful and detrimental to human welfare. - One cannot be surprised enough that an opponent of Haeckel has been found who completely ignores the actual points of contention and who does not consider it inappropriate to attack a natural scientist in a way that would only make sense for a scholar who wanted to appear as a church historian.

At any rate, this whole battle has brought us full clarity about one thing. It has shown that our entire intellectual life is permeated far and wide with ideas that are incompatible with the honest and unreserved conclusions of the natural sciences. The lack of objectivity and passion with which the bearers of such ideas have fought this time is at the same time proof that their reasons have become weak. Even if it is to be expected that the future will correct Haeckel's thoughts in some respects, this correction will not come from those who are fighting him today. Even if he did not get it right everywhere, he has undoubtedly entered the path on which the education of the mind will continue to progress.