and that it may be a legitimate
subject for controversy. But into that question our author does not
enter; and even when he has conferred on the atoms these astounding
properties, he abstains from what would seem a natural development: for
his doctrine is that our power is actually less than that of the
atoms,--that instead of utilising the attractions and repulsions, or
"likes and dislikes," of our constituent particles, and directing them
by the aggregate of conscious will-power to some preconceived end, we
ourselves, on the contrary, are dominated and controlled by _them_; so
that freedom of the will is an illusion.

Freedom being thus disposed of, Immortality presents no difficulty; a
soul is the operation of a group of cells, and so the existence of man
clearly begins and ends with that of his terrestrial body:--

"The most important moment in the life of every man, as in that of
all other complex animals, is the moment in which he begins his
individual existence [coalescence of sperm cell and ovum] ... the
existence of the personality, the independent individual,
commences. This ontogenetic fact is supremely important, for the
most far-reaching conclusions may be drawn from it. In the first
place, we have a clear perception that man, like all the other
complex animals, inherits all his personal characteristics, bodily
and mental, from his parents; and further, we come to the momentous
conclusion that the new personality which arises thus can lay no
claim to 'immortality'" (p. 22).

Others beside Haeckel have held this kind of view at one time or
another; but, unlike him, most of them have recanted and seen the error
of their ways. He is, indeed, aware that several of his great German
contemporaries have been through this phase of thought and come out on
the other side, notably the physiologist-philosopher Wundt, and he
refers to them fairly and instructively thus:--

"What seems to me of special importance and value in Wundt's work
is that he 'extends the law of the persistence of force for the
first time to the psychic world.'

"Thirty years afterwards, in a second edition, Wundt emancipated
himself from the fundamental errors of the first, and says that he
'learned many years ago to consider the work a sin of his youth';
it 'weighed on him as a kind of crime, from which he longed to free
himself as soon as possible.' In the first,