Daniel Gasman - Ferris State University

were often interwoven with the aesthetic tendencies that one typically associates with anti-positivistic
Symbolism, as well as with the artistic and literary expressions of the avant-garde modernist rebellion
against scientific positivism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 40
Haeckelian Monism revitalized for the modern world the mystical Monism of the pre-Socratics, the
hermeticism of Bruno, the pantheism of Spinoza, the romanticism of Goethe, and the idealism of the
German Naturphilosophen. It was a movement that was identifiable, not so much with the traditions of
conventional positivism, materialism, and rationalism that were reflected in the superficial materialistic
images of Haeckelian Monism which have been mentioned by Gliboff, but rather, and more importantly,
in the astonishing popular recrudescence of age-old hermeticism as a viable intellectual tradition.
Apparently unknown to Gliboff, Haeckel had a seminal influence on the growth of German, Italian,
Scandinavian, Russian, and French theosophy and occultism, and his religion of Monism itself can be
viewed as an explicit expression of theosophical thought. In addition, Haeckel’s Monism was
instrumental in initiating some of the greatest triumphs in modernist literature, painting, sculpture, music,
and architecture – and one could add that his ideas became vitally important sources for the crystallization
of Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytical theory and Marxist concepts of totality and scientific
determinism, ways of thinking that often tested the boundaries of purely vitalistic interpretations of nature
and history.
Gliboff asserts that ‘Haeckel made it clear that the greatest attractions of Darwin’s theory for him
were its freedom from teleology and divine intervention, and its promise of substituting scientific
understanding for superstitious wonderment.’ 41
But such statements of Haeckel are misleading. Gliboff
fails to examine Haeckel’s self-proclaimed metaphysical intentions, his constant reiteration that his
40
For example, Gliboff might have taken into account Hannah S. Decker, ‘The Lure of Nonmaterialism in Materialist
Europe: Investigations of Dissociative Phenomena, 1880-1919,’ in Jacques M. Quen, ed, Split Minds/SplitBrains,
New York: NYU Press, 1986, 31-62.
41
Gliboff, Bronn, Haeckel, 159.
20