Philosophy was shunned in order to leave a free field for the Churches to build in. Then the exact scientist took his hat and said, I am afraid I am incompetent, and the philosopher is incompetent, to do anything here; let the Church take the vacant chair, with my compliments. No philosophy: on this we will make war to the knife. This is “a point where science makes its compromise with the Churches.” No one can understand Haeckel’s career who does not grasp this antithesis. The contrast between Haeckel and Virchow, known to all the world since 1877, is clearly indicated. Virchow’s speech in 1877 is obscure. We must go back to 1863 to get behind the veil—the veil that hides Virchow, that is to say, the most prominent representative of the hostility to Haeckel. We cannot understand otherwise how this yawning gulf came about between Haeckel’s ideas and a school that professed to follow “exact” research. Haeckel was building up a natural philosophy which, starting from the solid foundation of scientific research and its results, went on to further, and greater, and more far-reaching issues, that could not be seen, but could be reached philosophically by more or less happy deductions from the scientific data. It might or might not have lasting value in points of detail. He was subject to the law of evolution. He worked with analogy, and the things he compared thereto were ever changing. It was all the same to him. In any case the dawning glimmer of the perfect light broadened out and lit up vague outlines even in the cloud-wreathed unknown. The others worked in such a way as to leave beside them provinces of a virgin whiteness, untouched by thought or logic. At times they slipped into these provinces, and celebrated their reconciliation-festival with “the Churches.” The layman continued to think that the Churches wielded an absolute authority; that the scientist, abandoning his natural philosophy, came to pay them tribute. This situation has done infinite mischief, more than the wildest and even obviously perverse philosophy ever did. It put the scientist in the position of a tolerated vassal in the world of thought—the world that the Churches had held in chains for ages. Woe to the man who ventured to discuss “consciousness”! Not because science had but the slender proportions of a pioneer in that field, and because there was a danger of it making great mistakes with its natural philosophy. No, but because the white neutral field began here that we had agreed to respect—we “exact” scientists and “the Churches.” This was the real reason why Virchow and so many others who advocated the strict investigation of facts had forfeited the right to oppose Haeckel’s bolder natural philosophy and its conclusion—will have forfeited the right, at least, in the judgment of a future and more impartial generation. They did not oppose him on the lines of an equal zeal for the truth, but on much lower and reactionary lines. Their concern was not for the absolute triumph of truth, but for a compromise with certain forces in public life whose supremacy was not grounded on logic but on inherited external power. It required a certain amount of diplomatic shrewdness to enter into this compromise, in view of the practical power of those forces. Haeckel never had this “shrewdness.” We grant that. But it is certainly a confusion of all standards when the shrewdness of the individual tries to entrench itself behind ostensible claims of scientific method; when research abandons all advance on certain sides on the plea of “exactness” instead of philosophising—and then itself makes use of this exactness for compromising with an ecclesiastical tradition that only differs from real philosophy in its antiquity and rigidity, its disdain of rational argument, and its employment of secular weapons that certain historical events have put in its hand without any merit on its own part.
The darkest cloud that hung menacingly on the horizon of Darwinism came from this quarter. At the moment we are dealing with it did not cause much concern. This early Darwinism thrilled with optimism as with the magic of spring. Haeckel had to speak once more in the course of the Congress. The geologist, Otto Volger, made a polite but energetic protest against the new theory in the final sitting. It was a curious connection of things that brought Volger into such a position.
Volger is the man who saved for Germany the venerable Goethe-house at Frankfort-on-the-Main. The Free German Chapter received it from him as a gift. The action has nothing to do with geology, but it stands in the annals of culture. Thus the shadow of Goethe came to Stettin, to be present at the open birth of German Darwinism—Goethe, who had once stood on the very brink of the evolutionary ideas. And the man who brought him was a geologist who felt moved to attack the ideas of Darwin and Haeckel!
