The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Darwinism and Worldview

[ 1 ] If the idea of expediency were to undergo a reform in the sense of a natural world view, the expedient formations of living nature would have to be explained in the same way as physicists and chemists explain inanimate processes. When a magnetic bar attracts iron filings to itself, no physicist thinks of a force working in the bar towards the goal, the purpose of the attraction. When hydrogen and oxygen combine to form water, the chemist does not interpret it as if there were something at work in the two substances that had the purpose of forming water in mind. An explanation of living beings governed by just such a natural sense must say: organisms become purposeful without anything in nature aiming at this purposefulness. Purposefulness arises without being predisposed as such anywhere. Charles Darwin gave such an explanation of purposefulness. He took the standpoint of recognizing that nothing in nature wants what is purposeful. Nature does not even consider whether what arises in it is purposeful or not. It therefore produces the inexpedient and the expedient indiscriminately.

[ 2 ] What is purposeful at all? But that which is so arranged that the external conditions of existence correspond to its needs, its living conditions. What is inexpedient, on the other hand, is that which is not. What will happen if, in the complete purposelessness of nature, all degrees of the more or less purposive arise from the most purposive to the least purposive? Every being will seek to shape its existence in accordance with the given conditions. The expedient succeeds in this without further ado, the more or less expedient only to a small degree. Now there is an additional factor: nature is not a frugal host with regard to the production of living beings. The number of germs is immense. This superabundance in the production of germs is only matched by a limited measure of the means of life. The result will be that those beings will have an easier time in their development which are more suitably formed for the appropriation of food. If a more purposeful being strives for the preservation of its existence alongside a less purposeful being, the more purposeful will outstrip the less purposeful. The latter must perish alongside the former. The efficient, i.e. the expedient, preserves itself, the inefficient, i.e. the inexpedient, does not. This is the "struggle for existence". It causes the expedient to survive, even if in nature the inexpedient arises indiscriminately alongside the expedient. Through a law that is so objective, so devoid of wisdom, as only a mathematical or mechanical law of nature can be, the course of natural development receives the tendency towards expediency, without this tendency being somehow inherent in nature.

[ 3 ] Darwin was led to this idea by the work of the national economist Malthus "On the Conditions and Consequences of the Increase of Population". In this work it is stated that an incessant competition takes place within human society because the population grows much faster than the amount of food. Darwin generalized this law established here for human history into a comprehensive law for the entire living world.

[ 4 ] Darwin now wanted to show how this struggle for existence becomes the creator of the manifold forms of living beings, how it overturns the old Linnaean principle that we "count as many species in the animal and plant kingdoms as there are different forms created in principle". Darwin's doubts about this principle became clear when he was on a trip to South America and Australia in the summer of 1831. He explains how these doubts took root in his mind: "When, during the voyage of the Beagle, I visited the Galapagos Archipelago, which lies in the Pacific Ocean about five hundred English miles from the South American coast, I found myself surrounded by peculiar species of birds, reptiles and snakes, which exist nowhere else in the world. But almost all of them had an American flavor. In the song of the mocking-bird, in the sharp cry of the vulture, in the large, lantern-like opuntia, I clearly perceived the proximity of America; and yet these islands were so many miles distant from the mainland, and differed widely from it in their geological constitution and climate. Even more surprising was the fact that most of the inhabitants of each island in this small archipelago were specifically different, though closely related to each other. I often wondered at the time how these peculiar animals and people had evolved. The simplest way seemed to be that the inhabitants of the various islands were descended from one another and had undergone modifications in the course of their descent, and that all the inhabitants of the archipelago were descended from those of the nearest mainland, namely America, from which colonization would naturally have originated. But for a long time it remained an inexplicable problem to me how the necessary degree of modification could have been achieved." The answer to this how lies in the natural conception of the development of the living. Just as the physicist places a substance in different ratios in order to get to know its properties, Darwin observed the phenomena that arise in living beings in different ratios after his return home. He carried out breeding experiments with pigeons, chickens, dogs, rabbits and cultivated plants. They showed how living forms continually change in the course of their reproduction. In certain circumstances, certain living beings change after a few generations in such a way that, if one compares the newly created forms with their ancestors, one could speak of two completely different species, each of which follows its own organizational plan. The breeder uses such variability of forms to develop cultivated organisms that correspond to certain intentions. He can breed a type of sheep with particularly fine wool if he only allows those individuals in his flock to reproduce that have the finest wool. Within the offspring, he again selects the individuals with the finest wool. The fineness of the wool then increases over the generations. After some time, a sheep species is obtained that is very far removed from its ancestors in terms of wool formation. The same is the case with other characteristics of living beings. Two things follow from this fact. First, that there is a tendency in nature to change living beings; and second, that a quality which has begun to change in a certain direction will increase in that direction if, in the reproduction of living beings, those individuals are kept away which do not yet possess this quality. The organic forms thus take on other characteristics in the course of time and remain in the direction of their transformation once it has begun. They transform and pass on transformed characteristics to their descendants.

