A History of Science — Volume 5Williams, Henry Smith
History
A History of Science — Volume 5
Williams, Henry Smith
Science -- History
The same complete candor of expression has marked every stage of the
unfolding of Professor Haeckel's philosophical pronouncements. This
fact is the more remarkable because Professor Haeckel is, so far as I am
aware, the only scientist of our generation who has felt at liberty to
announce, absolutely without reserve, the full conclusions to which his
philosophy has carried him, when these conclusions ran counter to the
prevalent prejudices of his time. Some one has said that the German
universities are oases of freedom. The remark is absolutely true of
Jena. It is not true, I believe, in anything like the same degree of any
other German university, or of any other university in the world. One
thing before others that has endeared Jena to Haeckel, and kept him
there in the face of repeated flattering calls to other universities, is
that full liberty of spirit has been accorded him there, as he knew it
would not be accorded elsewhere. "When a man comes into the atmosphere
of Jena," says Professor Haeckel, "he perforce begins to think--there
is no escape from it. And he is free to let his thoughts carry
him whithersoever they honestly may. My beliefs," he added, "are
substantially the beliefs of my colleagues in science everywhere, as I
know from private conversations; but they, unlike myself, are not free
to speak the full truth as they see it. I myself would not be tolerated
elsewhere, as I am well aware. Had I desired to remain in Berlin, for
example, I must have kept silent. But here in Jena one is free."
And he smiles benignly as he says it. The controversies through which he
has passed and the calumnies of which he has been the target have left
no scars upon this broad, calm spirit.
HAECKEL AS MAN AND TEACHER
It is indeed a delightful experience to meet Professor Haeckel in the
midst of his charming oasis of freedom, his beloved Jena. To reach his
laboratory you walk down a narrow lane, past Schiller's house, and
the garden where Schiller and Goethe used to sit and where now the
new observatory stands. Haeckel's laboratory itself is a simple oblong
building of yellowish brick, standing on a jutting point of land high
above the street-level. Entering it, your eye is first caught by a set
of simple panels in the wall opposite the door bearing six illustrious
names: Aristotle, Linne, Lamarck, Cuvier, Müller, Darwin--a Greek,
a Swede, two Frenchmen, a German, and an Englishman. Such a list is
significant; it tells of the cosmopolitan spirit that here holds sway.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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