There are many objections to this strict delimitation of the provinces of the human mind, as Virchow lays it down in the old style. It is true that materialism is a real philosophy, especially in the form current at the time and given to it by Vogt and Büchner. But it is a question whether we see, observe, or investigate at all, if we completely exclude philosophy; whether the philosophic thought can be really pumped out of even the most rigorous and exact “observation of facts,” like air in the air-pump; whether there are any such things as purely objective “facts” in this sense in any human brain. And it is also a question whether the facts, however objectively we regard them, do not arrange themselves, when they are numerous, in logical series, which force us to draw conclusions as to the unknown by the very laws of probability; in other words, whether they do not always produce a “philosophy” in the long run. However, these questions are all well within the pure atmosphere of science. It is Virchow’s practical conclusions that are interesting; and he goes on to draw them freely.
The man of science gives us no dogmatic philosophy of any kind, but facts. But for these facts and for the research that leads to them he must have an absolutely free path. No power can legitimately stand in his way that does not offer him more of what he regards as his palladium—facts. And, curiously enough, when we think of later events, the illustration that Virchow takes in 1863 to enforce this is—the Darwinism that Haeckel had just put before them.
Haeckel and Virchow were friendly colleagues at the time. We have already said that Haeckel was Virchow’s assistant at Würtzburg. Not only as a man, but especially as a scientist, Virchow was then (and long afterwards) greatly admired by him. The idea of the cell-state got into his blood; it was one of the bases on which he built up the Darwinian theory. Though he had never recognised this distinction between the mere investigation of facts and philosophic reflection on them, he respected Virchow as a master of methodological education. What was “method” at the bottom but philosophy! Was not the method that expressly excluded “miracles,” that sought always the natural law and the causal connection and the continuous series, a “philosophy”? This was the only method taught under Virchow as long as Haeckel worked with him. At the time the divergence of their ideas was not shown more openly. The one called “philosophy” what the other said was “the purely objective method of investigating the truth.” The figure of Pilate rises up behind the dilemma with his question: “What is truth?”
However, Virchow takes Darwinism by way of an example of which he approves, a point that seems to be established in the province of pure facts. In the Munich speech of 1877 there are polite references to “Herr Haeckel.” “As Herr Haeckel says.” “As Herr Haeckel supposes.” At Stettin we find Herr Haeckel described as “my friend Haeckel,” with whom “I quite agree,” &c. Haeckel himself, by the way, was still convinced—in his essay On the Generation of Waves in Living Particles—two years before the schismatic Council of 1877 that Virchow had had a decisive influence on his own Darwinian career. “If I have contributed anything myself in an elementary way to the building-up of the idea of evolution, I owe it for the most part to the cellular-biological views with which Virchow’s teaching penetrated me twenty years ago.” “As Herr Haeckel supposes,” was the cool repayment of this sincere expression of gratitude. However, that is another matter. Let us return to Stettin. We read, where “my friend Haeckel” comes in, that he has shown how scientific research (the pure investigation of facts without the least tincture of philosophy) has gone on to deal with “the great question of the creation of man.” It is merely conceded that there are still certain small outstanding difficulties, as, for instance, at the root of the genealogical tree. According to Darwin it is conceivable that there were four or five primitive forms of life. Haeckel is inclined to restrict them to a single stem-cell. It seems to him (Virchow) that there may have been a number of different beginnings of life. We have here the opening of the controversy as to the monophyletic (from one root only) or polyphyletic (from several roots) development of life, which is still unsettled as far as the commencement of life is concerned, but a very secondary question. It would be well if there had never been any more serious difference between Haeckel and Virchow. The speaker himself thinks it an unimportant matter beside the great question of freedom for scientific inquiry. One thing is as clear to him as it is to Haeckel. The biblical dogma of creation has broken down. It is impossible to take seriously any longer the breathing of the breath of life into a lump of clay, if these Darwinian ideas are sound. Once it is fully proved that man descends from the ape, “no tradition in the world will ever suppress the fact.” Scientific inquiry alone can correct itself. And what it holds to be established must be respected beyond its frontiers as well. What does he mean by “beyond its frontiers”? He means, as he makes it clear here, the same as Haeckel himself. “Church and State,” he says, must “reconcile themselves to the fact that with the advance of science certain changes are bound to take place in the general ideas and beliefs from which we build up our highest conceptions, and that no impediment must be put in the way of these changes; in fact, the far-seeing Government and the open-minded Church will always assimilate these advancing and developing ideas and make them fruitful.” What more do we want?
If this were the conclusion of Virchow’s speech, it would be merely a confirmation of Haeckel’s—the kind of support that the older worker can give to ardent youth, though on different grounds. But the cloven foot has still to peep out. I believe that, in the pure struggle of ideas, we can determine here, in 1863, precisely the point where Virchow falls—falls into a line that has nothing in common with the ideal struggle of the really free and liberating thought of humanity. We come to the great salto mortale, which one must see from 1863 onward in order to understand the Virchow of 1877.
