an under this law of an absolute necessity, in fully adopting
Darwin's doctrine as the wholly satisfactory key for the comprehension of
the entire development of nature up to the history of {239} mankind, in
advocating an absolutely monistic determinism and a nearly exclusive
dependence of the efficacy of moral principles on the theoretic cultivation
of the mind, on reasoning and education, he, as before mentioned, stands on
exactly the same ground with materialists and monists among whom he
expressly ranks himself; in the inconsequence with which he makes
concessions to the power of the idea and the ideal over man--concessions
which could never be concluded from a mere immanent process of nature--he
is closely related to Strauss. But it is peculiar that, although entirely
dependent in his reasoning on that monistic view of the world, and that
Darwinian view of nature, he defines his ethical developments and his
reflections on the organizations of human life in a relative independence,
which again separates him as moralist from these before-mentioned monists
and materialists, and rather ranks him, as we have seen in Chap. I, Sec. 4, in
the line of the disciples of Spinoza and Hegel. From this it can also be
explained, how it could happen that in criticisms and reviews of Darwinism
and its literature the standpoint which he takes could find such different
and diametrically opposed expositions. While, for instance, the "Beweis des
Glaubens," in the March number of 1873, thinks that Carneri wishes to seek
on Darwinian ground a new and better basis for morality than we had
heretofore; while Haeckel in the preface to the third edition of his
"Natural History of Creation," page XXIX, mentions the publication of
Carneri with the greatest praise, earnestly recommends all theologians and
philosophers to read it, and greets it as the first successful attempt at
applying fruitfully the monistic view {240} of the world, as established by
Darwinism, to the realm of practical philosophy and at showing that the
immense progress of our knowledge of the world caused by the descent theory
has only the most beneficial effect upon the further progressing
development of mankind in practical life;--a criticism in the "Ausland" (8
April, 1872, No. 15), calls the same publication "an attempt at harmonizing
Darwin's hypothesis with the current views of ethics, and at showing that
those doctrines cannot be sustained which result as strictly logical