Here again, it is plain, Haeckel had a greater freedom than Darwin. Working gradually from above, Darwin desisted when he came to spontaneous generation, and left room for God. Haeckel came into an open field, believing that there was no eternal Deity and that spontaneous generation itself was by no means a forbidding conception. The problem for him was merely, how he could work upward through the plants and animals of all geological periods until he reached man. He was bound to seek to dispense even here with the historical vital force, and explain everything by the great natural laws of the cosmos.
It was in this frame of mind that he received Darwin’s book. Can it be in the least surprising that it “profoundly moved” him. It opened out to him the whole way, just as he desired it. Müller’s third thesis, the immutability of species, broke down. But what did it matter? It was now possible for the first time to construct a philosophical zoology and botany in Müller’s sense, without any vital force and without God.
At the same time this rapid and impulsive acceptance of Darwin’s theory was not merely a decisive moment in Haeckel’s intellectual development; it was bound to be, even externally, a most important step in his career. The theistic controversy was forced on his attention. It passed out of the province of his inmost life, that had hitherto only been discussed in conversation with intimate friends, into the professional work of his most serious and public occupation—into zoology, into the radiolaria at which he had been working for years.
We must realise clearly what it must have meant at that time for a young zoologist, who wanted to do rigorous professional work and had quickly decided to settle at Jena in order to begin his career as an official teacher, to become “a Darwinian” in conviction and open confession. It might cost him both his official position and his scientific future; and this at the very moment when he had just secured them, or was in a better position to secure them. We have here for the first time the open manifestation of a principle in Haeckel’s life that he had hitherto only used inwardly, in application to himself. The truth must be told, whatever it cost. Shoot me dead, morally, materially, or bodily, as you will: but you will have to shoot the law first.
Darwin’s ominous book had been available in Bronn’s translation for two years. The German professional zoologists, botanists, and geologists almost all regarded it as absolute nonsense. Agassiz, Giebel, Keferstein, and so many others, laughed until they were red in the face, like a riotous first-night public that has made up its mind as to the absurdity of the play from the first act, and torment the author as the cat torments a mouse. Then Haeckel gave to the world his long-prepared Monograph on the Radiolaria (1862), the work with which he endeavours to establish—in fact, must establish—his position as an exact investigator, even amongst the academic scholars of the opposite camp. All goes very smoothly for many pages of the work. A few traces of heresy may be detected about page 100. The passage deals with the relation of organ to individual, in connection with the social species of radiolaria that live in communities. It is a subject that Haeckel took up with great vigour later on, as we shall see. Here it affords him an opportunity to say a word about the general fusion of things in the world of life, in opposition to our rigid divisions in classification. Organ and individual pass into each other without any fixed limit. That, he says, is only a repetition of the relation of the plant to the animal. We cannot establish any fixed limitations between them. What we set up as such are only man’s abstractions. In nature itself we never find these subjective abstract ideas of limitation “incorporated purely, but always fading away in gradual transitions; here, again, the scale of organisation rises gradually from the simplest to the most complex, in a continuous development.” However, these are words that might have been written by Schleiden or Unger or Bronn before Darwin’s time.
Yet there is something in the work that would have been a jet of ice-cold water to the Agassizs and Giebels. This brilliant new “Extraordinary Professor of Zoology and Director of the Zoological Museum at Jena University,” as it says on the title-page, accepts Darwin in a certain unambiguous passage late in the text.
