Haeckel's monistic philosophy
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| Haeckel's monistic philosophy |
And so it is that this booklet is given over to a study of the monistic philosophy as it was conceived and developed by Ernst Haeckel. In the booklet immediately preceding we have traced the principal lines of mental development which made this philosophy possible, and have shown the part it played in Haeckel's daily life, both as a scientist and as a propagandist. In this we shall consider only monism itself, and with a few exceptions, only in the form which Haeckel developed it. Furthermore we shall view it principally from the history angles of science and common-sense, as Haeckel probably would wish it to be viewed.
The reasons for this are several. In the first place I, like Haeckel, am untrained in technical philosophy, and therefore unqualified to write a critique of monism from the viewpoint of that science. Furthermore, plenty of such critiques have been written, and in nearly every one of them the author assures the public that he has so thoroughly disposed of Haeckel as a philosopher that there is no need for further criticism. There are some exceptions, of course, and now and then one finds an academic philosopher who is in warm sympathy with the great naturalist. But in the main, Haeckel has a rather low standing with the men of wordsplitting schools, and gets little criticism from them that contributes to monism.
On the other hand, I have managed to acquire a certain training in natural science; enough, at least, to doubt gravely the assurances of non-scientific pedagogues, and to see where such authorities as Professor Oswald Kiilpe make far greater blunders in zoology than they lay to Haeckel in fields of logic, dielectic, and tradition. Moreover, I find that there are very few critiques of Haeckelian monism written by naturalists, and that most of those are of two to five decades in age. The scientist of today, I am inclined to think, does not give very much attention to systems of philosophy, probably, as Elliott hints, because he has found them largely metaphysic and therefore sterile. With this initiative, and the additional stimulus provided by our bands of protestant devil-hunter
