Government and the open-minded Church will always assimilate these advancing and developing ideas and make them fruitful.” What more do we want? If this were the conclusion of Virchow’s speech, it would be merely a confirmation of Haeckel’s—the kind of support that the older worker can give to ardent youth, though on different grounds. But the cloven foot has still to peep out. I believe that, in the pure struggle of ideas, we can determine here, in 1863, precisely the point where Virchow falls—falls into a line that has nothing in common with the ideal struggle of the really free and liberating thought of humanity. We come to the great _salto mortale_, which one must see from 1863 onward in order to understand the Virchow of 1877. The passage is the more interesting as it refers to one of the chief stages in the development of Haeckel’s mind. The conception of man as a cell-state, established by Virchow in so masterly a fashion, involved a very curious conclusion. This conclusion, however we take it, came so close to the roots of every philosophy that it justified Schleiden to some extent when he protested that the whole cell-state theory was a philosophical element. If the human body is composed of millions of cells; if all the processes and functions, the whole life of the body in Virchow’s sense, are merely the sum of the vital processes and functions of these millions of individual cells; is not what we call “the soul” really the product of the millions upon millions of separate souls of these cells? Is not man’s soul merely the state-soul, the general spirit of this gigantic complex of tiny cell-souls? The lowest living things we spoke of, which consist of a single cell, showed unmistakable signs of having a psychic life. There was nothing to prevent us from thinking that in the combination of these various cells into communities each of them brought with it its little psychic individuality. And just as the individual bodies of the cells combined externally to form the new individual of the human body, so the cell-souls would enter into a spiritual combination to form the new psychic individuality of the human mind. I say there was nothing to prevent us from thinking this, in the line of deductions from the plain principles of the cell-state theory which Virchow claimed to be a naked “fact.” Philosophically, however, an immense number of questions, problems, doubts, and hopes lurked behind it. The whole conception of individuality took on a new aspect. First, in the material sense; the individual human being seemed to be, bodily, only the connecting bracket, as it were, of countless deeper individuals, the cells. But it was more significant on the spiritual side. The individual human soul could be analysed into millions of smaller psychic individualities, the cell-souls, of which it was the sum. The unified ego, the consciousness of self and unity of the psychic clamp, “man,” remained as the connection of all the cell-souls. A ray of