It is no longer a special distinction of any prominent personality of the nineteenth century to have been influenced by Goethe. It is a kind of natural necessity from which one cannot escape. All that is great in the century can be traced back to Goethe. He flows beneath it, like a dark stream through the bowels of a mountain. Here and there the flanks open and the stream becomes visible; not a restless bubbling spring, but a broad mirror. There is, however, a closer following of Goethe. There are a few strong spirits that have been consciously inspired by him from the first in all their thoughts; have throughout life felt themselves to be the apostles of the “gospel of Goethe”; and in every new creation of their own have held that they did but reflect or expand his ideas, did but carry on his principles to these further conclusions. Haeckel is, in his whole work, one of this smaller band; his whole personality is, in fact, one of its most conspicuous manifestations in the second half of the century. In Goethe we find the basic ideas of his philosophy. Goethe took from him his God, and gave him a new one: took from him the external, transcendental God of the Churches, and gave him the God that is in all things, in the eternal development of the world, in body and soul alike, the God that embraces all reality and being, beside whom there is no distinct “world,” no distinct “sinful man,” no special beginning or end of things. When Haeckel found himself, at the highest point of his own path, by the side of Darwin, he was the first to see and to insist that Darwin was but a stage in the logical development of Goethe’s ideas. Fate decided that Haeckel should be even externally in some sense an heir of the Goethe epoch. Jena, the university that Goethe had regarded with such affection, and at which Schiller had toiled with his heart’s blood in “sad, splendid years,” owes its fame in the last third of the century to Haeckel. It is not an excess of adulation, but a simple truth, to say that among the general public and abroad the reputation of Jena passes directly from Goethe, Schiller, and Fichte to Haeckel. His name stands for an epoch in the life of Jena, like theirs; all that lies between is forgotten and unknown. In the district itself it is as if the old epochs and the new came into direct touch. [Illustration: JENA. _From “Jena in Wort und Bild” (Frommann’sche Hofbuchhandlung, Jena)._ ]