n borne forward
on the advancing wave of monistic philosophy, he has, in its
specification, attempted such precision of materialistic detail, and
subjected it to so narrow and limited a view of the totality of
experience, that the progress of thought has left him, as well as his
great English exemplar, Herbert Spencer, somewhat high and dry, belated
and stranded by the tide of opinion which has now begun to flow in
another direction. He is, as it were, a surviving voice from the middle
of the nineteenth century; he represents, in clear and eloquent
fashion, opinions which then were prevalent among many leaders of
thought--opinions which they themselves in many cases, and their
successors still more, lived to outgrow; so that by this time Professor
Haeckel's voice is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness, not as
the pioneer or vanguard of an advancing army, but as the despairing
shout of a standard-bearer, still bold and unflinching, but abandoned
by the retreating ranks of his comrades as they march to new orders in
a fresh and more idealistic direction.

CHAPTER IV

MEMORANDA FOR WOULD-BE MATERIALISTS

The objection which it has been found necessary to express concerning
Materialism as a complete system is based not on its assertions, but on
its negations. In so far as it makes positive assertions, embodying the
results of scientific discovery and even of scientific speculation
based thereupon, there is no fault to find with it; but when, on the
strength of that, it sets up to be a philosophy of the universe--all
inclusive, therefore, and shutting out a number of truths otherwise
perceived, or which appeal to other faculties, or which are equally
true and are not really contradictory of legitimately materialistic
statements--then it is that its insufficiency and narrowness have to be
displayed.

It will be probably instructive, and it may be sufficient, if I show
that two great leaders in scientific thought (one the greatest of all
men of science who have yet lived), though well aware of much that
could be said positively on the materialistic side, and very willing to
admit or even to extend the province of science or exact knowledge to
the uttermost, yet were very far from being philosophic Materialists or
from imagining that other modes of regarding the universe were thereby
excluded.

Great leaders of thought, in fact, are not accustomed to take a narrow
view of existence, or to suppose that on