[ 5 ] The natural conclusion from this observation is that transformation and inheritance are two driving principles in the development of living beings. If one now assumes that in a natural way in the world the beings change in such a way that the purposeful arises alongside the inexpedient and the more or less purposeful, then one must also presuppose a struggle of the manifold changed forms. This struggle brings about haphazardly what the breeder does systematically. Just as he excludes from reproduction those individuals who would bring into the development what he does not want, so the struggle for existence eliminates the inexpedient. Only what is expedient for development remains. Thus, like a mechanical law, the tendency to constant perfection is laid into it. Darwin, having recognized this and thus laid a firm foundation for the natural world view, was able to place the enthusiastic words at the end of his work "The Origin of Species", which ushered in a new epoch of thought: "From the struggle of nature, from hunger and death, therefore, the highest thing we are able to conceive is the production of the higher animals. There is something magnificent in this view of life, according to which it was originally created by the Creator with all its various powers from few forms, or perhaps only one; and that, while this planet moves in circles according to the definite laws of gravitation, from a simple beginning an endless number of the most beautiful and wonderful forms have been and are still being developed." At the same time it can be seen from this sentence that Darwin did not arrive at his view through any anti-religious sentiments, but solely from the conclusions that arose for him from the clearly speaking facts. It was certainly not the case with him that hostility to the needs of feeling determined him to a reasonable view of nature, for he tells us clearly in his book how the world of ideas he had gained spoke to his heart: "Very eminent writers seem to be entirely satisfied with the view that each of the species was created independently. In my opinion, it is more consistent with the laws impressed on matter by the Creator, so far as we know, that the generation and extinction of the past and present inhabitants of the earth, as well as the determinations of the birth and death of an individual, are dependent on secondary causes. If I regard all beings not as special creations, but as linear descendants of a few beings who lived long before the younger geological strata were deposited, they seem to me to be ennobled by this ... We can look forward with confidence to a future of great length. And since natural selection only works through and for the good of each being, all physical and mental talents will strive towards perfection."

[ 6 ] In a wealth of facts, Darwin showed how organisms grow and reproduce, how in the course of their further development they inherit characteristics once adopted, how new organs arise and change through use or disuse, how creatures adapt to their conditions of existence; and finally how the struggle for existence makes a natural selection (breeding selection), whereby diverse, ever more perfect forms arise.

[ 7 ] This seems to provide an explanation of purposeful beings that does not make it necessary to proceed differently in organic nature than in inorganic nature As long as such an explanation could not be given, one had to admit, if one wanted to be consistent, that wherever a purposeful being arises within nature, a power foreign to nature intervenes. This basically admitted a miracle for every such case.

[ 8 ] Those who, for decades before the publication of Darwin's work, had been striving for a natural view of the world and life, now felt in the most vivid way that a new direction of thought had been given. Such a feeling was expressed in 1872 by David Friedrich Strauß in his "Old and New Faith" with the words: "One sees that ... it must go where the flags flutter merrily in the wind. Yes, merry, in the sense of the purest, most sublime joy of the spirit. We philosophers and critical theologians had good reason when we decreed the miracle to be a thing of the past; our powerlessness died away without effect, because we did not know how to make it dispensable, did not know how to prove a force of nature that could replace it in those places where it had hitherto been considered most indispensable. Darwin has proved this natural force, this natural process; he has opened the door through which a happier posterity will throw out the miracle for ever. Everyone who knows what depends on wonder will praise him as one of the greatest benefactors of the human race."

[ 9 ] Through Darwin's idea of expediency, it is possible to really think of the concept of development in terms of natural law. The old theory of nesting, which assumes that everything that comes into being was already there in a hidden form (cf. page 286 of the first volume of this book), was thus robbed of its last hopes. Within a developmental process conceived in Darwin's sense, the perfect is in no way already contained in the imperfect. For the perfection of a higher being arises through processes that have absolutely nothing to do with the ancestors of this being. Consider: a certain developmental series has reached the marsupials. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, of a higher, more perfect form in the form of the marsupials. It contains only the ability to transform itself indiscriminately in the further course of its reproduction. Conditions now arise which are independent of any "inner" developmental system of the marsupial form, but which are such that, of all possible forms of transformation, the marsupials develop into the prosimians. The marsupial form did not contain the semi-ape form any more than the direction of a rolling billiard ball contains the path it takes after it has been pushed by a second ball.

[ 10 ] Those who were accustomed to an idealistic way of thinking did not find it easy to understand this reformed concept of development. The extremely perceptive and subtle mind of Friedrich Theodor Vischer, who emerged from Hegel's school, wrote in an essay as late as 1874: "Development is an unwinding from a germ, which progresses from trial to trial until the image that lay in the germ as a possibility has become real, but then, standing still, holds on to the form found as a permanent one. In fact, every concept begins to waver when we consider the types that have existed on our planet for so many millennia and, above all, when we consider our own human type to still be changeable. We can then follow our thoughts, indeed our laws of thought, our feelings, the ideal images of our imagination, which are nothing more than purifying reproductions of forms of the ones we know

[ 11 ] Nature: we can no longer trust any of these firm supports of our soul. Everything is called into question." And at another point in the same essay we read: "For example, it is still somewhat difficult for me to believe that one gets the eye from seeing, the ear from hearing. The immense weight that is placed on the choice of breed also does not make sense to me."

[ 12 ] If Vischer had been asked whether he imagined that in hydrogen and oxygen there was an image of water in embryo, so that it could develop out of them, he would undoubtedly have answered: No; neither in oxygen nor in hydrogen is there anything of water; the conditions for the formation of this substance are only present at the moment when hydrogen and oxygen come together under certain conditions. Does it need to be different if the interaction of the marsupials with the external conditions of existence gives rise to the prosimians? Why should the semi-apes already lie hidden in the marsupials as a possibility, as an image, so that they can develop out of them? What arises through development arises anew without having been present in any form beforehand.

[ 13 ] Prudent naturalists felt the weight of the new theory of purpose no less than thinkers like Strauss. Without doubt, Hermann Helmholtz was one of those who could be considered representatives of such level-headed natural scientists in the fifties and sixties. He emphasized how the wonderful and ever more richly unfolding purposefulness in the structure and actions of living beings in the face of growing science virtually challenged us to compare the processes of life with human actions. For these are the only series of phenomena that have a character similar to that of organic phenomena. Indeed, the purposeful arrangements in the world of organisms usually far exceed what human intelligence is capable of creating. It is therefore not surprising that the construction and activity of the living world has been attributed to human intelligence. "Before Darwin," says Helmholtz, "one therefore had to admit only two explanations of organic purposefulness, both of which, however, attributed it to the intervention of free intelligence in the course of natural phenomena. Either, in accordance with the vitalistic theory, the processes of life were regarded as continuously guided by a life-soul; or, for each living species, one resorted to an act of supernatural intelligence through which it was supposed to have come into being ... Darwin's theory contains an essentially new creative idea. It shows how a purposefulness of formation in organisms can arise through the blind operation of a natural law, even without any interference from intelligence. This is the law of the transmission of individual peculiarities from parents to offspring; a law that had long been known and recognized and only needed a certain delimitation." Helmholtz is now of the opinion that the principle of natural selection in the struggle for existence has provided such a delimitation of the law.

