HAECKEL, ERNST HEINRICH

HAECKEL, ERNST HEINRICH (1834–1919), German physician, zoologist, evolutionary biologist.

Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, known during his lifetime as "the German Darwin," was born on 16 February 1834 in Potsdam, Prussia, and died in Jena, Germany, on 9 August 1919. Haeckel died in his beloved home, Villa Medusa, after having lived in Jena for the last fifty-eight years of his life. For most of that time he was a professor of zoology at the University of Jena.

Haeckel's scientific perspective on the origins and development of organisms was based on an uneasy syncretism of the archetypal Romantic biology of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin. Haeckel was one of the earliest proponents of Darwinian theory in Germany. The two men met three times during their lives and corresponded. Haeckel is credited for being the first to explicitly state in print, in his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (1866; General morphology of organisms), that "Man has evolved from apes just as these have evolved from lower animals"—an explosive admission that Darwin deliberately avoided in his On the Origin of Species (1859). It is also in his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen that Haeckel introduced the idea—now considered incorrect—for which he is most famous, the "biogenetic law": ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. His famous illustrations of a developing human embryo replicating the analogous sequence of stages of the evolution of life on earth still appear in college textbooks (although there is a lingering controversy over whether they were falsified by Haeckel).

Haeckel was also the first to use the drawing of the "phylogenetic tree" to visually represent the Darwinian view of advanced forms of life emerging from more primitive species. An accomplished visual artist who celebrated the truth and beauty of nature in drawings, watercolors, and oil paintings, Haeckel reproduced his throbbing, almost psychedelic vision of sea microorganisms as observed through his microscope in an influential volume of illustrations, Kunstformen der Natur (1899; Art forms in nature). The spiny, mandala-like images in his book were borrowed by many art nouveau (Jugendstil) artists, including the Parisian architect René Binet (1826–1911), who used the form of one of these microbes as the inspiration for a pavilion built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris. Dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) was an ardent admirer of Haeckel, and during her tour of Germany in 1903–1904 she based some variations of her "dance of the future" on Haeckel's evolutionary ideals. In science, art, and culture, Haeckel was unquestionably one of the most famous and influential men of the nineteenth century.

By 1904, the year of his seventieth birthday, Haeckel had achieved enormous international acclaim as a populizer of science rivaled, perhaps, only by late-twentieth-century scientists such as Carl Sagan and E. O. Wilson. His rapid rise to fame followed the publication in Germany in 1899 ofDie Weltraetsel (1900; The Riddle of the Universe). Within five years of publication, each of these editions had sold more than one hundred thousand copies. The unprecedented success of this book was due to its vivid and apparently convincing philosophy of life based on Haeckel's concept of monism, "the connecting link between religion and science." Although Haeckel had first proposed his scientific religion of monism in a lecture he gave in Altenburg, Germany, on 9 October 1892, these ideas did not catch fire in the general public, with the exception of Roman Catholic priests enraged by his anti-Christian (and especially antipapist) polemics. The Riddle of the Universe changed all that. Monism was to replace dualisms in science (vitalism, a form of materialistic dualism) and religion (distinctions between psyche and body, natural and supernatural, nature and God). More importantly, an explicitly pantheistic and atheistic "monistic religion" based on "the good, the true, and the beautiful" in nature would replace Christianity. There would be no chapels or cathedrals in this new science-based faith, for nature itself would be worshipped through a new aesthetic vision in science. All scientists would develop the skills and sensitivities of artists, and artists would sing, paint, and dance the eternal flame of life as reflected through the prismatic truth of evolution.

Due to the overwhelming popularity of monism among "free thinkers," artists, scientists, and pantheists—particularly those in the German youth movement who were already practicing sun worship, nudism, vegetarianism, and Aryan mysticism—in January 1906 disciples of Haeckel in Jena formed an organization to promote the scientific religion of monism. The German Monistenbund, as it was called, grew by 1915 to six thousand members in forty-five cities. Membership fell during World War I and again after Haeckel's death in 1919. As they did with many other competing organizations and political parties, the Nazis banned the Monistenbund in 1933.

Perhaps Haeckel's most detailed statement of his pantheism and his contempt for Christianity can be found in his short 1914 book, Gott-Natur (Theophysis): Studien uber monistische Religion (God-nature [theophysics]: studies in monistic religion). In it, he proposed that his universal God be named the "All-God" (Allgott), "Pantheos," or "Deus intramundanus." The revered prophets of the new monistic religion were to be Giordano Bruno, Benedict de Spinoza, and Goethe instead of Jehovah, Christ, and Allah. According to the seven principles of theophysics, (1) God is nature itself, eternal and imperishable; (2) God is the laws of nature itself, impersonal, unconscious, unyielding; (3) God possesses no free will; (4) God does not perform supernatural miracles or wonders; (5) God as a universal substance is a trinity of attributes (matter, energy, and the psychom—a word Haeckel coined for the unity of psyche and body); (6) God is blind fate; and (7) God is no judge and knows no difference between good and evil.

Haeckel's last major work was Kristallseelen: Studien über des anorganische Leben (1917; The souls of crystals: studies of inorganic life). In it, Haeckel argues that life sprang from nonlife, and that the fact that crystals grow, move, transform, and have a symmetric internal structure like biological beings suggests that they, too, have a soul or psyche and are probably the inorganic source of life on this planet. This is an extension of an idea Haeckel had proposed as early as 1877 about living cells and microbes known as protozoa, that each cell or protozoa had its own psyche and that the totality of organic matter was "ensouled" (beseelt). Haeckel may have been prescient when he speculated about the origins of life from nonlife, for current scientific speculation also points to crystals as the form of inorganic matter from which life sprang almost four billion years ago.

Haeckel's international reputation as a prophet of science evaporated after World War I due to his very public support of the German war effort. In the last year of his life he was a member of the Thule-Gesellschaft, the underground organization that would later produce many members of the Nazi party, an act consistent with his lifelong support of Otto von Bismarck, the kaisers, and German nationalism.

See alsoDarwin, Charles; Evolution; Germany; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von; Nationalism; Romanticism.

bibliography

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——. The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy. Translated by Joseph McCabe. London, 1905.

——. Gott-Natur (Theophysis): Studien über monistischen Religion. Leipzig, 1914.

——. Kristallseelen: Studien über des anorganische Leben. Leipzig, 1917.

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Richard Noll