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THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 1905.

THE QUINTESSENCE OF HAECKELISMUS.

THE

Biological

The Riddle

Translated (London :

The Wonders of Life. A Popular Study of Philosophy. Supplementary volume to of the Universe. By Ernst Haeckel. by Joseph McCabe. Pp. xiv + 501. Watts and Co., 1904.) Price 6s. net. HIS new book by the indefatigable Haeckel is supplementary to his "Riddle of the Universe." That several hundred thousand copies of the "Riddle " were sold indicates the widespread interest taken in what the author calls "the construction of a rational and solid philosophy of life," or in what others would call an extremely biological way of looking at things. But the "Riddle" and its solutions raised storms of criticisms and evoked hundreds of reviews--both friendly and hostile-besides many large pamphlets and even a few books, not to speak of more than five thousand letters. To these collectively, friends and foes alike, Haeckel now replies in this "biological sketch-book," written uninterruptedly in the course of four months when he was completing his seventieth

year in a vacation at Rapallo, a tiny coast-town of the Italian Riviera. He had leisure there to think over all the views on organic life which he had formed in the course of a many-sided experience of life and learning since the beginning of his academic studies (1852) and his teaching at Jena (1861). The constant sight of the blue Mediterranean, the animal inhabitants of which he knows so well, his solitary walks in the wild gorges of the Ligurian Apennines, and the moving >pectacle of the "forest-crowned mountain altars," inspired him with "a feeling of the unity of living nature-a feeling that only too easily fades away in the study of detail in the laboratory." He hopes that his readers may be moved by his book "to penetrate deeper and deeper into the glorious work of Nature, and to reach the insight of our greatest German natural philosopher, Goethe :

"What greater thing in life can man achieve

Than that God-Nature be revealed to him?" The work is described as "a popular study of biological philosophy "; it is divided into four sections -methodological, morphological, physiological, and genealogical, which deal respectively with the knowledge of life, the nature of life, the functions of life, and the history of life. It raises no end of perplexing problems-life and death, nutrition and reproduction, heredity and variation, sensation and intelligence, morality and religion. It discusses protoplasm and the cell, spontaneous generation and evolution in general, the "pro-morphology" of organisms and the intricate architecture of the brain, the recapitulation of phylogeny in ontogeny, the inheritance of acquired characters, the evolution of sensation, æsthesis, intelligence, and morality. In short, it comprises practically everything, including miracles, the religious thoughts of Mr. Romanes, the university curriculum, the increase of pauperism, the introduction of Spartan elimination-methods, the Apostles' Creed, the immacu

late conception, immortality, and a belief in a personal God. A book with so large a purview is bound to be sketchy-and the author calls it "a biological sketchbook "--but sketchiness in dealing with subjects so Haeckel continually and quite fairly refers to what momentous is apt to be unsatisfactory, and, while he has said elsewhere in his large family of books, the discriminating reader may justly complain that he has often to deal rather with an assertion of convictions than with a reasoned argument. What carries one on from page to page is the feeling that we have to listen to a veteran who is telling us frankly and fearlessly what he believes to be true in regard to the order of nature and our place in it.

66

From one point of view Haeckel's discussion of the "Wonders of Life" is an apology for "Monism" or Hylozoism." In studies of "unequal value and incomplete workmanship," as the illustrious author confesses, an attempt is made to show how we may attain to the conception of one great harmoniously working universe" whether you call this Nature or Cosmos, World or God "-without utilising any knowledge which is not of empirical origin and a posteriori. We must not allow metaphysical fictions to intrude on our philosophy-still less into our science; we may work hocus-pocusing with transcendental formula; science is sufficient unto herself, and is justified of her children; criticism of her postulates and categories is a waste of time when there is so much to do; psychology is "a branch of physiology," and it is unprofitable to think about thinking; a theory of knowledge" is a luxury for the leisured. Everything seems to become plain sailing if we embark on the craft Hylozoism," but we require faith to help us across the gangway.

with the "law of substance," but there is to be no

From another point of view Haeckel's book may be taken as an expression of the outlook on man and nature which may be reached by a conscientious pursuit of the scientific method. Those who remain agnostic or positivist in regard to either monism or dualism in any of their forms will be interested in hearing once more of the order, unity and progressiveness of nature's tactics, and in considering the practical proposals which a thorough-going Darwinian has to offer in regard to incapables and incurables, pauperism and crime. We cannot do more than remark that these proposals preach elimination rather than eugenics; they are more akin to surgery than to preventive medicine. Much of the book is, naturally enough, an echo of previous works-the "Monera," the "Gastræa Theory," the "Natural History of Creation," the "Evolution of Man," and, what has always appeared to us the author's magnum opus, the "Generelle Morphologie" (1866); but all has been modernised and orientated afresh to illustrate what Haeckel was so much impressed with at Rapallo, the unity of living nature. An interesting illustration of the author's artistic enthusiasm and indifference to popularity will be found in the pages on promorphology, wherein he discusses the architectural symmetries of organisms, as he did forty years ago. The centrostigmatic, centraxonial, and centroplane