[ 14 ] And a researcher who was no less cautious than Helmholtz, J. Henle, stated in a lecture: "If the experiences of artificial breeding were to be applied to the Oken-Lamarck hypothesis, it would have to be shown how nature begins in order to take the steps by which the experimenter achieves his goal. This is the task which Darwin set himself and pursued with admirable zeal and ingenuity."

[ 15 ] The materialists were the most enthusiastic of all about Darwin's work. It had long been clear to them that sooner or later such a man would have to come along to shed philosophical light on the accumulated facts that were pressing for a guiding thought. In their opinion, after Darwin's discovery, the world view for which they had campaigned could not fail to triumph.

[ 16 ] Darwin approached his task as a natural scientist. He initially kept within the boundaries of such a scientist. The fact that his thoughts could shed light on the fundamental questions of worldview, on the relationship of man to nature, is only touched on in his fundamental book: "In the future I see an open field for far more important research. Psychology will certainly rely on ... the foundation: the necessity of acquiring every mental power and ability step by step. Much light may yet be shed on the origin of man and his history." According to Büchner, this question about the origin of man became a matter close to the materialists' hearts. In the lectures he gave in Offenbach in the winter of 1866/67, he said: "Must the theory of transformation also be applied to our own race, to man or to ourselves? Must we accept that the same principles or rules which have brought other organisms into being should also apply to our own origin and origin? Or do we - the masters of creation - make an exception?"

[ 17 ] Natural science clearly taught that humans could not make an exception. On the basis of precise anatomical studies, the English naturalist Huxley was able to state in 1863 in his "Testimonies to the Position of Man in Nature": "The critical comparison of all the organs and their modifications within the ape series leads us to this one and the same result, that the anatomical differences which separate man from the gorilla and chimpanzee are not so great as the differences which separate these apes from the lower species of monkeys." Faced with such facts, could one still doubt that natural development, which through growth and reproduction, heredity, variability of forms and the struggle for existence has brought about the series of organic beings up to the ape, has ultimately also produced man in exactly the same way?

[ 18 ] In the course of the century, the basic view penetrated ever deeper into the body of scientific knowledge, which Goethe was imbued with - albeit in his own way - and because of which he set about with all his energy to correct the opinion of his contemporaries that man lacked a so-called intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw. All animals should have this bone, but not humans, they thought. And this was seen as proof that man was anatomically different from animals, that he was conceived differently according to his blueprint. Goethe's natural way of thinking required him to carry out diligent anatomical studies to dispel this error. And when he had succeeded in his goal, he wrote to Herder, full of the feeling that he had done something that was highly conducive to the knowledge of nature: "I compared ... human and animal skulls, got to the bottom of it, and lo, there it is! Now I beg you, let nothing be known to you, for it must be kept secret. It should also make you very happy; for it is like the keystone to man, it is not missing, it is also there! But how!"

[ 19 ] Under the influence of such ideas, the great worldview question of man's relationship to himself and to the outside world became the task of showing by scientific means what the actual processes are that have led to the formation of man in the course of development. This changed the point of view from which one sought to explain natural phenomena. As long as one saw in every organism, and thus also in man, a purposeful construction plan realized, one had to take this purpose into consideration when explaining the beings. One had to take into account the fact that in the embryo the later organism announces itself in advance. Extended to the whole universe, this meant that the explanation of nature best fulfilled its task by showing how nature, at the earlier stages of its development, prepares itself to produce the later ones and, at the summit, man.

[ 20 ] The modern idea of development rejected all tendency of knowledge to see the later in the earlier. For them, the later was in no way contained in the earlier. On the other hand, it increasingly developed the principle of seeking the earlier in the later. This principle was an integral part of the principle of inheritance. One can almost speak of a reversal of the direction of the need for explanation. This reversal became important for the formation of ideas about the development of the individual organic organism from the egg to the mature state, for the so-called germ history (ontogeny). Instead of holding it against themselves that the later organs are prepared in the embryo, they began to compare the forms that the organism assumes in the course of its individual development from the egg to maturity with other forms of organisms. Lorenz Oken was already following such a trail. In the fourth volume of his "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte für alle Stände" (p. 468), he wrote: "Through my physiological investigations, I came to the conclusion a number of years ago that the developmental states of the chick in the egg are similar to the various classes of animals, so that at first it possesses, as it were, only the organs of the infusoria, then gradually acquires those of the polyps, jellyfish, mussels, snails, etc.. Conversely, I then had to regard the animal classes as stages of development which paralleled those of the shell. This view of nature demanded the most exact comparison of those organs which in each higher animal class are newly added to the others, and also of those which develop successively in the calyx during breeding. A perfect parallelism is of course not so easy to establish in a subject so difficult and so far from being sufficiently observed. But to prove that it really exists is indeed not difficult: this is shown most clearly by the metamorphosis of insects, which is nothing more than a development of the young that takes place outside the egg before our eyes, and so slowly that we can observe and examine each embryonic state with leisure." Oken compares the metamorphoses of insects with other animals and finds that the caterpillars bear the greatest resemblance to worms, the pupae to crabs. From such similarities, the ingenious thinker concludes: "There is therefore no doubt that there is a striking similarity here, which justifies the idea that the history of development in the egg is nothing other than a repetition of the history of the creation of the animal classes." It was in the nature of this witty man to suspect a great idea on the basis of a lucky aperçu. He did not even need the correspondingly correct facts for such a hunch. However, it is also in the nature of such intuited ideas that they do not make a great impression on the workers in the field of science. Oken flashes like a comet in the German worldview sky. He develops a wealth of light. From a rich store of ideas, he provides guiding concepts for the most diverse areas of fact. However, the way in which he established factual contexts usually had something violent about it. He worked towards the punch line. This was also the case with the above-mentioned law of the repetition of certain animal forms in the germ development of others.

