Freedom in Science and Teaching. - Ernst Haeckel (mobi reader txt) 📗

title="[110]"> Bois-Reymond availed themselves of the particularly solemn occasions of the fiftieth anniversary and of the fiftieth meeting of the German naturalists and physicians to lay lance in rest against the progress and freedom of science. The eager approbation which they both promptly met with from the party of the clergy and of all other enemies of free thought—Virchow, indeed, in much greater measure than Du Bois-Reymond—appears to justify this inquiry. I believe I can contribute something towards answering it, and as I am not fettered by any reverence for the Berlin tribunal of science or by any anxiety as to vexing influential Berlin connections, as most of my colleagues are who think as I do, I do not hesitate, here as elsewhere, to express my honest conviction in the freest and frankest manner, not troubling myself about the wrath which may be roused in many actual—and not actual—officials in Berlin at this exposition of the unvarnished truth.

The primary cause of their "misunderstanding," and the best excuse that can be offered for it, in Virchow and Du Bois-Reymond alike, lies in their unacquaintance with the advance of modern morphology. As has been repeatedly stated, no natural science is so directly to be referred to the doctrine of evolution—and more particularly to the theory of descent—as morphology. It is because we morphologists can neither explain nor comprehend all the manifold and infinitely complex form-phenomena of the animal and plant worlds without this theory, because to us transmutation contains the only possible, rational explanation of organic types, that we all regard it as the indispensable basis of the scientific doctrine of form, and as demanding no further proofs of its certainty than those which now lie in abundance before us.

Du Bois-Reymond, and still more Virchow, ignore these proofs, because they are to a great extent ignorant alike of the inquiries and results, of the methods and the aims of our modern morphology, and this ignorance may be accounted for partly by the one-sided direction which their biological studies have taken, partly by the fact that there are few universities where the study of morphology is so behindhand as at the University of Berlin. Fully twenty years have now elapsed since the great Johannes Müller died, the last naturalist who could command all the departments of biology. The three great provinces of science which had been reunited into a triune kingdom under his powerful sceptre, were then divided among three professors' chairs: Du Bois-Reymond took that of physiology, Virchow, theoretical pathology (pathological anatomy and physiology), and the third, and most important chair, that of morphology (human and comparative anatomy, including the history of evolution) fell to Boguslaus Reichert. This choice was, as is now universally admitted, an incomprehensible mistake. Instead of calling Carl Gegenbaur, or Max Schultze, or some one else of youthful capacity and vigour to the chair of morphology—a science which is the first foundation of zoology as well as of medicine—in Reichert they selected an elderly school anatomist cramped by strong old-fashioned notions, who had done some good and useful specialist work, but whose general views had developed all awry, and who for the unexampled obscurity of his conceptions and the confusion of his ideas, was outdone by none save only Adolf Bastian. For twenty years this man has represented animal morphology in the second university of Germany, and in these twenty years hardly any work worth mentioning has been done there in the whole of this vast department—neither by the master nor by his pupils. We have only to compare the many worthless anatomical productions of Berlin during these two decades (for instance, the recent confused work by Fritsch on the brain of fishes) with the rich mine of invaluable work produced during the preceding twenty years by Johannes Müller and his crowd of disciples.

But, as if this were not enough, Reichert took advantage of his influential position to hinder as far as possible all scientific study of morphology. For example, he, with the co-operation of his colleagues, carried through that pretended "reform" of medical examination which puts the so-called Tentamen physicum in the place of the philosophicum; philosophy was entirely eliminated. Zoology and botany, which for centuries have been very justly regarded as the indispensable foundation of all instruction in natural science for the young medical student, disappeared from the curriculum. Only, as if in scorn of these sciences, in each examination a small place was reserved for comparative anatomy—for that most difficult and philosophical part of animal morphology which cannot be at all understood without some previous knowledge of the other branches of zoology. And yet comparative anatomy and the history of development are the indispensable preliminary steps to a true scientific comprehension of human anatomy, that most essential foundation of all medical knowledge. Without the vivifying idea of development, mere anatomical knowledge is an empty and lifeless cramming of the memory.

In the place of morphology, thus degraded from its office, a detailed study of physiology was introduced, but always in a one-sided direction. Now these two great branches of biology, which are equally important and have an equal claim on our attention, are so dependent the one on the other, that a real scientific understanding of organic life can never be obtained without due relative study of both. The masterly and incomparable teaching of Johannes Müller owed a great part of its captivating charm to his equitable regard for morphology and physiology, as well as to his comprehensive treatment, from the broadest point of view, of the enormous mass of details to be dealt with. I therefore have not the smallest doubt that the morphological training of medical students, as at present conducted at Berlin under the influence of Reichert and his colleagues, is as far behind that of Müller's day, twenty or thirty years ago, in all general comprehension of the typical organism, as it is in advance of it in specialist acquirements.

