Daniel Gasman - Ferris State University

The intention of Monism was to overcome the separation of man from nature occasioned by dualistic
Christianity and its by-product, Cartesian logic, as well as by modern mechanistic science – the science
that Gliboff erroneously assigns to Haeckel – with its damaging industrial and technological creations,
indeed by all dualisms be they religious, scientific, cultural, or political.
Haeckel can be more accurately classified among those scientists depicted by the Symbolist art critic,
Albert Aurier, in 1892 – the year of Haeckel’s religious and proto-Nazi manifesto, Monism as Connecting
Science and Religion – who ‘after having proclaimed the omnipotence of scientific observation and
deduction’ return to the ‘most bizarre theogony, the maddest metaphysical reverie.’ 51 In its religious and
spiritual devotion, Haeckel’s Monism may be said to have contributed to what Gilbert Durand has termed
the ‘return of Hermes,’ 52
of Monistic hermeticism or occultism in the post-positivistic late nineteenth and
early twentieth century, rather than to perpetuating the tenets of an increasingly moribund and superficial
materialistic positivism.
The summa of Monism, as of hermeticism, was the conviction that it had virtually solved the ‘Riddles
53
of the Universe,’ that it had attained a magical unlocking of all secrets, so that Haeckel and the Monists
could claim to that of Judaism and Christianity. Accordingly, Haeckel’s belief in spontaneous generation
effected in the slime at the bottom of the ocean, and his celebrated Recapitulation Theory, that ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny, 54
were not simply materialistic hypotheses as Gliboff mistakenly claims, but the
Monist equivalents of the ancient and venerable myths of the origin of life out of darkness and the
primeval mud, the transmutation through the process of dissolving and coagulating of one form of matter
into another form of matter that was made possible by their shared divine component. – These
51
Albert Aurier, ‘Symbolist Painters,’ [1892], quoted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1968, 93-94.
52
Gilbert Durand, ‘Le XXe Siècle et le retour d’Hermès,’ in Figures mythiques visages de l’oeuvre de la
mythocritique à la mythanalyse, Paris, 1979, 243-306.
53
It should be noted that Gliboff, while listing Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe in his bibliography, hardly ever
refers to it.
54
Gliboff misleadingly explains Haeckel’s Recapitulation Theory to be a wholly mechanical explanation for the
process of evolution.
23