[ 21 ] In contrast to Oken, Carl Ernst von Baer stuck to the purely factual as far as possible when he spoke of what led Oken to his idea in his "Developmental History of Animals" in 1828. "The embryos of mammals, birds, lizards and snakes, and probably also of tortoises, are in their early states uncommonly similar to each other both as a whole and in the development of the individual parts; so similar that the embryos can often only be distinguished by their size. I possess two small embryos in wine spirit, for which I have neglected to note the names; and I am now quite unable to determine the class to which they belong. They may be lizards, small birds or very young mammals. The head and trunk are so similar in these animals. However, the extremities are still missing in these embryos. Even if they were there, at the first stage of formation, they would teach us nothing, since the feet of lizards and mammals, the wings and feet of birds, and the hands and feet of humans develop from the same basic form." Such facts of germ history were bound to arouse the greatest interest among those thinkers who were inclined to Darwinism with their convictions. Darwin had proved the possibility that organic forms change, and that by way of transformation the species living today descend from a few, perhaps only from one original one. Now the manifold living beings show themselves to be so similar in their first stages of development that they can hardly or not at all be distinguished. In 1864, Fritz Müller made an organic connection between this fact of similarity and the idea of descent in his thoughtful essay "For Darwin". Müller is one of those high-minded personalities whose souls absolutely need a natural world view to breathe spiritually. He also felt satisfaction in his own actions alone, if only he could feel that his motives were as necessary as a natural force. In 1852 Müller moved to Brazil. For twelve years he worked as a high school teacher in Desterro (on the island of Santa Catharina not far from the coast of Brazil). In 1867 he had to give up this position too. The man of the new world view had to give way to the reaction that took hold of his school under the influence of the Jesuits. Ernst Haeckel described Fritz Müller's life and work in the "Jenaische Zeitschrift für Naturwissenschaft" (XXXI. Band N. F. XXIV, 1897). Darwin described him as the "prince of observers". And it was from a wealth of observations that the small but significant essay "Für Darwin" was written. It dealt with a single group of organic forms, the crustaceans, in the spirit that Fritz Müller believed must result from Darwin's view. He showed that the crustacean forms, which differ from each other in their mature states, are completely similar to each other at the time they hatch from the egg. If one assumes that, in the sense of Darwin's theory of descent, the crustacean forms have developed from an original crustacean form, and if one assumes that the similarity in the juvenile states of these animals is an inheritance from their common ancestral form, then one has united Darwin's ideas with Oken's ideas of the repetition of the creation history of the animal classes in the development of the individual animal form. Fritz Müller also accomplished this unification. He thereby brought the early forms of an animal class into a certain lawful connection with the later ones that formed from them through transformation. The fact that once an ancestral form of a creature living today looked like this and like that has caused this creature living today to look like this and like that at one time in its development. The developmental stages of organisms reveal their ancestors, and the nature of the latter determines the characters of the germ forms. In Fritz Müller's book, phylogeny and ontogeny are linked like cause and effect. This was a new move in the Darwinian school of thought. This is not weakened by the fact that Müller's cancer research was modified by Arnold Lang's later investigations.

[ 22 ] It had only been four years since the publication of Darwin's book "Origin of Species" when Müller's paper appeared in his defense and confirmation. He had used a single animal class to show how to work in the spirit of the new ideas. Seven years after the "Origin of Species", in 1866, a book appeared that was completely imbued with this new spirit, which used the ideas of Darwinism to illuminate the connection between the phenomena of life from a high vantage point: Ernst Haeckel's "General Morphology of Organisms". Every page of this book reveals the great aim of using the new ideas as the basis for a survey of the totality of natural phenomena. Haeckel sought a world view based on Darwinism.

[ 23 ] Haeckel endeavored to do his utmost for the new world view in two directions: he constantly enriched his knowledge of the facts that shed light on the connection between natural beings and natural forces; and he drew from these facts, with iron consistency, the ideas that would satisfy the human need for explanation. He is imbued with the unshakeable conviction that man can gain full satisfaction for all his soul's needs from these facts and these ideas. As it was clear to Goethe in his own way, so it is also clear to him in his own way that nature "works according to eternal, necessary, divine laws in such a way that the Deity himself could not change it". And because this is clear to him, he worships his deity in the eternal and necessary laws of nature and in the substances on which these laws operate. Just as the harmony of the laws of nature, which in themselves are connected with necessity, satisfies reason in his view, it also offers the feeling heart, the ethically and religiously inclined mind, what it thirsts for. In the stone that is drawn to the earth and falls towards it, the same divine is expressed as in the plant blossom and in the human spirit that dramatically shapes "William Tell".