It is necessary to bring to light once more this passage, buried in a work that is not easily accessible, an expensive technical work separated from us by four decades now. It is worth doing so, not only on account of the courage it displayed at the time, but also as a document relating to the great controversy of the nineteenth century. It is found on pages 231 and 232, partly in the text, but for the most part in a note. Immediately after giving the table of classification Haeckel goes on to say: “I cannot leave this general account of the relationship of the various families of the radiolaria without drawing special attention to the numerous transitional forms that most intimately connect the different groups and make it difficult to separate them in classification, to some extent.” It is interesting to note that in spite of our very defective knowledge of the radiolaria it is nevertheless possible to arrange “a fairly continuous chain of related forms.” He would like to draw particular attention to this, because “the great theories that Charles Darwin has lately put forward, in his Origin of Species in the Plant and Animal World by Natural Selection, or The Preservation of the Improved Races in the Struggle for Life, and which have opened out a new epoch for systematic biology, have given such importance to the question of the affinities of organisms and to proofs of continuous concatenation that even the smallest contribution towards the further solution of these problems must be welcome.” He then endeavours in the text, without any more theoretical observations, practically to construct a “genealogical tree of the radiolaria,” the first of a large number of such trees in the future. He takes as the primitive radiolarian a simple trellis-worked globule with centrifugal radiating needles, embodied in the Heliosphæra. “At the same time,” he says, characteristically, “this does not imply in the least that all the radiolaria must have descended from this primitive form; I merely show that, as a matter of fact, all these very varied forms may be derived from such a common fundamental type.” In other words, once more, it is conceivable—a golden word even long afterwards. The first “genealogical tree,” a “table of the related families, sub-families, and genera of the radiolaria,” arranged in order from the higher forms down, and connected with lines and brackets, comes next. The text deals thoroughly with the possibility of descent. This closes the first and general part of the monograph. But there is a long note at this point in the text, where Darwin’s title is cited, that gives us his first appreciation of Darwin in detail. It begins: “I cannot refrain from expressing here the great admiration with which Darwin’s able theory of the origin of species has inspired me. Especially as this epoch-making work has for the most part been unfavourably received by our German professors of science, and seems in some cases to have been entirely misunderstood. Darwin himself desires his theory to be submitted to every possible test, and ‘looks confidently to the young workers who will be prepared to examine both sides of the question impartially. Whoever leans to the view that species are changeable will do a service to science by a conscientious statement of his conviction; only in that way can we get rid of the mountain of prejudice that at present covers the subject.’ I share this view entirely,” Haeckel continues, “and on that account feel that I must express here my belief in the mutability of species and the real genealogical relation of all organisms. Although I hesitate to accept Darwin’s views and hypotheses to the full and to endorse the whole of his argument, I cannot but admire the earnest, scientific attempt made in his work to explain all the phenomena of organic nature on broad and consistent principles and to substitute an intelligible natural law for unintelligible miracles. There may be more error than truth in Darwin’s theory in its present form, as the first attempt to deal with the subject. Undeniably important as are the principles of natural selection, the struggle for life, the relation of organisms to each other, the divergence of characters, and all the other principles employed by Darwin in support of his theory, it is, nevertheless, quite possible that there are just as many and important principles still quite unknown to us that have an equal or even greater influence on the phenomena of organic nature. This is the first great attempt to construct a scientific, physiological theory of the development of organic life and to prove that the physiological laws and the chemical and physical forces that rule in nature to-day must also have been at work in the world of yesterday.” Haeckel then refers to Bronn, the translator of the book. With Bronn he calls Darwin’s theory the fertilised egg from which the truth will gradually develop; the pupa from which the long-sought natural law will emerge. And he concludes: “The chief defect of the Darwinian theory is that it throws no light on the origin of the primitive organism—probably a simple cell—from which all the others have descended. When Darwin assumes a special creative act for this first species, he is not consistent and, I think, not quite sincere. However, apart from these and other defects, Darwin’s theory has the undying merit of bringing sense and reason into the whole subject of the relations of living things. When we remember how every great reform, every important advance, meets with a resistance in proportion to the depth of the prejudices and dogmas it assails, we shall not be surprised that Darwin’s able theory has as yet met with little but hostility instead of its well-merited appreciation and test.” There is yet no question of man and his origin. But what he says is very bold for the time; and before a year is out we shall find him drawing the most dangerous conclusion of all. And it is found, not in a late page and note in a stout technical volume, but in the pitiless glare of the sunlight, in the most prominent position that could then be given to it in German scientific culture.
CHAPTER V
THE SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS OF 1863
In the second decade of the nineteenth century, Oken had inspired the formation of large public gatherings of German naturalists and physicians. Oken was one of the advanced thinkers who felt that all technical science was in the end only preparatory to the great work of educating the people. In his opinion the naturalist, even if he spent his whole life in investigating the filaments of plants or the limbs of insects, was a pioneer of culture. In any case these gatherings were a very good practical move at the time. In a time of terrible reaction on all sides a feeling came at last even to the recluse of science that, besides the technical value of his work, it ought to do something towards lifting his fellows out of the rut they were falling into. They felt that if all ideals were going to be lost, the ultimate aim of special research would perish with them. Oken took up a position of democratic opposition. He was soon joined by Alexander von Humboldt, who, with the same feeling at heart, gave the work a certain polish of scientific and impartial dignity. There are features of his work that amuse us to-day, but those were evil days, and every particle of goodwill had to be appreciated. However, there was a serious difficulty.