In medical, as in all other scientific learning, the highest aim does not consist in seeking to accumulate a vast chaotic mass of isolated items of knowledge, but in a general comprehension of the science, its aims and problems. The teacher should, above everything, guide the pupil to this general knowledge, and then it will be easy to him, by the aid of proper methods, to acquire mastery in each individual and special branch. Thus in medicine, as in every other science, he is not the best qualified who, on Bastian's method, has loaded his memory with a confused mass of undigested facts, and has flung them all together into his brain without any order; but, on the contrary, he who has practically digested a considerable number of the most important facts, and has critically co-ordinated them to a harmonious whole. It is precisely under this aspect that transmutation is of such inestimable value to morphology; it enables us to rise from the bare empirical knowledge of numberless isolated facts to a philosophical conception of their efficient causes.

The aversion and contempt which the theories of descent and selection have met with at Berlin, more than in any other place, is in great measure to be explained by the circumstance that, during the last two decades, morphological studies have been more neglected in that university than any others. In no other city of Germany has evolution in general, as well as Darwinism in particular, been so little valued, so utterly misunderstood, and treated with such sovereign disdain as in Berlin. Nay, Adolf Bastian, the most zealous of all the Berlin opponents of our doctrines, has insisted on these facts with peculiar satisfaction. Of all the conspicuous naturalists of Berlin only one accepted the doctrine of transmutation from the beginning with sincere warmth and full conviction, being, indeed, persuaded of its truth even before Darwin himself. This was the gifted botanist Alexander Braun, who is lately dead—a morphologist who was equally distinguished by the extent of his comprehensive knowledge of details, as by his philosophical mastery over them. His firm conviction of the truth of the theory of descent is all the more remarkable because he was at the same time a spotless character, a pious Christian in the best sense of the word, and an extremely conservative politician; a striking example that these convictions can dwell side by side with the principles of the recent doctrines of evolution in one and the same person. But in comparison with the powerful influence of the rest of the Berlin naturalists who, for the most part, are decided opponents of transmutation, and who have only lately—a few of them, to follow the fashion—become converts to it, a man like Alexander Braun could have no effect in procuring that it should be taught.

However, this is not the first time that this very Berlin society of learned men has set itself with remarkable firmness against the most important advances of science. Virchow's former colleague, the deceased Stahl, with a similar purpose and with great success, preached this principle: "Science must turn back again." Just as at the present day the Berlin biologists have opposed the most obstinate and pertinacious resistance to the greatest scientific stride of this century, so did it happen in former times with regard to other doctrines of progress. We have only to recall Caspar Friedrich Wolff, the great inquirer, who in 1759 first detected the nature of the individual processes of development in the animal ovum, and founded on it his observations in his "Theoria Generationes," which marked an epoch in biological science. The Berlin savants, full of the prevailing prejudices, so contrived at that time that Wolff never once could obtain the permission which he craved, to lecture publicly, and in consequence found himself compelled to retire to St. Petersburg for the sake of peace. And yet in that instance there was no question of a "theory" properly so-called. For the fundamental theory of generation—the "theory of epigenesis"—as propounded by Wolff was nothing more than a simple, general exposition of embryological facts which he had been the first to recognise, and of whose truth every one might convince himself by direct observation. In spite of this, for another half century, the predominant error of the "Preformation-theory" continued to be universally accepted—the ludicrous and nonsensical doctrine, supported by the authority of Haller, that all the successive generations of animals exist preconceived and enclosed one within the other, and that no individual development ever takes place! Nulla est epigenesis! (Compare my "Evolution of Man," vol. i. p. 31.)

But it would appear that it is the fate of that most interesting of all sciences, the history of evolution, to find its most important steps and its greatest discoveries met by the firmest and most persistent opposition. For while Wolff's fundamental theory of epigenesis, which was promulgated in 1759, was not recognised until 1812, Lamarck's theory of descent, founded in 1809, had to wait fully fifty years before Darwin, in 1859, showed it to be the greatest acquisition of modern science; and during that period, in spite of all the progress made in empirical science, how persistently this most comprehensive of all biological theories was combated. We need only recollect how, in 1830, the celebrated George Cuvier silenced its most eloquent supporter, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, in the midst of the Paris Academy, and how almost at the same time its founder, the great Lamarck, ended his life in blindness, misery and want, while his opponent Cuvier was enjoying the highest honours and the greatest splendour. And yet we know now that the despised and contemned Lamarck and Geoffroy had already grasped truths of the highest significance, while Cuvier's much-admired and universally-accepted theory of creation is now on all hands neglected as an absurd and untenable delusion. But as neither Haller as against Wolff, nor Cuvier as against Lamarck, could permanently hinder the