[ 24 ] How erroneous it is to believe that the feeling for the wonderful beauties of nature is destroyed by a rational penetration into the workings of nature, by research into its laws, is shown so vividly by the work of Ernst Haeckel. The rational explanation of nature has been denied the ability to satisfy the needs of the mind. It may be asserted that wherever a person's emotional world is impaired by the knowledge of nature, this is not due to this knowledge, but to the person whose feelings are moving in the wrong direction. Anyone who follows the research paths of an observer of nature, such as Haeckel, with an open mind will also feel his heart beat faster with every step in the knowledge of nature. Anatomical dissection and microscopic examination will not destroy any natural beauty, but will reveal countless new ones. It is undoubted that in our time there is a struggle between reason and imagination, between reflection and intuition. Ellen Key, the intellectual essayist, is absolutely right when she sees in this struggle one of the most important phenomena of our time. (Cf. Ellen Key: Essays. Berlin, 5th Fischers Verlag, 1899.) Whoever, like Ernst Haeckel, digs deep down into the shaft of facts and boldly climbs up to the peaks of human knowledge with the thoughts that arise from these facts, can only find in the explanation of nature the reconciling power "between the two equally strong racers, reflection and intuition, which mutually bring each other to their knees". (Ellen Key, ibid.) Almost simultaneously with the publication in which Haeckel sets out with unreserved honesty his world view flowing from his knowledge of nature, with the appearance in 1899 of his "Welträtsel", he began to publish a work, "Kunstformen der Natur", in which he gives reproductions of the inexhaustible abundance of the wonderful forms that nature produces in its bosom, and which in beauty and diversity "far surpass all forms of art created by man". The same man who guides our intellect into the laws of nature directs our imagination to the beauty of nature.

[ 25 ] The need to bring the great questions of worldview into direct contact with the individual scientific investigations led Haeckel to one of those facts that Goethe says characterize concise points at which nature voluntarily gives us the basic ideas for their explanation. This fact presented itself to Haeckel when he investigated the extent to which the old Oken idea, which Fritz Müller applied to crustaceans, could be made fruitful for the whole animal kingdom. In all animals, with the exception of protists, which consist of only one cell throughout their lives, a cup-shaped or jug-shaped body, the so-called cup-germ or gastrula, is formed from the egg cell with which the creature begins its germ development. This cup-shaped germ is an animal form that all animals, from sponges to humans, assume in their first stage of development. This form has only skin, mouth and stomach. Now there are lower plant animals that have only these organs throughout their lives, which are therefore similar to the goblet germ. Haeckel interpreted this fact in terms of the theory of development. The gastrula form is an heirloom that animals have inherited from their common ancestor. Probably millions of years ago, there was an extinct animal species, the gastraea, which was built similarly to the lower plant animals still living today: the spongia, polyps, etc. From this animal species, everything developed. From this animal species evolved all the diverse forms that live today among polyps, sponges and humans. All these animals repeat their ancestral form in the course of their germinal history.

[ 26 ] An idea of immense significance was thus gained. The path from the simple to the composite, to perfection in the world of organisms was mapped out. A simple animal form develops under certain circumstances. One or more individuals of this form transform into another form according to the living conditions in which they find themselves. What is created through transformation is passed on to descendants. Two forms already exist. The old one, which has remained at the first stage, and a new one. Both forms can continue to develop in different directions and to different degrees of perfection. After long periods of time, an abundance of species arises through the inheritance of the forms that have developed and through new formations through adaptation to the living conditions.

[ 27 ] So, for Haeckel, what happens today in the world of organisms is connected with what happened in primeval times. If we want to explain any organ in an animal of our present day, we look back to the ancestors who developed this organ under the conditions in which they lived. What arose from natural causes in earlier times has been passed on to the present day. The history of the tribe clarifies the development of the individual. The causes of individual development (ontogenesis) thus lie in the development of the phylum (phylogenesis). Haeckel expresses this fact in his basic biogenetic laws with the words, the short ontogenesis or the development of the individual is a rapid and contracted repetition, a compressed recapitulation of the long phylogenesis or development of the species.

[ 28 ] Thus, all explanation in the sense of special purposes, all teleology in the old sense, is removed from the realm of the organic. One no longer looks for the purpose of an organ, one looks for the causes from which it has developed; a form does not point to the goal towards which it strives, but to the origin from which it has emerged. The method of explaining the organic has become the same as that of the inorganic. Water is not sought as a goal in oxygen, nor is man sought as a purpose in creation. One searches for the origin, for the actual causes of beings. The dualistic way of looking at things, which declares that the inorganic and the organic must be explained according to two different principles, is transformed into a monistic way of thinking, into monism, which has only one unified way of explaining the whole of nature.

[ 29 ] Haeckel points out with significant words that through his discovery the path has been found on which all dualism in the sense meant above must be overcome. "Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis. With this one sentence our fundamental monistic conception of organic development is clearly indicated, and the truth of the theory of gastraea depends primarily on the truth of this principle... . For and against this principle every naturalist will have to decide in the future who is not content with the mere admiration of strange phenomena in biogeny, but strives to understand their meaning. This sentence also describes the unbridgeable gap that separates the older teleological and dualistic morphology from the newer mechanical and monistic morphology. If the physiological functions of heredity and adaptation are shown to be the sole causes of the formation of organic form, then at the same time every kind of teleology, dualistic and metaphysical approach is removed from the field of biogeny; the sharp contrast between the guiding principles is thus clearly indicated. Either there is a direct and causal connection between ontogeny and phylogeny or there is not. Either ontogeny is a compressed extract of phylogeny or it is not. Between these two assumptions there is no third! Either epigenesis and descent - or preformation and creation." (Cf. also Volume 1, p.286 ff. of this book.) Haeckel is a philosophical thinker. That is why, soon after he had absorbed Darwin's view, he energetically advocated the important conclusion that results from this view for the origin of man. He could not content himself with shyly pointing to this "question of all questions" like Darwin. Man is anatomically and physiologically no different from the higher animals, and consequently the same origin must be ascribed to him as to them. With great boldness, he immediately advocated this opinion and all the consequences that follow from it in terms of worldview. It was not doubtful to him that henceforth the highest expressions of man's life, the acts of his spirit, were to be considered from the same point of view as the activities of the simplest living beings. Observation of the lowest animals, the primitive animals, infusoria and rhizopods, taught him that these organisms also have a soul. In their movements, in the hints of sensations that they reveal, he recognized expressions of life that only needed to be enhanced and perfected in order to become the complicated acts of reason and will of man.

