nd the religious
contemplation of nature peacefully participated. Now this view is to be
given up forever, in consequence of nothing else than Darwin's selection
theory. With an energy--we may say with a passionateness and confidence of
victory--such as we were accustomed to see only in the most advanced
advocates of materialism, Ludwig {159} Buechner, D. F. Strauss, Haeckel,
Oskar Schmidt, Helmholtz, the editor of the "Ausland" and some of his
associates, and our often-mentioned "Anonymus,"--in a common attack, assail
every idea of a _conformity to an end_ in nature, every idea of a goal
toward which the development at large and individually strives; in a word,
the whole category of _teleology_.[9]

In order to be just in our judgment, we shall have to let the advocates of
this view speak for themselves;--the advocates of _Dysteleology_, as
Haeckel, who is so extremely productive in forming new exotic words, calls
it; or of _Aposkopiology_, as Ebrard, in his "Apologetik" ("Apologetics"),
correcting the etymology, {160} somewhat pedantically calls it; or of
_Teleophoby_, as it is called by K. E. von Baer, in humorous irony.

The anonymous author of the book called "The Unconscious from the
Standpoint of Physiology and Descent Theory", asserts that, while the
descent theory but puts the teleological principle in question by
withdrawing the ground for a positive proof--an assertion which we
certainly have to reject most decidedly (compare Part II, Book II, Chap. I,
Sec. 2-Sec. 6)--the selection theory directly rejects it. Natural selection, he
says, solves the seemingly unsolvable problem of explaining the conformity
to the end in view, as result, without taking it as an aiding principle.
And Helmholtz says: "Darwin's theory shows how conformity to the end in the
formation of organisms can also originate without any intermingling of an
intelligence by the blind administration of a law of nature."

Haeckel really revels in these ideas. He says (Nat. Hist. of Creat., Vol. I,
p. 19): "These optimistic views [of the much-talked-of purposiveness of
nature or of the much-talked-of beneficence of the Creator] have,
unfortunately, as little real foundation as the favorite phrase, 'the moral
order of the universe,' which is illustrated in an ironical way by the
history of all nations.... If we contemplate the common life and the mutual
relations between plants and animals (man included), we shall find
everywhere, and at all times