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Updated: June 29, 2025
It came from a young zoologist at Vienna who had thoroughly mastered Wigand's great anti-Darwinian work, an intelligent investigator who had set to work in the spirit of Wigand. Another talented zoologist, Hans Driesch, dedicates to the memory of Wigand two books in rapid succession and reprehends the contemporaries of that master of science for ignoring him.
He informs his readers that the criticism of Haeckel by men like Virchow, His, Semper, Haacke, Baer, and Wigand have been examined by professional specialists and proved practically worthless. This statement alone so clearly reveals Schmidt's lack of critical faculty and judgment that by it he at once forfeits his right to be taken seriously.
When Wigand closed his eyes in death in 1896, he was able to bear with him the consciousness that the era of Darwinism was approaching its end, and that he had been in the right. Today, at the dawn of the new century, nothing is more certain than that Darwinism has lost its prestige among men of science. It has seen its day and will soon be reckoned a thing of the past.
I look forward either to an entirely useless existence, or to an activity which responds to my inmost being, even if I have to exercise it afar from all external splendour. In the former case I should have to think of abbreviating that existence. Please address and send the manuscript, together with the enclosed letter, to the publisher Otto Wigand in Leipzig.
Soon, however, Sachs began to incline toward the position assumed by Naegeli; and as early as 1877, Wigand, in the third volume of his great work, expressed the hope that Sachs would withdraw still further from Darwinism. As years went by, Sachs drifted more and more from his earlier position, and Wigand was of opinion that to himself should be ascribed the credit of bringing about the change.
This means nothing less than a complete subversion of all scientific methods. Usually a theory is deduced from separate observations regarding the "actual" but here and this is what Wigand constantly asserted the theory was enunciated first, and then followed the attempt to establish it in fact.
But as this letter was, a few months later, followed by a similar one addressed to the publisher Wigand, who subsequently printed the essays, it is to be inferred that Breitkopf & Härtel, though assured of the future of Schumann's compositions, doubted the financial value of his musical essays an attitude pardonable at a time when there was still a ludicrous popular prejudice against literary utterances by a musician.
But it is not the case that mechanical theories have here prevailed. The opposition to them is just as great here as elsewhere, and from the days of Wigand onwards it has been almost continuously sustained.
Wigand once told me that he had sent Darwin a copy of his work and had addressed a letter to him at the same time merely stating that he had sent the book, making no reference to the line of thought contained in it. Darwin answered immediately in the kindest manner that he had not as yet received the book, but when it arrived he would at once make a careful study of its contents.
Even K. E. von Baer, who expressly contests the idea of selection, thinks it only scientifically indefensible, but not anti-religious; an opinion also held by Wigand.
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