[ 30 ] What steps does nature take to evolve from the gastraea, the primordial intestinal animal that lived millions of years ago, to man? This was the comprehensive question that Haeckel set himself. He gave the answer in his "Anthropogeny", published in 1874. The first part deals with the germinal history of man and the second with the phylogeny. From point to point it was shown how the causes of the former lie in the latter. The position of man in nature was thus determined according to the principles of the theory of development. To works such as Haeckel's "Anthropogeny" one may apply the saying that the great anatomist Karl Gegenbaur pronounced in his "Comparative Anatomy" (2nd edition, 1870) that Darwinism as a theory receives back from science in abundance what it has given it in method: Clarity and certainty. For Haeckel, the Darwinian method also gave science the theory of the origin of man.

[ 31 ] The full extent of what was thus achieved can only be appreciated if one looks at the opposition with which Haeckel's comprehensive application of Darwinian principles was received by the supporters of idealistic world views. There is no need to look at those who turned against the "monkey theory" in blind faith in a traditional opinion, or at those who believe that all finer, higher morality is endangered if people no longer believe that they have a "purer, higher origin". One can also turn to those who are quite inclined to accept new truths. But even they found it difficult to find their way into this new truth. They asked themselves:

[ 32 ] Are we not denying our rational thinking if we no longer seek its origin in a general world reason above us, but in the animal kingdom below us? Such spirits pointed out with great zeal the points at which Haeckel's view still seemed to be let down by the facts. And these spirits have powerful allies in a number of natural scientists who, out of a strange bias, use their knowledge of the facts to continually emphasize where experience is not yet sufficient to draw Haeckel's conclusions. The typical representative and at the same time the most impressive representative of this natural scientist's point of view is Rudolf Virchow. The contrast between Haeckel and Virchow can be characterized as follows: Haeckel trusts in the inner consistency of nature, which Goethe believes comforts us over the inconsistency of human beings, and says to himself: if a principle of nature has proved to be correct for certain cases and we lack the experience to prove its correctness in other cases, there is no reason to put fetters on the progress of our knowledge; what experience denies us today can be brought to us tomorrow. Virchow is of a different opinion. He wants a comprehensive principle to gain as little ground as possible. He seems to believe that life cannot be made sour enough for such a principle. The contrast between the two minds came to a head at the fiftieth meeting of German naturalists and physicians in September 1877. Haeckel gave a lecture on "Today's development in relation to science as a whole."

[ 33 ] In 1894, Virchow felt compelled to say: "The ape theory was arrived at by speculation; one could just as easily have arrived at an elephant or a shaft theory." Virchow demands incontrovertible evidence for this view. However, as soon as something appears that is a link in the chain of evidence, Virchow seeks to invalidate its value in every possible way.

[ 34 ] The bone remains found by Eugen Dubois in Java in 1894 form such a link in the chain of evidence. They consist of a skullcap, a femur and some teeth. An interesting discussion arose about this find at the Leyden Zoological Congress. Out of twelve zoologists, three were of the opinion that the bone remains were from an ape, three that they were from a human; six, however, were of the opinion that we were dealing with a transitional form between humans and apes. Dubois showed in a lucid manner the relationship between the creature whose remains we had before us and the present-day apes on the one hand and the present-day humans on the other. The scientific theory of development must lay special claim to such intermediate forms. They fill in the gaps that exist between the numerous forms of organisms. Each such intermediate form provides new evidence for the relationship of all living things. Virchow opposed the view that the bone remains originated from such an intermediate form. At first he declared that the skull came from an ape, the thigh from a human. However, expert palaeontologists, after carefully examining the finds, were adamant that the remains belonged together. Virchow sought to support his view that the thigh could only have come from a human by claiming that a bone growth on it proved that it had been affected by a disease that could only have been cured by careful human care. The paleontologist Marsch argued that similar bone growths also occur in wild apes. Another of Virchow's assertions, that the deep constriction between the upper edge of the eye sockets and the lower skull roof of the supposed intermediate creature spoke for its ape nature, was contradicted by a remark by the naturalist Nehring that the same formation was found on a human skull from Santos in Brazil. Virchow's objections arose from the same attitude that led him to see pathological, abnormal formations in the famous skulls of Neandertal, Spy, etc., while Haeckel's fellow scientists considered them to be intermediate forms between ape and man.

[ 35 ] Haeckel did not allow any objections to rob him of his confidence in his way of thinking. He constantly treated science from the points of view he had gained, and he influenced the public consciousness by popularizing his view of nature. In his "Systematische Phylogenie, Entwurf eines natürlichen Systems der Organismen auf Grund der Stammesgeschichte" (1894-1896), he sought to present the natural relationships of organisms in a strictly scientific manner. In his "Natural History of Creation", which went through eleven editions between 1868 and 1908, he provided a generally understandable discussion of his views. In 1899, in his generally comprehensible studies on monistic philosophy "Welträtsel", he provided an overview of his natural philosophical ideas, which unreservedly set out the consequences of his basic ideas from all sides. In between all these works, he published studies on the most diverse special research, always taking account of philosophical principles and detailed scientific knowledge in the same way.

[ 36 ] The light that emanates from the monistic world view is, according to Haeckel's conviction, that which "dispels the heavy clouds of ignorance and superstition which have hitherto spread impenetrable darkness over the most important of all problems of knowledge, over the question of the origin of man, of his true nature and of his position in nature". This is how he expressed himself in the speech he gave on August 26, 1898 at the fourth international zoological congress in Cambridge "On our present knowledge of the origin of man". The extent to which his world view forges a bond between religion and science was vividly explained by Haeckel in his 1892 publication "Monism as a bond between religion and science. Confession of faith of a natural scientist".

