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Updated: June 8, 2025
According to his Anthropogeny, the belief that the hand of a Creator has arranged all things with wisdom and intelligence is an ancient story and an empty phrase. Pious Renunciation of the Knowability of God. Wilhelm Bleek, Albert Lange, Herbert Spencer.
To man belongs, together with the visible objective body, the invisible subjective Something which we may call mind or soul or x, but which, at all events, first makes the body into a man. To observe and make out this Something is in my view the true anthropogeny; how the body originated concerns me as little as does the question whether my gloves are made of kid or peau de suède.
But when the prophets of ethical naturalism again and again announce that the great aim of all the discoveries of the evolution theory is to show us how far mankind has fortunately progressed; when their spirit of devotion is nourished by Göthe's Promethean word: "Hast thou not thyself accomplished all, thou holy glowing heart?" and even when Häckel prints as the leading motto of his "Anthropogeny" Göthe's poem "Prometheus"; when the struggle of selection is also elevated to a moral principle, and the life-task of an individual is limited to creating elbow-room for himself: then humility, indeed, is a virtue which a naturalist may acquire, not through his naturalism, but in spite of it; and the great naïveté with which, in books of that tendency, haughtiness and passion for glory are treated as something necessarily understood, and their own ego is glorified, is a much more logical result.
Where teleological Dualism seeks the arbitrary thoughts of a capricious Creator in miracles of creation, causal Monism finds in the process of development the necessary effects of eternal immutable laws of nature." Häckel's "Anthropogeny" also is replete with attacks upon a teleological view of nature, which leave nothing wanting in distinctness and coarseness. On page 111, Vol.
The followers of Darwin enter still less into the discussion of the question as to the origin of self-consciousness and of moral self-determination. Häckel who, in his "Natural History of Creation" and in his "Anthropogeny," expounds his whole evolution theory in all its antecedent conditions and consequences has, indeed, much to say of the different faculties of the soul of man and animals.
Let the reader think of Häckel's "Natural History of Creation" and "Anthropogeny," where he will find the most interesting reports from all realms of exact natural science, together with a wholly unsolved entanglement of descent, selection, and mechanical view of the world, and this mode of contemplation of the world, with eloquent and enthusiastic proclamation of monism and with unconcealed derision of the capricious arbitrariness of a personal Creator, all thrown together as one great entire system, formed at one stroke.
In order to give a clear idea of the first mentioned facts, Häckel, for instance, in his "Natural History of Creation" and in his "Anthropogeny," represents by engravings the embryos of different vertebrates and also of man; representations which although, according to the judgment of competent scientists, unfortunately not exact, but modified, after the manner of stencil plates, in favor of greater similarity yet make it quite clear that the similarity of the different embryos must be very great.
It is to be regretted that this resounding trumpet blast of a few naturalists renders any peaceful interchange of ideas impossible from the beginning. I have expressed my admiration for Darwin more freely and earlier than many of his present eulogists. But I maintain, that when anthropogeny is discussed, it is desirable first of all to explain what is understood by anthropos.
It was soon evident to every clear-headed thinker that this question could only be answered in the sense of our anthropogeny, by admitting that man had descended from a long series of Vertebrates by gradual modification and improvement. In this way the real affinity of man and the Vertebrates came to be admitted on all hands.
This theory was most strenuously defended by the Catholic priest and natural philosopher, Michelis, in his Haeckelogony: An Academic Protest against Haeckel's Anthropogeny . In still more "academic" and somewhat mystic form the theory was advanced by a natural philosopher of the older Jena school the mathematician and physicist, Carl Snell.
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