We can see very well that this was quite natural. If there was any man likely to put forward such views it was Virchow. He had passed through Müller’s school, but was now one of the younger group who, even during Müller’s life, were gradually adopting certain very profound views on life and man, without any particular resistance on the master’s part. The chief characteristic of nearly the whole of this group was the lack of the volcanic stratum below of deep and personal religious feeling; in Müller this had been throughout life an enchained Titan among the rocks of his logical sense of realities, yet it had given a gentle glow and movement to the floor of his mind. Rudolf Virchow was the coolest, boldest, and clearest-minded of the group. He went to the opposite extreme. If Müller was standing on a volcano, which he only repressed by the giant force of his will—a nature that was above all master of itself—Virchow, on the contrary, was standing on a glacier, and he had never taken the trouble to conceal it. I should not venture to count him amongst the instinctively Monistic minds, in the sense of Goethe, to whom the unity of God and nature, the inorganic and the organic, the animal and the man, comes as an ardent and irresistible feeling. But it would have been strange if, in those years and in the middle of the whole scientific current of his time, his own organ, his icy logic, had not led him to the same conclusion; that it is a simpler method of research to believe in natural law alone, to regard the living merely as a complex play of the same forces that we have in physics and chemistry, and to consider man, with the bodily frame of an ape-like mammal, to be really such an animal. I believe, indeed, that Virchow never abandoned this simple solution in his own mind at any part of his career. The controversy he afterwards engaged in ran on different lines. It seems to me that at an early stage of his development he became convinced that there must be limits to scientific inquiry, not on logical, but on diplomatic grounds; because it is not an absolute agency, but only a relatively small force amongst many more powerful institutions, the Church, the State, and so on. Hence it would have to respect limitations that were not drawn from its own nature; in given cases it would have to keep silent in order not to jeopardise its existence as a whole. It is my firm belief that this diplomatic attitude as such would lead to the destruction of all pursuit of the truth. It carefully excludes the possibility of any further martyrdoms, but at the cost of science’s own power to illumine the world. In my opinion the free investigation of the truth is an _absolute_ right. Churches, States, social orders, moral precepts, and all that is connected with them, have to adjust themselves to this investigation, and not the reverse.