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Take Cicero's book de Officiís, or the Divina Commedia of Dante, and you will find that to them the earth is the center of creation, that the infinite stars circle around it, and that man is the king of animals: a geocentric and anthropocentric illusion inspired by immeasurable conceit.
Such an anthropocentric view of life and destiny in exalting man, of course, thereby liberated him, not merely from ecclesiastical domination, but also from those illusive fears and questionings, those remote and imaginative estimates of his own intended worth and those consequent exacting demands upon himself which are a part of the religious interpretation of life.
Häckel, in his "Anthropogeny," repeatedly reproaches man with the "arrogant anthropocentric imagination" which leads him to look upon himself as the aim of earthly life and the centre of earthly nature; this, he says, is nothing but vanity and haughtiness. Several writers in the "Ausland" faithfully second him in this debasement of the value of man.
This is the title of an address delivered by Du Bois-Reymond on 25th January 1883, in the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and afterwards published in his Collected Addresses (vol. ii. 1887). As the author himself mentions in a note (p. 500) that this gave rise, "most unmeritedly," to great excitement, and called down upon him the violent attacks of the clerical press, I may be allowed to point out here that it contained nothing new, I myself, fifteen years previously, in my lectures on "The Origin and Genealogy of the Human Race," having carried out in detail the comparison between Darwin and Copernicus, and the service rendered by these two heroes in putting an end to the anthropocentric and geocentric views of the world. (See the Third Series in Virchow and Holtzendorff's Collection of Popular Scientific Lectures, Nos. 53 and 54, 1868, 4th ed., 1881.) When Du Bois-Reymond says, "For me, Darwin is the Copernicus of the organic world," I am the more pleased to find that he agrees (partly in identical words) with my way of thinking, as he himself, quite unnecessarily, takes up an attitude of opposition towards me. The same is the case with regard to the explanation of innate ideas by Darwinism, which he has attempted in his address on "Leibnitzian Ideas in Modern Science" (vol. i. of the Collected Addresses). Here also he is most agreeably at one with me in what, four years before, I had elaborated in my General Morphology (vol. ii. p. 446), and in my Natural History of Creation . "The laws of heredity and adaptation explain to us how it is that
The spread of the Copernican doctrine of the revolutions of the earth, and the relations of our planet to the solar system gradually drove before it the old anthropocentric ideas. Men looked into the heavens and saw a new universe.
Certainly, I should say, very different from what those systems are which the European genteel tradition has handed down since Socrates; for these systems are egotistical; directly or indirectly they are anthropocentric, and inspired by the conceited notion that man, or human reason, or the human distinction between good and evil, is the centre and pivot of the universe.
The imagination is subjective, personal, anthropocentric; its movement is from within outwards toward an objectification. The understanding, i.e., the intellect in the restricted sense, has opposite characteristics it is objective, impersonal, receives from outside. For the creative imagination the inner world is the regulator; there is a preponderance of the inner over the outer.
Democracy. It has abraded the edge of that keen anthropocentric outlook of the Greeks which exalted whatever was distinctively human. Men have learnt to see beauty here, there, and everywhere a little beauty, mark you, not much! They fail to realize that in widening their capacity of appreciation they dilute its intensity. They have watered their wine. There is more to drink.
In his opinion "degeneration is the great principle that explains the existence of all the lower forms." If this Michelis-Dohrn theory were true, and all animals were really degenerate descendants of an originally perfect humanity, man would assuredly be the true centre and goal of all terrestrial life; his anthropocentric position and his immortality would be saved.
Human ethical notions, as Chuang Tzŭ perceived, are essentially anthropocentric, and involve, when used in metaphysics, an attempt, however veiled, to legislate for the universe on the basis of the present desires of men. In this way they interfere with that receptivity to fact which is the essence of the scientific attitude towards the world.
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