The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological PhilosophyHaeckel, Ernst
Philosophy
The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy
Haeckel, Ernst
Biology; Evolution (Biology); Life -- Origin
Monism is best expressed as hylozoism, in so far as this removes
the antithesis of materialism and spiritualism (or mechanicism and
dynamism), and unites them in a natural and harmonious system. Our
monistic system has been charged with leading to pure naturalism;
one of its most vehement critics, Frederick Paulsen, attaches so
much importance to this stricture that he thinks it as dangerous
as dogmatic clericalism. We may, therefore, usefully consider the
idea of naturalism, and point out in what sense we accept it and
identify it with monism. The key to the position is in our monistic
anthropogeny, our unprejudiced conviction, supported by every branch
of anthropological research, of "man's place in nature," as we have
established it in the first section of the _Riddle_ (chapters ii.-v.).
Man is a purely natural being, a placental mammal of the order of
primates. He was phylogenetically evolved in the course of the
Tertiary Period from a series of the lower primates (directly from
the anthropoid apes, but earlier from the cynocephali and lemures).
Savage man, as we have him to-day in the Veddah or Australian negro, is
physiologically nearer to the apes than to highly civilized men.
Anthropology (in the widest sense) is only a particular branch of
zoology, to which we must assign a special position on account of its
extreme importance. Hence all the sciences which relate to man and his
psychic activity--especially what are called the moral sciences--must
be regarded from our monistic point of view as special branches of
zoology and as natural sciences. Human psychology is inseparably
connected with comparative animal psychology, and this again with
that of the plants and protists. Philology studies in human speech a
complicated natural phenomenon, which depends on the combined action
of the brain-cells of the phronema, the muscles of the tongue, and
the vocal cords of the larynx, as much as the cry of mammals and the
song of birds do. The history of mankind (which we, in our curious
anthropocentric mood, call the history of the world), and its highest
branch, the history of civilization, is connected by modern prehistoric
science directly with the stem-history of the primates and the other
mammals, and indirectly with the phylogeny of the lower vertebrates.
Hence, when we consider the subject without prejudice, we do not find
a single branch of human science that passes the limits of natural
science (in the broadest sense), any more than we find nature herself
to be supernatural.
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