[ 37 ] If one compares Haeckel with Hegel, the difference in worldview interests in the two halves of the nineteenth century emerges in sharp outline. Hegel lives entirely in the idea and takes only as much from the world of scientific facts as he needs to illustrate his ideal world view. Haeckel is rooted with all the fibers of his being in the world of facts and draws from it only the sum of ideas to which it necessarily urges him. Hegel always endeavors to show how all beings work towards ultimately reaching the summit of their becoming in the human spirit; Haeckel always endeavors to show how the most complicated human activities point back to the simplest origins of existence. Hegel explains nature from spirit; Haeckel derives spirit from nature. We can therefore speak of a reversal of the direction of thought in the course of the century. Within German intellectual life, Strauss, Feuerbach and others initiated this reversal; in materialism the new direction found a provisional, extreme expression, in Haeckel's world of thought a strictly methodical-scientific one. For that is the significant thing about Haeckel, that his entire research activity is imbued with a philosophical spirit. He certainly does not work towards results that are set up as goals of world view or philosophical thinking for any motives; but his method is philosophical. With him, science appears directly with the character of world view. The whole nature of his view of things has determined him to be a confessor of the most decided monism. He views spirit and nature with equal love. That is why he could still find the spirit in the simplest living beings. Yes, he goes even further. He searches for traces of the spirit in the inorganic mass particles. "Every atom" - he says - "possesses an inherent sum of force and is in this sense animated. Without the assumption of an atomic soul, the most ordinary and most general phenomena of chemistry are inexplicable. Pleasure and displeasure, desire and aversion, attraction and repulsion must be common to all mass atoms; for the movements of the atoms, which must take place in the formation and dissolution of every chemical compound, can only be explained if we attribute to them sensation and will, and it is on this alone that the generally accepted chemical doctrine of elective affinity is fundamentally based." And just as he traces the spirit down to the atom, so he traces the purely material-mechanical events up to the most sublime spiritual achievements. "The spirit and soul of man are also nothing other than forces that are inseparably bound to the material substrate of our body. Just as the power of movement of our flesh is bound to the form elements of the muscles, so the thinking power of our spirit is bound to the form elements of the brain. Our mental powers are functions of these body parts, just as every power is the function of a material body."

[ 38 ] But one must not confuse this way of thinking with that which dreams souls into natural beings in an unclear mystical way and allows them to be more or less similar to human beings. Haeckel is a fierce opponent of the world view that transfers human characteristics and activities to the outside world. He repeatedly expressed his condemnation of the humanization of nature, of anthropomorphism, with a clarity that could not be misunderstood. When he ascribes a soul to the inorganic mass or the simplest organisms, he means nothing more than the sum of the expressions of force that we observe in them. He adheres strictly to the facts. Sensation and will of the atom are not mystical soul forces for him, but are exhausted in what we perceive as attraction and repulsion. He does not mean to say that attraction and repulsion are actually sensation and will, but that attraction and repulsion are at the lowest level what sensation and will are at a higher level. Development is not a mere unfolding of the higher levels of the spiritual from the lower, in which they already lie hidden, but a real ascent to new formations (cf. above p. 403 ff.), an increase from attraction and repulsion to sensation and will. This basic view of Haeckel's agrees in a certain sense with that of Goethe, who expresses himself on the subject with the words: The fulfillment of his view of nature had become his through the recognition of the "two great driving wheels of all nature", polarity and increase, the former "belonging to matter, insofar as we think of it materially, the latter to it, insofar as we think of it spiritually; the former is in perpetual attraction and repulsion, the latter in perpetual ascent. But because matter can never exist and be effective without spirit, and spirit can never exist and be effective without matter, matter is also able to increase, just as spirit does not allow itself to be attracted and repelled."

[ 39 ] The adherent of such a worldview is content to deduce the things and processes that actually exist in the world. The idealistic world-views require entities for the derivation of a thing or process that are not found within the realm of the actual. Haeckel derives the form of the beaker germ, which appears in the course of animal development, from an organism that actually once existed. An idealist searches for ideal forces under whose influence the developing germ becomes a gastrula. Haeckel's monism draws everything it needs to explain the real world from this real world. He looks around in the realm of the real in order to recognize how things and processes explain each other. His theories, like those of the idealist, are not there for him to search for a higher level to the real, an ideal content that explains the real, but to make the connection of the real itself comprehensible to him. Fichte, the idealist, asked about the purpose of man. By this he meant something that is not exhausted in the forms of the real, the actual; he meant something that reason adds to the actually given existence; something that illuminates the real existence of man with a higher light. Haeckel, the monistic observer of the world, asks about the origin of man, and by this he means the real origin, the lower beings from which man has developed through actual processes.

[ 40 ] It is significant how Haeckel justifies the ensouling of the lower beings. An idealist would refer to rational conclusions. He would come up with the necessities of thought. Haeckel refers to what he has seen. "Every natural scientist who, like me, has observed the life activity of unicellular protists for many years is positively convinced that they also possess a soul; this cellular soul also consists of a sum of sensations, ideas and volitional activities; the sensations, thoughts and volitions of our human souls are only gradually different." The idealist attributes spirit to matter because he cannot imagine that spirit can arise from spiritless matter. He believes that spirit must be denied if it is not allowed to exist before it is there, i.e. in all those forms of existence where there is not yet an organ or a brain for it. For the monist, there is no such conceptual process. He does not speak of an existence that does not present itself as such externally. He does not assign two kinds of qualities to things: those that are real in them and express themselves in them, and those that are secretly in them in order to express themselves only at a higher level to which things develop. For him, what he observes is nothing more. And if what is observed develops further and increases in the course of its development, the later forms are only present at the moment when they really show themselves.

[ 41 ] The objections raised by the intellectual Bartholomew of Carneri, who, on the other hand, made an immortal contribution to the development of an ethics of this world view, show how easily Haeckel's monism can be misunderstood in this direction. In his work "Empfindung und Bewußtsein. Monistische Bedenken" (1893), he argues that the sentence: "No spirit without matter, but also no matter without spirit" would entitle us to extend the question to the plant, even to the next best boulder, and to attribute spirit to it as well. But there is no doubt that this would create confusion. It cannot be overlooked that consciousness arises only through the activity of the cells of the gray cortex. "The conviction that there is no spirit without matter, that is, that all spiritual activity is bound to a material activity, with the end of which it also reaches its end, is based on experience, while nothing in experience suggests that spirit is connected with matter at all." Those who describe matter, which betrays no spirit, are like those who attribute the ability to tell time not to the mechanism of the clock, but to the very metal of which it is made.

