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Updated: May 6, 2025
A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life that something which clothes itself in such infinitely varied and beautiful as well as unbeautiful forms of matter. We can evoke electricity at will from many different sources, but we can evoke life only from other life; the biogenetic law is inviolable.
We see this ontogenetically in every child. The biogenetic law compels us to affirm it phylogenetically. From all these facts sound reason must conclude that the still prevalent belief in the immortality of the soul is an untenable superstition. I have shown its inconsistency with modern science in the eleventh chapter of The Riddle of the Universe.
And as a matter of fact they all afford conclusive proofs of evolution; but not one of them, including even the fundamental biogenetic law and the inoculated chimpanzee, is decisive in regard to descent. This contention is sufficiently important to claim our attention for a little. Let us take the last example.
K. E. von Baer, the founder of the whole present science of the history of development, has certainly a most competent judgment of the correctness of this so-called biogenetic maxim; and he convincingly shows, in his essay on "Darwin's Doctrine," that the embryos never represent a former animalic form, but that their development follows the principle of representing first the common characteristics of the class, then those of the order, etc., until finally the individual characteristics appear in the formation.
In fact, with the aid of our biogenetic law we can trace the origin of our various systems of organs much further, down to the lowest stages of our ancestry.
As the heart of all Vertebrates is originally, in the light of phylogeny, only a local enlargement of the middle principal vein, it is in perfect accord with the biogenetic law that its first structure in the embryo is a simple spindle-shaped tube in the ventral wall of the head-gut.
It is clear that this morula reproduces for us to-day the simple structure of the multicellular animal that succeeded the unicellular amoeboid form in the early Laurentian period. In accordance with the biogenetic law, the morula recalls the ancestral form of the Moraea, or simple colony of Protozoa.
Here it may also be well to point out the great importance of anthropogeny, in the light of the biogenetic law, for the purposes of philosophy. Most certainly every clear and consistent thinker must derive from the facts of comparative anatomy and ontogeny we have adduced a number of suggestive ideas that cannot fail to have an influence on the progress of philosophy.
They show us that all the higher Vertebrates reproduce in their earlier stages, in harmony with the biogenetic law, the process that had so important a part in the rise of the whole Chordonia-stem.
The ontogeny of the diaphragm in man and the other mammals reproduces this phylogenetic process to-day, in accordance with the biogenetic law; in all the mammals the diaphragm is formed by the secondary conjunction of the two originally separate structures, the earlier ventral part and the later dorsal part.
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