Picture - Cosmic Polymath

HAECKEL'S BELIEF IN THE OMNIPOTENCE OF MATTER 199
but no nerves or specific organs of sense. The nerve-soul (neuropsyche) ; the psychic life of all the higher animals
is conducted, as in man, by means of a more or less complicated ' psychic apparatus.' This apparatus is always
composed of three chief sections : the organs of sense are responsible for various sensations ; the muscles effect the
movements ; the nerves form the connection between the two by means of a special central organ, the brain or
ganglion. The gangUonic cells, or ' psychic-cells,' which compose the central nervous organ, are the most perfect
of all organic elements ; they not only conduct the commerce between the muscles and the organs of sense, but
they also effect the highest performances of the animal soul, the formation of ideas and thoughts, and especially
consciousness. The long ancestral history of our ' vertebrate-soul ' commences with the formation of the most
rudimentary spinal cord in the earliest acrania ; slowly and gradually, through a period of many millions of years,
it conducts to that marvellous structure of the human brain which seems to entitle the highest primate form to
quite an exceptional position in nature. No phenomenon of the life of the soul is so wonderful and so variously
interpreted as consciousness. Consciousness is a vital property of every cell. It is found in all organisms, animal
or vegetal, but not in lifeless bodies (such as crystals). This opinion is usually associated with the idea that all
organisms (as distinguished from inorganic substances) have souls : the three ideas—life, soul, and consciousness
are then taken to be co-extensive. Fechner has endeavoured to prove that the plant has a ' soul,' in the same
sense as an animal is said to have one ; and many credit the vegetal soul with a consciousness similar to that of
the animal soul. In truth, the remarkable stimulated movements of the leaves of the sensitive plants (the mimosa,
drosera, and dionaea), the automatic movements of other plants (the clover and wood-sorrel, and especially the
Hedysarum), the movements of the ' sleeping plants ' (particularly the papilioncwea), &c., are strikingly similar to
the movements of the lower animal forms : whoever
ascribes consciousness to the latter cannot refuse it to such
vegetal forms. The peculiar phenomenon of consciousness is not, as du Bois-Raymond and the dualistic school
would have us believe, a completely ' transcendental ' problem ; it is, as I (Haeckel) showed thirty-three years ago,
a physiological problem, and, as such, must be reduced to the phenomena of physics and chemistry. The con-
ception of the soul as a ' substance ' is far from clear to many psychologists ; sometimes it is regarded as an
' immaterial ' entity of a peculiar character in an abstract and idealistic sense, sometimes in a concrete and reahstic
sense, and sometimes as a confused tertium quid between the two. If we adhere to the monistic idea of substance,
we find energy and matter inseparably associated in it. We must distinguish in the ' substance of the soul !
characteristic psychic energy which is all we perceive (sensation, perception, volition, &c.), and the psychic matter,
which is the indispensable basis of its activity—that is, the living protoplasm. Thus, in the higher animals the
' ' matter of the soul is a part of the nervous system ; in the lower nerveless animals and plants it is a part of the
multicellular protoplasmic body ; and in the unicellular protists it is a part of their protoplasmic cell-body. The
supreme and aU-pervading law of nature, the true and only cosmological law, is, in my opinion (Haeckel), the law
of substance ; all other known laws of nature are subordinate to it. Under the name of ' law of substance ' we
embrace two supreme laws of different origin and age—the older is the chemical law of the ' conservation of matter,'
and the younger is the physical law of the ' conservation of energy.' Among the various modifications which the
fundamental idea of substance has undergone in modern physics, in association with the prevalent atomism, we
shall select only two of the most divergent theories for a brief discussion, the kinetic and the pyknotic. Both
theories agree that we have succeeded in reducing all the different forces of nature to one common original force ;
gravity and chemical action, electricity and magnetism, light and heat, &c., are only different manifestations,
forms, or dynamodes, of a single primitive force (prodynamis). This fundamental force is generally conceived as
a vibratory motion of the smallest particles of matter—a vibration of atoms. The atoms themselves, according
to the usual '
kinetic theory of substance,' are dead, separate particles of matter, which dance to and fro in empty
space and act at a distance. The real founder and most distinguished representative of the kinetic theory is
Newton, the famous discoverer of the law of gravitation. In his great work, the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia
Mathematica (1687), he showed that throughout the universe the same law of attraction controls the unvarying
constancy of gravitation ; the attraction of two particles being in direct proportion to their mass and in inverse
proportion to the square of their distance. This universal force of gravity is at work in the fall of an apple and
the tidal wave no less than in the course of the planets round the sun and the movements of all the heavenly bodies.
In fundamental opposition to the theory of vibration, or the kinetic theory of substance, we have the modern
theory of '
condensation,' or the pyknotic theory of substance. It is most ably estabUshed in the suggestive work of
J. C. Vogt on " The Nature of Electricity and Magnetism on the Basis of a Simplified Conception of Substance " (1891).
Vogt assumes the primitive force of the worid, the universal prodynamis, to be, not the vibration or oscillation of
particles in empty space, but the condensation of a simple primitive substance, which fills the infinity of space in
an unbroken continuity. Its sole inherent mechanical form of activity consists in a tendency to condensation
or contraction, which produces infinitesimal centres of condensation ; these may change their degree of thickness,
'
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