No part of science became in the succeeding decades so fruitful for Darwinistic purposes as geology. It might very well be called a continuous argument for Darwin; from the little slab of Solenhofen Jurassic schist that yielded, in 1861, the first impression of the archeopteryx, the real connecting link between the lizard and the bird, to the incomparable discoveries of Othniel Marsh, Cope, and Ameghino in America, which put whole sections of the genealogical tree of the mammals before us, on to the skull and thighbone of the ape-man (pithecanthropus) of Java, found by Eugen Dubois, which brings so vividly home to us the transition from the gibbon to man. But, as if it had been scared away by the new idea of evolution and its demand for proof, the most and the best of this material was not forthcoming until after Darwin was pretty firmly established everywhere. At the earlier date we are dealing with it was quite possible for a geologist to play the sceptic with a shadow of justification. We need not go into the point to-day. It is ancient history. But there is an incidental point in Volger’s criticism and the reply it provoked from Haeckel that calls for notice.
Volger declared that Darwinism in general was an unsupported hypothesis, but he made a concession. The species of animals and plants need not be absolutely unchangeable. The only thing that is impossible is a continuous upward direction in evolution. All the groups of living things, even the highest, may have been present together from the earliest days. Local changes in the distribution of land and water, &c., must have brought about a certain amount of variation in life-forms. But after brief divergences all would return to the original type. The proper symbol of the story of life is the wave that rises out of the sea and sinks back into it. There was no such thing as a steady advance, a wave that never sank back into the water. The real image of human life is the analogy of its obvious development: youth, maturity, then old age and back once more. The speaker urged in plausible terms that this conception retained the idea of an “eternal becoming,” which is better than a rigid fulfilment. As if an eternally advancing evolution did not include this “eternal becoming.” Haeckel spoke immediately after Volger. He not only attacked the weak points of the geologist, but went on to the deeper philosophic question. The notion of a “perennial circular movement” is “inconsistent with all the facts of human history.” “If we appeal to sentiment, I must say that this circular theory has no attraction for me, whereas the Darwinian idea of a progressive evolution seems the only one consistent with the nature of man.” The story of the animals and plants is subject to “the law of progress” just as much as human history.
In these words of Haeckel’s we have a clear indication of the optimistic temper of Darwinism at the time. They touch a question of fundamental importance for the value of the new theory: the question whether, in spite of all it destroyed, in spite of its disseverance from the idea of God, it brought with it a new ground of conciliation, a conviction of the ever-advancing growth of the world and ever greater achievements? God was replaced by natural law. There was no longer any “design” beyond the simple and unchanging course of natural laws. Well, what were these natural laws going to do for us? Were they giving us a world that would become more and more harmonious, that was on the whole an advancing organism, that would be an increasing embodiment of God—the God within nature, not without, God at the end of things, after æons of worlds that seemed to break up like the individual in the struggle for existence, yet were eternal in the mighty essence that was tossed on from world to world like a grain of dust and was made the starting-point of infinitely new and more complex movements? Or—was the work of these natural laws but a ceaseless poking and thrusting and bubble-blowing without any inner meaning? Was it the play of waves that rise and fall, and rise and fall again, in the ocean, an eternal melting into smoke and nothingness? Was the whole of “evolution” an absolutely meaningless play of innumerable tendencies, not one of which would ever come to anything?
This note also was found in the first melody. Something would have been lacking if it had not been struck. Here again there could be a parting of ways, not only in the crowd, but amongst the thoughtful. The whole struggle of optimism and pessimism might be dragged in. At all events, the problem was bound to be pointed out from the start.
When Volger, not a bad opponent at the bottom, and Haeckel had made their speeches, indicating at once certain lasting antitheses within the subtle philosophy of Darwinism, Virchow closes the debates and the Congress with a most dangerous blessing. In essentials he is once more on the side of Haeckel. He suggests that geology should be allowed to mature a little before final judgment is passed. The strongest evidence for evolution is found in embryology (the science of the embryonic forms and uterine development of living species of animals). The prophecy was fulfilled, if ever prophecy was, and in Haeckel’s own most particular field of work. But, in fine—he returns to his point—the main thing is the “pursuit of truth.” And since “the most earnest ecclesiastical teachers” declared that “God is truth,” he could not do better than close with a reminder (I quote him verbatim) of “the compromise that may be effected between science and the Church.” Translated into plain language, that means: My dear children, fight it out as you will, but respect the Church always as the main thing, and you will do well, however much you differ. Thus closed this remarkable Scientific Congress—as quietly as a bomb that smokes noiselessly, like a whiff from a tobacco pipe. But one day it will burst.