I. Haeckel and His Opponents

Now it is interesting to see how Liebmann's presuppositions lead him yet again to the assumption that what arises on the road of evolution was there already before its appearance. In the recently published second part of his Thoughts and Facts he maintains: “It is true that for us, to whom the world appears in the form of perception known as time, the seed is there before the plant; begetting and conception come before the animal that arises from them, and the development of the embryo into a full-grown creature is a process of time and drawn out in time to a certain length. In the timeless world-being, on the contrary, which neither becomes nor passes away, but is once and for all, maintaining itself unchangeably amid the stream of happenings, and for which no future, no past, but only an eternal present exists, this before and after, this earlier and later, falls away entirely. ... That which unrolls itself for us in the course of time as the slower or more rapidly passing succession of a series of phases of development, is in the omnipresent, permanent world-being a fixed law, neither coming into existence nor passing away.”