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 Evolution of Man, The — Volume 02 by Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Page 1  

the antithesis disappears in the Monistic philosophy, which knows neither matter without force nor force without matter. It is only necessary to reflect for some time over the question from the strictly scientific point of view to see that it is impossible to form a clear idea of either hypothesis. As Goethe said, "Matter can never exist or act without spirit, nor spirit without matter."

The human "spirit" or "soul" is merely a force or form of energy, inseparably bound up with the material sub-stratum of the body. The thinking force of the mind is just as much connected with the structural elements of the brain as the motor force of the muscles with their structural elements. Our mental powers are functions of the brain as much as any other force is a function of a material body. We know of no matter that is devoid of force, and no forces that are not bound up with matter. When the forces enter into the phenomenon as movements we call them living or active forces; when they are in a state of rest or equilibrium we call them latent or potential. This applies equally to inorganic and organic bodies. The magnet that attracts iron filings, the powder that explodes, the steam that drives the locomotive, are living inorganics; they act by living force as much as the sensitive Mimosa does when it contracts its leaves at touch, or the venerable Amphioxus that buries itself in the sand of the sea, or man when he thinks. Only in the latter cases the combinations of the different forces that appear as "movement" in the phenomenon are much more intricate and difficult to analyse than in the former.

Our study has led us to the conclusion that in the whole evolution of man, in his embryology and in his phylogeny, there are no living forces at work other than those of the rest of organic and inorganic nature. All the forces that are operative in it could be reduced in the ultimate analysis to growth, the fundamental evolutionary function that brings about the forms of both the organic and the inorganic. But growth itself depends on the attraction and repulsion of homogeneous and heterogeneous particles. Seventy-five years ago Carl Ernst von Baer summed up the general result of his classic studies of animal development in the sentence: "The evolution of the individual is the history of the growth of individuality in every respect." And if we go deeper to the root of this law of growth, we find that in the long run it can always be reduced to that attraction and repulsion of animated atoms which Empedocles called the "love and hatred" of the elements.

Thus the evolution of man is directed by the same "eternal, iron laws" as the development of any other body. These laws always lead us back to the same simple principles, the elementary principles of physics and chemistry. The various phenomena of nature only differ in the degree of complexity in which the different forces work together. Each single process of adaptation and heredity in the stem-history of our ancestors is in itself a very complex physiological phenomenon. Far more intricate are the processes of human embryology; in these are condensed and comprised thousands of the phylogenetic processes.

In my General Morphology, which appeared in 1866, I made the first attempt to apply the theory of evolution, as reformed by Darwin, to the whole province of biology, and especially to provide with its assistance a mechanical foundation for the science of organic forms. The intimate relations that exist between all parts of organic science, especially the direct causal nexus between the two sections of evolution--ontogeny and phylogeny--were explained in that work for the first time by transformism, and were interpreted philosophically in the light of the theory of descent. The anthropological part of the General Morphology (Book 7) contains the first attempt to determine the series of man's ancestors (volume 2 page 428). However imperfect

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