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In the "Academy" for October, 1869, there is a review by Professor Huxley of Dr. Haeckel's "Natürlische Schöpfungsgeschichte," in which he says: "Professor Haeckel enlarges on the service which the 'Origin of Species' has done in favoring what he terms 'the causal or mechanical' view of living nature as opposed to the 'teleological or vitalistic' view.
It is an incontrovertible fact, that the hereditary transmission of acquired characters has in no way been proved. On the contrary after it had at first received a general tacit recognition and was postulated by Lamarck, Darwin and Haeckel, it was denied by Weismann.
Gentlemen, just bridge one gulf for us; the gulf lying between any two species will do. We get impatient, standing and gazing. Look! Can you see across? Mr. Darwin says, "Professor Haeckel, in his general Morphology and other works, has brought his great knowledge and abilities to bear on what he calls phylogeny or the lines of descent of all organic beings." Origin of Species, p. 381.
So Christianity is a viá media between limitless Polytheism and absolute Monotheism. Professor Haeckel of Jena, in his hatred of Christianity, instanced Mohammedanism as a better religion and scornfully called the Christian religion "Polytheism." The definition is not altogether untrue. Paganism was not wholly false.
Now, the very spot on which we stood is highly cultivated, and forms a part of the garden of the Blasehek villa. There, early in the eighties, as the guest of the hospitable Herr Blasehek, Professor Ernst Haeckel botanised a week, on his way to Ceylon.
The young man, believing this to be only the mocking mood of one who knew the argument of the dualists better than they knew it themselves, remained silent, and Weissmann composedly resumed: "The dogmatism of Haeckel is as vain as the assumption of Metchnikoff. We shall forever discover and forever despair. Such is the life of man."
No man asserts the immutability of all those varieties of plants and animals, which naturalists, for the convenience of classification, may call distinct species. Haeckel, for example, gives a list of twelve species of man. So any one may make fifty species of dogs, or of horses. This is a mere artificial distinction, which amounts to nothing.
The explanation was plausible enough, if the evidence had been all that it seemed to be. But the specimens examined by himself and by Haeckel, who two years later published a full and detailed description of Bathybius, were seen only in a preserved state. It was dredged up again on the voyage of the Porcupine and examined in a fresh state by Sir Wyville Thomson and Dr.
It is evident that the evolutionary theory not only contradicts the Bible story of creation but, if true, deprives Christianity of every claim of being the true religion. If all things have come into being through the action of forces residing in matter then the world did not come into being through a divine fiat or command. As Haeckel says: "Every supernatural creation is completely excluded."
Haeckel points out that if Goethe had known Lamarck's work his genius would have gained for the "Philosophie Zoölogique" the interest and respect of the reading world. But Cuvier laughed it out of court, and only in comparatively modern times, since Darwin's work has set the world thinking anew, is Lamarck's career recognized at its true value.
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