all aspects of human life have their parallels, or, more correctly, their lower stages of development, in the animal kingdom. The _whole history of nations_, or what is called _universal history, must therefore be explicable by means of natural selection,--must be a physico-chemical process_, depending upon the interaction of adaptation and inheritance in the struggle for life. And this is actually the case." That in his ethical naturalism he sees a real reform of morality, he expressly declares on the page next to the last of his "Natural History of Creation": "Just as this new monistic philosophy first opens up to us a true understanding of the real universe, so its application to practical human life must open up _a new road towards moral perfection_." (Vol. II, p. 367.) In the low conception of morality and its principle, Haeckel is perhaps seconded only by Seidlitz who says in his "Die Darwin'she Theorie" ("Darwin's Theory"), p. 198: "Rational and moral life consist in the satisfaction of all physical functions, in correct proportion and relation to one another. Man is immoral through excessive satisfaction of one function and through neglect of the others." As in the religious question, so in the ethical, Carneri also takes a peculiar position. In reducing all the phenomena of existence, together with the whole spiritual life of mankind, to a close development of nature according to the causal law, in expressly grouping also the utterances of the will of man under this law of an absolute necessity, in fully adopting Darwin's doctrine as the wholly satisfactory key for the comprehension of the entire development of nature up to the history of {239} mankind, in advocating an absolutely monistic determinism and a nearly exclusive dependence of the efficacy of moral principles on the theoretic cultivation of the mind, on reasoning and education, he, as before mentioned, stands on exactly the same ground with materialists and monists among whom he expressly ranks himself; in the inconsequence with which he makes concessions to the power of the idea and the ideal over man--concessions which could never be concluded from a mere immanent process of nature--he is closely related to Strauss. But it is peculiar that, although entirely dependent in his reasoning on that monistic view of the world, and that Darwinian view of nature, he defines his ethical developments and his reflections on the organizations of human life in a relative independence, which again separates him as moralist from these before-mentioned monists and materialists, and rather ranks him, as we have seen in Chap. I, Sec. 4, in the line of the disciples of Spinoza and Hegel. From this it can also be explained, how it could happen that in criticisms and reviews of Darwinism and its literature the standpoint which he takes could find such different and diametrically opposed expositions. While, for instance, the "Beweis des