The General Morphology stands at the parting of two ways. It afforded a programme of an infinite amount of fresh technical research—the elaboration of his studies in detail, of promorphology, of his theory of individuality, and of the phylogenetic system of living things; and the strengthening of the laws of evolution, especially the great biogenetic law. On the other hand, there was the purely philosophic work to be done: the gathering together of the general threads that ran through his work, and the building of a new philosophy of life, based on a new story of creation, from the atom to the moneron, from the moneron to man, and the whole to be comprised and contained in God. In a word, he might proceed in either of two ways from the Morphology: he might construct academic zoology afresh, or he might write a work on the new God.
When he came home from Lanzarote, the two ways seemed to coincide in front of him; his work had, indeed, opened them out as one. But external circumstances intervened. As things are, it was only his academic colleagues that had any right to the new biology. A new book on God and creation would go out to “the publicans and sinners.” Interest must be lit up amongst the people at large, where there was as yet only the faintest spark. It appeared, moreover, that most of his academic colleagues in 1867 had no wish to enter on the new path he had opened out. A new generation would have to grow up first. The Morphology, from which Haeckel on his travels had expected at least a revolution, met at first with an icy silence. There was hardly any discussion of it, and no excitement whatever. Haeckel quickly made up his mind. He must turn in the other direction. Gegenbaur consoles him. He has given too much—twenty dishes instead of one. He must serve up the best part of the work on one dish, and it will be taken. Haeckel agrees with him to some extent, but his heavy technical artillery cannot be simplified so easily as that. The only possible thing to do is to give an extract of it, which will make the broad lines of the system clear. But as soon as that is done, he sees that the extract is still only the general philosophical part of it, and will not appeal to the general public.
It was such reflections as these that led to the writing of his History of Creation, a popular work.[[5]]
[5]. Translated into English with the above title. Literally, the title is: The Story of Natural Creation.
The chapters of this work were first delivered orally to students, in the form of lectures, and formed a kind of introduction to morphology. The lectures, retaining their lighter form, were then combined to make the book. It was published in 1868, a small volume in a very primitive garb. The success of the work was unprecedented.
Zoology and botany were treated philosophically in the Morphology. That did not suit the professional scientists, who (as I said) crossed themselves when they saw “natural philosophy.” In the History of Creation the great problems of philosophy are dealt with successively on Darwinian lines, from the zoological and botanical point of view. It was like the sinking of a deep well amongst general thoughtful readers. People felt at last what a power science had become. The old riddles of life were studied in a new light with the aid of this book. There was no predecessor in this field. Haeckel was absolutely the first to appeal to the general reader in this way. It is true that what he gave them was, strictly speaking, only an extract from his own Morphology, especially the second volume. But as he now arranged his matter chronologically, he converted his outline of a world-system into a “world-history”—a real “history of natural creation.” In the “Pictures of Nature” in the first volume of his Cosmos Humboldt had tried to bring the natural world before his readers as a great panorama, to be taken in at one glance. But he strictly confined his study of nature to the things that actually exist; how they came to exist was not, he intimated, a subject of scientific inquiry. Haeckel proceeds to this further task. His panorama of nature does not stand out rigidly before us; it develops, under the eyes of the observer, from the formless nebula to the intelligent human being. Even on the surface this was seen to be a prodigious advance. Very plain, but very attractive, it makes its way by the force of its convincing dialectic, and places no reliance on the fireworks of rhetoric. The subtle power of it lies in the arrangement of the facts, which suddenly assume the form of a logical chain instead of being a shapeless chaos. Even if all the main ideas of the work were false, we should be compelled to regard it as one of the cleverest works that was ever written, from the dialectical point of view. But the essence of this cleverness is the way in which the grouping of the facts is made to yield the philosophic evolution, which is the thoughtful basis of the work. As the world proceeds in its natural development from the nebular cosmic raw material until it culminates in the ape and man, the reader finds himself at the same time advancing along a series of general philosophic conclusions with regard to God, the world, and man. If at the end he has retained the whole series of what are to him more or less new scientific details, he is bound to find himself caught in a strong net of philosophic conclusions.
In view of all this we can easily understand the different reception that the book met with from friend and foe. People who had already assented to the main issues of the work on general grounds of probability, were delighted to find these issues decisively established by the plain facts of science. On the other hand, those who would have none of Haeckel’s philosophy now felt compelled, in view of this dreadful work, to call these alleged facts of science themselves into question. In face of this hostility it was some disadvantage that the History of Creation contained a vast amount of technical material (such as the genealogical trees, the Darwinian laws, the explanation of the facts of embryology, &c.) that could only be presented summarily in it, while the proper technical description and justification of them was buried in the thick volumes of the Morphology. Haeckel said, over and over again, that a certain thing had been so fully established by him scientifically in the other work that he was now at liberty to take it as a fact; and he accordingly built it up as such without prejudice into the compact structure of the popular work. Readers who wanted to go further into the discussion of these facts had to look up the relevant passages in the larger book. But the great bulk of his opponents—amongst whom we must count even many professional scientists—had never read the two volumes of the Morphology. They merely took the brief statement in the History of Creation, which was really little more than a reference, and made a violent attack on the “fact” it was said to convey.