[ 42 ] Haeckel's view, correctly understood, is not affected by Carneri's concerns. It is protected from this by the fact that it adheres strictly to observation. In his "Welträtseln" Haeckel says: "I myself have never advocated the hypothesis of atomic consciousness; on the contrary, I have expressly emphasized that I imagine the elementary psychic activities of sensation and will, which can be ascribed to atoms, to be unconscious." What Haeckel wants is nothing other than that no leap should be made in the explanation of natural phenomena, that the complicated way in which spirit appears through the brain should be traced back to the simplest way in which mass attracts and repels. Haeckel regards the discovery of the organs of thought by Paul Flechsig as one of the most important findings of modern science. He emphasized that there are four areas for the central sensory organs in the grey cortical zone of the brain mantle, four "inner sensory spheres", the body feeling sphere, the olfactory sphere, the visual sphere and the auditory sphere. Between these four sensory foci lie the thinking foci, the "real organs of spiritual life"; they "are the highest tools of the soul's activity, which mediate thinking and consciousness ... These four foci of thought, distinguished from the intermediate sensory foci by a peculiar and highly intricate nervous structure, are the true organs of thought, the only organs of our consciousness. In recent times Flechsig has shown that in one part of these organs there are still found in man particularly intricate structures which are lacking in other mammals and which explain the superiority of human consciousness." (Welträtsel, 5. 212 f.)

[ 43 ] These explanations show clearly enough that Haeckel, unlike the idealistic world-explainers, is not interested in placing the spirit in the lower levels of material existence in order to find it again in the higher ones, but rather in following the simple phenomena up to the complicated ones by means of observation in order to show how the activity of matter, which expresses itself in the primitive field as attraction and repulsion, increases to the higher spiritual processes.

[ 44 ] Haeckel is not looking for a general spiritual principle because he is not satisfied with the general lawfulness of natural and spiritual phenomena, but he is completely satisfied with this general lawfulness for his needs. The lawfulness that expresses itself in the spiritual activities is of the same kind as that which appears in the attraction and repulsion of the mass particles. When he calls the atoms animated, this has a completely different meaning than when a proponent of an idealistic world view does so. The latter starts from the spirit, and takes the ideas he has gained from the contemplation of the spirit down into the simple operations of the atoms when he thinks them animated. He thus explains the phenomena of nature from the essences which he himself has first placed in them. Haeckel starts from the observation of the simplest natural phenomena and follows them up to the spiritual phenomena. He thus explains mental phenomena from laws that he has observed in the simplest natural phenomena.

[ 45 ] Haeckel's world view can arise in a soul whose observation extends only to natural processes and natural beings. Such a soul will want to understand the connection within these processes and beings. Its ideal can become to see through what the processes and beings say about their becoming and interaction themselves and to strictly reject everything that is added to an explanation of the events and workings from outside. Such an ideal deals with the whole of nature in the same way as one deals with the explanation of the mechanism of a clock. One does not need to know anything about the watchmaker, about his skill and about the thoughts he had when making the watch. You can understand the movement of the watch if you can see through the mechanical laws of the interaction of the parts. Within certain limits, such an understanding is all that is necessary to explain the movement of the watch. Indeed, one must be aware that the clock itself - as such - cannot be explained if one allows for any other explanation. If, for example, in addition to the mechanical forces and laws, one were to invent special spiritual forces that would move the hands of the clock forward in accordance with the course of the sun. Haeckel sees such forces invented in addition to natural processes as everything that is similar to a special life force or a power that works towards a "purposefulness" in beings. He does not want to think anything about natural processes other than what they themselves express for observation. His thought structure is to be that which is derived from nature. For the consideration of the development of the world view, this structure of thought presents itself to a certain extent as a counter-gift from the side of natural science to the Hegelian world view, which in its thought painting wants nothing to be drawn from nature, but everything from the soul. If Hegel's world view said: The self-conscious ego finds itself by having the pure experience of thought within itself, - then Haeckel's view of nature could reply: This experience of thought is a result of the processes of nature, is their highest product. And if the Hegelian world view did not feel satisfied by such a reply, the Haeckelian view of nature could demand: Show me such inner thought-experiences that do not appear like a mirror of what happens outside thought. A philosophy would then have to show how thought can come to life in the soul and really give rise to a world that is not merely the mental reflection of the external world. Thought that is merely thought cannot oppose Haeckel's view of nature. By way of comparison, the latter can claim that nothing can be found in the watch that indicates the person etc. of the watchmaker. Haeckel's view of nature is on the way to showing how, as long as one is merely confronted with nature, one can say nothing about it other than what nature itself says. In this respect, this view of nature makes a significant appearance in the course of the development of the world view. It proves that philosophy must create a field for itself which, beyond the thoughts gained from nature, lies in the self-creative realm of the life of thought. It must take the step beyond Hegel indicated in a previous section. It cannot exist in a mere procedure that remains in the same field in which natural science stands. Haeckel probably has not the slightest need to turn his attention to such a step in philosophy. His view of the world allows thought to come alive in the soul, but only to the extent that its life is stimulated by the observation of natural processes. What thought can create as a world view when it comes to life in the soul without this stimulation, that is what a higher world view would have to add to Haeckel's view of nature. One must also go beyond what the watch itself says, for example, if one wants to know the shape of the watchmaker's face. One therefore has no right to claim that Haeckel's view of nature should speak differently about nature itself than Haeckel speaks where he presents what he has positively observed about natural processes and natural beings.