Die Schöpfung des Menschen und seiner Ideale Ein Versuch zur Versöhnung Zwischen Religion und Wissenschaft

Abstract

AN author who claims for his book that it is, “in its aim and substance, entirely new and original,” does not prepossess a reader in his favour; nor do the contents of Dr. Haacke's book remove the prejudice. He seeks to prove that the mechanical conception of nature leaves room for faith in a moral order of nature, by showing that natural bodies and organisms, and human ideals alike follow a great law of tendency to equilibrium. The book is popular in character, and it has the merit of being very readable. It is partly and mainly biological, partly philosophical, and throughout speculative. Dr. Haacke will have nothing to do with Darwin or Prof. Weismann—not merely that he rejects pangenesis or the continuity of the germ-plasm, but natural selection as well. He substitutes an epigenetic theory of gemmæ or crystals of the germ-plasm, which have polarity and are united into a gemmarium (or collection of gemmæ) whose configuration seems to be determined by every influence which affects the organism. The theory, which is explained in full in the author's work “Gestaltung und Vererbung,” is based on the assumed transmission of acquired characters. How unclearly he conceives the problem is shown by his description of an ideal test of that transmission (p. 344), which is no test at all, and by the confused treatment of inherited memory. Dr. Haacke thinks that in consequence of the organic connection of every part of the body, acquired characters may affec the configuration of the gemmarium, but he does no explain how the male gemmarium, when it passes from the parent body, should retain this configuration. The philosophical portion of the book is purely hypothetical. Each atom has sensation, and therefore, according to the sensori-motor law, also motion, which it exhibits in the tendency to equilibrium with other atoms. Schopenhauer's “will to live ” is replaced by the “will to equilibrate.” It is not clear whether the author supposes each brain-cell to have consciousness (which is psychological atomism with a vengeance). The most interesting portion of the book, from a philosophical point of view, is the slight sketch in which it is shown that art, morality, and religion exhibit the tendency to unite various elements into an equilibrium, that is, in simpler language, into an organic system. It is not, however, quite original, nor is it adequate. The author hopes to reconcile religion with the materialistic conception of nature in half a page, in which he declares the ideal of religion to be the equilibrium of all other ideals, and God to reveal himself everywhere as the tendency to equilibrium. From a purely speculative point of view, the author's doctrine is open to a grave objection. That every organic form which can maintain itself exhibits internal equilibrium is undoubted, and if Dr. Haacke had expounded this truth in its application to morality and knowledge with anything approaching adequacy, he might have done service. But it is quite another thing to assume a “tendency to equilibrium.” How much truer is the simple doctrine of Spinoza, that everything tends to “persist in its being”—in suo esse perseverare—a real tendency of which equilibrium is the result. Such a view is perfectly compatible with natural selection, which is the process by which bodies that cannot be in equilibrium under their conditions are eliminated. But Dr. Haacke apparently takes natural selection to be a force instead of a mere process according to which forces act, dismisses it for this reason, and sets up in its place an unreal striving after equilibrium, which equilibrium is only an effect. Of his purely philosophical quality the sample which the author gives in the concluding portion of his book does not induce us to recommend the book to the study of philosophers.