This led to a great deal of confusion. As in this case a controversy over some petty zoological detail was always a “struggle about God,” and so agitated the opponent down to the most secret folds of his philosophy, the usual consequences did not fail to put in an appearance. Haeckel was branded and calumniated personally. There has never been any apostle in the world that some sect or other has not decried as a rogue and evil-doer, simply because he was an apostle. Wherever Haeckel has made use of any material that did not seem to be absolutely sound in every respect, he was not simply accused of making a mistake, not even of ignorance, but the whole thing has been put down at once to dishonesty and the worst type of bad faith.
One should bear in mind how very generally pioneer work of this kind is liable to err. Further, in the History of Creation there is the danger involved in the popular presentation of the results of scientific research. Any man who has written popular works, or delivered lectures to the general public, knows what this means. There is little common measure between them. The truths of science are in a state of constant flux; it is of their essence to be so. To fish out a piece from this stream, fix it, and magnify it for the public with a broad beam of light, really amounts in principle to an alteration of it; it is putting a certain pressure on things, and giving them an arbitrary shape. The work of popularising truths is so holy a thing in its aim that this risk has to be run. We must take things as they are. We have two alternatives: either not to popularise at all, or to take the apparatus with all its defects. We can diminish these according to our skill; but there is a subjective limit to this skill in all of us.
The first edition of the History of Creation—Haeckel’s first attempt at popularising—had a good deal of inequality in this respect. To begin with, the book had the air of an extempore deliverance. Its success was very largely due to its being cast in this form. But there was a good deal that could be improved here and there, and was improved in the later editions of the work. In the tenth edition, as we now have it, it is a splendid work in regard to the illustrations, for instance. But the first edition was merely provided with a few very crude woodcuts in outline. Some of them were very clumsy. In comparing different embryological objects the same blocks were used sometimes, and this would give rise to misunderstanding in the mind of the reader. For instance, there was question of demonstrating that certain objects, such as the human ovum and the ovum of some of the related higher mammals, were just the same in their external outlines. This fact is quite correct and established to-day. If I draw the outline, and write underneath it that as a type it is applicable to all known ova of the higher mammals, including man, there is no possibility of misunderstanding. But if I print the same illustration three times with the suggestion that they are three different mammal-ova, the general reader is easily apt to think, not only that they are identical in the general scheme of this outline, but also in internal structure. He imagines that the ova of man and the ape are just the same even in their microscopic and chemical features. This leads to a contradiction between the illustration and what Haeckel expressly says in the text. We read that there is indeed an external resemblance in shape between these ova, but that there is bound to be a great difference in internal structure, since an ape is developed from the one and a human being developed from the other. It would have been better if the general reader, who is not familiar with these outline pictures, had been more emphatically informed in the text below the illustration that even the outline is to be taken as a general and ideal scheme. In this sense we must certainly admit that the illustration was bad, since it would lead to a misunderstanding of the clear words of the text. But what are we to say when the opponents of Haeckel’s views viciously raise the cry of “bad faith” on the ground of a few little slips like this, and suggest that he deliberately tried to mislead his readers with false illustrations? Amongst the general public, in so far as it was hostile to Haeckel, the charge blossomed out into the most curious forms. Some declared that the whole story of a resemblance between man’s ovum and embryo and those of other animals was an invention of Professor Haeckel’s; others—we even read it now and again in our own time—went so far as to say that the human ovum and embryonic forms only existed in Haeckel’s imagination. All these wild charges are of no avail. The human ovum, which corresponds entirely in its general scheme to that of the other higher mammals, was not discovered in 1868 by the wicked Haeckel, but in 1827 by the great master of embryological research, Carl Ernst von Baer. The considerable external resemblance, at certain stages of development, between the embryos of reptiles, birds, and mammals, including man, was decisively established by the same great scientist. These really remarkable stages in the development of the human embryo, during which, in accordance with the biogenetic law, it shows clear traces of the gill-slits of its fish-ancestors, and has a corresponding fin-like structure of the four limbs and a very considerable tail, can be seen by the general reader at any time in the illustrated works of His, Ecker, and Kölliker (Haeckel’s chief opponents) or in any illustrated manual of embryology, and their full force as evolutionary evidence can be appreciated. Any man that constructs his philosophy in such a way that, in his conviction, it stands or falls with the existence of these embryonic phenomena, is in a very delicate position, apart altogether from Haeckel. His philosophy will collapse, even if the History of Creation had never been written.