aturalists, to
whom Haeckel thought to be able to lay full and exclusive claim, for
the last twenty years of his life should have been moving towards the
Christian faith in his eager search for truth and should die not a
monist, but a convinced Christian. Neither did he die an old man, to
whom the adherents of monism would certainly have the effrontery to
impute feeble-mindedness, but at the early age of forty-six years. Nor
was his a sudden deathbed conversion--an impression which Schmidt
attempts to create (p. 62) in order to be able with H. Heine to
relegate the conversion to the domain of pathology--but followed after
many years of diligent and honest study and research. The other point
of which we must treat here, is the manner in which, after the example
of Dr. Reh, Schmidt attempts in the "Umschau" to exonerate Haeckel in
the matter of the "History of the three cliches." To begin with, it is
at the very least dishonest on the part of Schmidt to say that, "in
default of scientific arguments, theological adversaries have for the
last thirty years been using it as the basis of their attacks." That is
untrue, the "theological adversaries" have not had knowledge of it for
that length of time. On the contrary Haeckel's own scientific
colleagues were the first to discover and publish the matter some time
in the seventies, and in consequence excluded Haeckel from their
circle. Why does Schmidt not mention here the names of Ruetimeyer, His,
and Semper? Furthermore Schmidt writes as if Haeckel had satisfied his
colleagues in the matter of his forgery by declaring soon after (1870)
that he had been "guilty of a very ill-considered act of folly." Why
does Schmidt not mention the fact that the weighty attacks of His (Our
Bodily Form and the Physiological Problem of its Origin, Leipzig, 1875)
dates from the year 1875, five years after Haeckel's forced, palliative
explanation? Besides, this incident of the three cliches is only one
instance; the other examples of Haeckel's sense of truthfulness are for
the most part entirely unknown to his "theological adversaries," who
have nowhere to my knowledge made use of them; but _all_ of them
have been brought to light and held up before Haeckel by naturalists,
namely, by Bastian (1874), Semper and Kossmann (1876 and 1877), Hensen
and Brandt (1891), and Hamann (1893). Does this in any way tend to
establish Schmidt's honesty? (Dr. Dennert has entered into a more
searching criticism of Hae