The passage is the more interesting as it refers to one of the chief stages in the development of Haeckel’s mind. The conception of man as a cell-state, established by Virchow in so masterly a fashion, involved a very curious conclusion. This conclusion, however we take it, came so close to the roots of every philosophy that it justified Schleiden to some extent when he protested that the whole cell-state theory was a philosophical element.
If the human body is composed of millions of cells; if all the processes and functions, the whole life of the body in Virchow’s sense, are merely the sum of the vital processes and functions of these millions of individual cells; is not what we call “the soul” really the product of the millions upon millions of separate souls of these cells? Is not man’s soul merely the state-soul, the general spirit of this gigantic complex of tiny cell-souls? The lowest living things we spoke of, which consist of a single cell, showed unmistakable signs of having a psychic life. There was nothing to prevent us from thinking that in the combination of these various cells into communities each of them brought with it its little psychic individuality. And just as the individual bodies of the cells combined externally to form the new individual of the human body, so the cell-souls would enter into a spiritual combination to form the new psychic individuality of the human mind. I say there was nothing to prevent us from thinking this, in the line of deductions from the plain principles of the cell-state theory which Virchow claimed to be a naked “fact.” Philosophically, however, an immense number of questions, problems, doubts, and hopes lurked behind it. The whole conception of individuality took on a new aspect. First, in the material sense; the individual human being seemed to be, bodily, only the connecting bracket, as it were, of countless deeper individuals, the cells. But it was more significant on the spiritual side. The individual human soul could be analysed into millions of smaller psychic individualities, the cell-souls, of which it was the sum. The unified ego, the consciousness of self and unity of the psychic clamp, “man,” remained as the connection of all the cell-souls. A ray of light was thrown on the deep mystery of the origin of individualities, material and spiritual. Haeckel devoted himself afterwards to the question with all his energy. But at the time it was Virchow who, unconsciously enough, started the great wave that welled up from the depths of his theory.
He had marked out his path very clearly in the first part of his speech. Scientific research collects facts. It puts them before us without any reference to philosophy. The less philosophy there is in the investigation of facts the better. But the other side of the matter is that no power in heaven or on earth has anything to say as regards its work on things that it holds to be facts. The only possible logical conclusion from this, with reference to the question of the cell-soul, was for the investigator of facts to say: Even in respect of the psychic life we go our way and look neither to right nor left, whatever conclusions and assumptions the philosopher makes. Virchow acted very differently.
He first grants that this dissolution of man into a federal unity of countless cells must somehow affect the “unified soul.” We are compelled “to set up a plurality even in the psychic life.” He has reached the limit of his radicalism. We expect him to continue: Hence, as in the case of the Mosaic story of creation, of Darwinism, of the cell-theory as a whole, so here we men of science go our way unmoved; even if the whole of the teaching that has hitherto prevailed in philosophy and theology in regard to the soul breaks down, we simply go our way, and do not ask anybody’s permission. This he does not do. Take one step further, he says, and we “can easily believe that it is necessary to split up our whole psychic life in this way and ascribe a soul to each individual cell.” Haeckel believed a little later that this was necessary; that the most rigorous logic compelled us to do it. But, says Virchow suddenly, we must protest most vigorously against this. This deduction from the cell-state theory reaches a point where “science is incompetent,” namely, “the facts of consciousness.” Taboo! The path of the scientific inquirer is barricaded. What follows rests on no scientific grounds, but is a sort of confession. Up to the present natural science has not been able to say anything as to the real nature, the locality, and the ground of consciousness. “Hence I have always said that it is wrong to refuse to recognise the peculiar character of these facts of consciousness that dominate our whole higher life, and to yield to the personal craving to bring these facts of consciousness into accord with an independent soul, a spiritual force, and let the individual formulate his religious feeling according to his conscience and disposition. That is, I think, the point where science makes its compromise with the Churches, recognising that this is a province that each can survey as he will, either putting his own interpretation on it or accepting the traditional ideas; and it must be sacred to others.” The direction of the logic is clear enough. The application of the cell-state theory to psychic life must lead to the problem of consciousness. But we must not follow it, because science has never yet penetrated into this province. It is the province of peaceful compromise with “the Church,” and we must respect it.
It seems to me that the explanation is clear. The whole field of conflict that Haeckel found within the science of his time is opened out, though Virchow was by no means disposed at that time to take Darwinism as an example of the thing to be avoided, as he did at Munich fourteen years afterwards. The kind of scientific inquiry that Virchow advocated is what was called “exact” at a later period. It kept clear of all philosophical speculation, and repeated over and over again that it was only concerned with facts. It had, however, another card to play—peace with “the Churches.”