even obviously perverse philosophy ever did. It put the scientist in the position of a tolerated vassal in the world of thought—the world that the Churches had held in chains for ages. Woe to the man who ventured to discuss “consciousness”! Not because science had but the slender proportions of a pioneer in that field, and because there was a danger of it making great mistakes with its natural philosophy. No, but because the white neutral field began here that we had agreed to respect—we “exact” scientists and “the Churches.” This was the real reason why Virchow and so many others who advocated the strict investigation of facts had forfeited the right to oppose Haeckel’s bolder natural philosophy and its conclusion—will have forfeited the right, at least, in the judgment of a future and more impartial generation. They did not oppose him on the lines of an equal zeal for the truth, but on much lower and reactionary lines. Their concern was not for the absolute triumph of truth, but for a compromise with certain forces in public life whose supremacy was not grounded on logic but on inherited external power. It required a certain amount of diplomatic shrewdness to enter into this compromise, in view of the practical power of those forces. Haeckel never had this “shrewdness.” We grant that. But it is certainly a confusion of all standards when the shrewdness of the individual tries to entrench itself behind ostensible claims of scientific method; when research abandons all advance on certain sides on the plea of “exactness” instead of philosophising—and then itself makes use of this exactness for compromising with an ecclesiastical tradition that only differs from real philosophy in its antiquity and rigidity, its disdain of rational argument, and its employment of secular weapons that certain historical events have put in its hand without any merit on its own part. The darkest cloud that hung menacingly on the horizon of Darwinism came from this quarter. At the moment we are dealing with it did not cause much concern. This early Darwinism thrilled with optimism as with the magic of spring. Haeckel had to speak once more in the course of the Congress. The geologist, Otto Volger, made a polite but energetic protest against the new theory in the final sitting. It was a curious connection of things that brought Volger into such a position. Volger is the man who saved for Germany the venerable Goethe-house at Frankfort-on-the-Main. The Free German Chapter received it from him as a gift. The action has nothing to do with geology, but it stands in the annals of culture. Thus the shadow of Goethe came to Stettin, to be present at the open birth of German Darwinism—Goethe, who had once stood on the very brink of the evolutionary ideas. And the man who brought him was a geologist who felt moved to attack the ideas of Darwin and Haeckel!