Picture - Cosmic Polymath

HAECKEL'S BELIEF IN THE OMNIPOTENCE OF MATTER 197
and goals, destinations, or points of arrival ; the steps being not only separated from each other, but also arranged
in groups which can be individually treated as regards time and space. The ultimate result is substantially the
same, but the mode of arriving at that result is wholly different.
Of course, there is no necessity to divide or separate plants and animals into categories, but as one great plan
obviously runs through the whole of nature, and design is everywhere apparent, it follows that there must be an
orderly sequence with boundaries of a more or less rigid description. These boundaries make classification on a
broad basis possible, but the artificial classifications of the makers or rather the manufacturers of species are not
thereby endorsed or sanctioned. I find, for example, that hving, and even dead matter, lends itself to radiating
and concentric arrangements, and that it tends to split up longitudinally and transversely, and to produce fission
and segmentation as seen in the branches and stems of plants, and in the Umbs, vertebrae, &c., of animals. This
circumstance makes it possible to establish a classification outside all existing classifications, and of a more
primitive or fundamental kind. The classifications of botanists, zoologists, and Palseontologists may be very partial
and very inaccurate, but the inability adequately to grasp the situation does not seriously impair the great
argument for a First Cause and Design, and for the orderly arrangements which have for their object a series of
graduated types disposed in a well-marked ascending scale.
Haeckel thus states his case : ^ " Experience has never yet discovered for us a single immaterial substance,
a single force which is not dependent on matter, or a single form of energy which is not exerted by material movement,
whether it be of mass, or of ether, or of both. ... (1) The universe, or the cosmos, is eternal, infinite, and
illimitable. (2) Its substance, with its two attributes (matter and energy), fills infinite space, and is in eternal
motion. (3) This motion runs on through infinite time as an unbroken development, with a periodic change from
life to death, from evolution to devolution. (4) The innumerable bodies which are scattered about the space-
filhng ether all obey the same law of substance ; while the rotating masses slowly move towards their destruction
and dissolution in one part of space, others are springing into new life and development in other quarters of the
universe. (5) Our sun is one of these unnumbered perishable bodies, and our earth is one of the countless transitory
planets that encircle them. (6) Our earth has gone through a long process of cooling, before water, in hquid
form (the first condition of organic life), could settle thereon. (7) The ensuing biogenetic process, the slow development
and transformation of countless organic forms, must have taken many millions of years—considerably over
a hundred.^ (8) Among the different kinds of animals which arose in the later stages of the biogenetic process on
earth, the vertebrates have far outstripped all other competitors in the evolutionary race. (9) The most important
branch of the vertebrates, the mammals, were developed later (during the Triassic period) from the lower amphibia
and the reptilia. (10) The most perfect and most highly-developed branch of the class mammalia is the order
of primates, which first put in an appearance, by development from the lowest prochoriata, at the beginning of
the Tertiary period—at least three million years ago. (11) The youngest and most perfect twig of the branch
primates is man, who sprang from a series of man-like apes towards the end of the Tertiary period. (12) Conse-
quently, the so-caUed ' history of the world '—that is, the brief period of a few thousand years, which measures
the duration of civilisation—is an evanescently short episode in the long course of organic evolution, just as this,
in turn, is merely a small portion of the history of our planetary system ; and as our mother-earth is a mere speck
in the sunbeam in the ilUmitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable frame-
work of organic nature. All the different philosophical tendencies may, from the point of view of modern science,
be ranged in two antagonistic groups ; they represent either a dicalistic or a monistic interpretation of the cosmos.
The former is usually bound up with teleological and ideahstic dogmas, the latter with mechanical and realistic
theories. Duahsm, in the widest sense, breaks up the universe into two entirely distinct substances—the material
world and an immaterial God, Who is represented to be its creator, sustainer, and ruler. Monism, on the contrary
(likewise taken in its widest sense), recognises one sole substance in the universe, which is at once ' God and
Nature '
; body and spirit (or matter and energy) it holds to be inseparable. The extra-mundane God of duahsm
leads necessarily to Theism ; the intra-mundane God of the monist to Pantheism. . . . The
whole animal world
falls into two essentially different groups, the unicellular primitive animals (Protozoa) and the multicellular animals
with complex tissues (Metazoa). The entire organism of the protozoon (the rhizopods or the infusoria) remains
throughout life a single simple cell (or occasionally a loose colony of cells without the formation of tissue, a coenobium).
The organism of the metazoon, on the contrary, is only unicellular at the commencement, and is subsequently built
up of a number of cells which form tissues. The theory of a cell-soul is completely established by an accurate study
of the unicellular protozoa, the psychic phenomena of the protistse form, the bridge which unites the chemical
1 " The Riddle of the Universe," by Professor Ernst Haeckel, M.D., LL.D., D.Sc., &c. Watts & Co., Loudon, 1902.
2 It will be observed that in (6) and (7) Haeckel tacitly refers the existence of life on the earth to spontaneous generation, a wholly discredited
and impossible doctrine.