osophical or naturalistic dogma,
hold strictly to fact, and renounce with nonchalance any pretensions at
completeness of knowledge if the data do not admit of it, and on these
grounds hold themselves aloof from evolutionist generalisation. From among
these come the counsels of "caution," admissions that the theory is a
scientific hypothesis and a guide to research, but not knowledge, and
confessions that the Theory of Descent as a whole is verifiable rather as
a general impression than in detail.

Virchow's Position.

Warnings of this kind have come occasionally from Du Bois-Reymond, but the
true type of this group, and its mode of thought, is Virchow. It will
repay us and suffice us to make acquaintance with it through him. His
opposition to Darwinism and the theory of descent was directed at its most
salient point: the descent of man from the apes. In lectures and
treatises, at zoological and anthropological congresses, especially at the
meetings of his own Anthropological-Ethnological Society in Berlin, from
his "Vortraege ueber Menschen-und Affen-Schaedel" (Lectures on the Skulls of
Man and Apes, 1869), to the disputes over Dubois' _Pithecanthropus
erectus_ in the middle of the nineties, he threw the whole weight of his
immense learning--ethnological and anthropological, osteological, and above
all "craniological"--into the scale against the Theory of Descent and its
supporters. Virchow has therefore been reckoned often enough among the
anti-Darwinians, and has been quoted by apologists and others as against
Darwinism, and he has given reason for this, since he has often taken the
field against "the Darwinists" or has scoffed at their "longing for a
pro-anthropos."(13) Sometimes even it has been suggested that he was
actuated by religious motives, as when he occasionally championed not only
freedom for science, but, incidentally, the right of existence for "the
churches," leaving, for instance, in his theory of psychical life, gaps in
knowledge which faith might occupy in moderation and modesty. But this
last proves nothing. With Virchow's altogether unemotional nature it is
unlikely that religious or spiritual motives had any role in the
establishment of his convictions, and in Haeckel's naive blustering at
religion, there is, so to speak, more religion than in the cold-blooded
connivance with which Virchow leaves a few openings in otherwise frozen
ponds for the ducks of faith to swim in! And he has nothing