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Updated: June 27, 2025
For only phenomena are “accessible to thought.” Among the biologists who concern themselves with deeper considerations, Oscar Hertwig, the Director of the Anatomical Institute at Berlin, has expressed ideas similar to those we have been discussing, little as this may seem to be the case at first sight.
What else does this mean but that: We have no specific knowledge of Descent but we believe in it. In short, this is not natural science but natural philosophy; it forms no constituent part of our certain knowledge of nature but it is one aspect of our world-view. All the above-quoted assertions of Hertwig are calm and well-considered and show a decided deviation from the Darwinian position.
Associated with them is Reinke’s “Theory of Dominants.” Driesch started from their ranks, and is a most interesting example of consistent development from a recognition of the impossibilities of the mechanistic position to an individually thought-out vitalistic theory. Hertwig, too, takes a very definite position of his own in regard to these matters.
It is also proper to mention here the fact that in another place Hertwig no longer recognizes so fully the dogma set up by Fritz Mueller and Haeckel which is so closely bound up with Darwinism. I mean the so-called "biogenetic principle" according to which the individual organism is supposed to repeat in its development the development of the race during the course of ages.
Let us hope that these last wild convulsions are really the signs of approaching dissolution. In order to judge of the present status of Darwinism it is of primary importance to note the position assumed by the few really eminent investigators, who as pupils of Haeckel still seem to have remained true to him. Among these I reckon Oskar Hertwig, the well known Berlin anatomist.
A similar train of ideas to Lotze’s is followed to-day by O. Hertwig, especially in his “Mechanismus und Biologie.” Lighter and more elegant was the polemic against vital force, and the outline of a mechanical theory which Du Bois-Reymond prefaced to his great work, “Untersuchungen über die tierische Electricität” . It did not go nearly so deep as Lotze’s essay, but perhaps for that very reason its phrases and epigrams soon became common property.
Hertwig then is decidedly of opinion that Darwinism entirely fails in the individual case because in its application the basis of experience vanishes. Indeed, according to him, phylogeny is not at all capable of direct scientific investigation.
The organization of the egg is carried forward to the adult as an unbroken physiological unity, or individuality, through all modifications and transformations." And Wilson, Whitman, Hertwig, and others urge "that the organism as a whole controls the formative processes going on in each part" of the embryo. "Interaction of cells" can help us but little.
It is important to call especial attention to this because the adversaries of the book ignore it. Even Haeckel's friend and pupil, O. Hertwig sounds the retreat.
In embryology, so competent an authority as O. Hertwig—himself a former pupil of Haeckel’s—has reacted from the “fundamental biogenetic law.” His theory of the matter is very much that of Hamann which we have already discussed; development is not so much a recapitulation of finished ancestral types as the laying down of foundations after the pattern of generalised simple forms, not yet specialised; and from these foundations the special organs rise to different levels and grades of differentiation according to the type.
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