the ear, these wonderful works of art, which have always been appealed to as the most conclusive evidences of finalistic and creationistic doctrines. The first eye produced in the evolution of the animal kingdom was, like the first horn of the bovine genus, a mere rudimentary organ, differing as much from the eyes of higher species now existing as the fin of the fish differs from the arm of man. But in so far as it refracted light and aroused a luminous sensation, however weak, it gave the individual endowed with it an immense advantage in the struggle for existence, and made him the "elect of nature." His blind congeners necessarily disappeared, leaving it to him to preserve the species and to transmit this visual organ, in a more pronounced form perhaps, to the descendants. The same causes continued to act, and to accumulate their effects, from generation to generation, until, after thousands of centuries of progressive evolution, the eye at last attained to its present perfection, surpassing the most consummate products of art and the wisest combinations of intelligence; and it attained to it, not through intelligent intervention, but by natural selection.1

It was, as we have said, owing to this mechanical explanation of finality - an explanation which, in Darwin, does not exclude the idea of creation that contemporary materialism at once enthusiastically adopted the theory of natural selection. What we attribute to "the wisdom of Providence," or to "the kindness of Mother Nature," appeared, in the Darwinian hypothesis, as the product of the natural competition of beings and the selection resulting therefrom. Animals that can live in warm climates without any covering are protected by warm fur in Northern regions; most of those inhabiting the desert resemble their surroundings in color, and are thereby concealed from their enemies; finally, the existence of every living being is, in a certain measure, "assured." But there is no charitable 1 Origin of Species, chap. VI., pp. 139 ff.

design nor supernatural and providential arrangement in all this. The animals of the North do not have fur in order to protect them from the cold; they do not suffer from the cold, because they have fur. And they have fur, because their progenitors, whom chance clothed with a thicker skin, were, on that account, better fitted to carry on the struggle for existence than their less favored congeners; and were able, in consequence of this natural selection, to reproduce themselves and to transmit their peculiarities to their offspring, whereas the others perished, and their type disappeared. The same may be said of the animals of the desert, and of all animals and plants enjoying some advantage apparently due to final causes.1

The principle of selection applies not only to anatomy and physiology, but also to animal psychology. The instincts of spiders, ants, bees, beavers, and birds, which, even according to Hartmann's belief, can only be explained by means of a deus ex machina (the unconscious), are, in Darwin's opinion, nothing but inherited habits, which have become a second nature through the effects of the struggle for life and natural selection. That which is innate in the present generation was not so in the original ancestors, and the wonderful art manifested in the instincts of certain animals is merely the result of an evolution lasting countless ages, and of a gradual perfection, beginning with the very earliest origin of these species. Our intellectual habits originated in the same way. The ideas which spiritualism considers as innate, and which, according to Kant, belong to the very constitution of the intelligence, are, undoubtedly, a part of our present mental organization, but they were not native to our first progenitors. The latter acquired them by experience; they were transmitted to us, as intellectual habits or dispositions, by heredity aided by selection, and thus eventually became innate.

1 Haeckel, Natural History of Creation, Lecture XI.

An inevitable corollary of the principle of transforma tion and selection is the simian origin of man. Darwin advances it in his second main work: The Descent of Man (1871). Man is the descendant of a variety of apes, more favored than the rest. The false pride which hinders us from accepting this view arises from the fact that the ape has a comical demeanor which gives him the appearance of a crétin, an idiot, a caricature of a man. We should not feel so, if it were held that we descended from the lion or the rose-bush. Strange to say, we do not even experience this feeling when we read the Biblical story, according to which our species sprang from a clod of earth: a still more humiliating origin, considering the enormous distance between a clod of earth and an organized being, and an organized being as advanced as the ape. The objection is made that a Cæsar, a Kant, a Goethe, could not have descended from an animal, that there is an insuperable distance between them and the ape. But this objection falls to the ground when we take into account, on the one hand, the intermediate links between the anthropoid ape and Cæsar (Papuans, New Zealanders, Caffirs, etc.), and, on the other, the immense period of time which nature, i. e., the struggle for existence and selection, needed to effect the evolution from the man-ape to Cæsar and Goethe. It is true, the six thousand years, which, according to the Bible, is the age of the world, would not have sufficed. But the paleontological discoveries of our century (lacustrine deposits, flint tools, cave-dwellers, the kjökken-möddings on the Danish coasts, etc.) unquestionably prove that the human race is much older, and that even Egyptian civilization, which is prodigiously ancient, is relatively modern. Infinitely short steps and infinitely long periods: these, says Strauss,2 are the two keys which open the gates hitherto accessible to miracle only. Well! Does not

1 Strauss, Der alte und neue Glaube, p. 202.

Id.

Christianity teach that God became man? Then why cannot an animal become man? The non-Christian religions do not believe it to be impossible, as the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, taught by ancient Egypt, Brahmanism, and Buddhism, shows. In truth, there is no gulf between man and the animal. We cannot deny the latter sensibility, memory, and intelligence. The facts which prove it would fill volumes. The moral sense is not foreign to animals; it may, as Strauss adds,1 be aroused in the dog by the whip; but can we not say the same for many men? The animal has feelings of motherly love, attachment, and devotion. It differs from us in degree only; its "soul" is to ours what the bud is to the flower and the fruit.

We shall not dwell upon these results of contemporary materialistic thought, which add nothing essentially new to the teachings of the eighteenth century. What characterizes modern materialism is not its mechanical explanation of the world, nor its absolute negation of final causes, -in this respect as well as in all the others, materialistic principles have not changed since the times of Democritus,

but solely the fact that, thanks to Darwin, it found, as its adherents claim, a ready answer to the constantly reiterated and never refuted objection of the teleologists: Every work adapted to an end presupposes a workman, an intelligence, a design, and shall not the most admirable product of all, the most perfect camera obscura, the human eye, presuppose one?

In other respects, contemporary materialism agrees not only with the materialism of the eighteenth century and Greek materialism, but also with the essential doctrines of German idealism and Spinozistic pantheism: the Universe or the All-One substituted for God, the consubstantiality of beings, absolute determinism. In order to emphasize this agreement, the German materialism of our days calls itself monism.

1 Der alte und neue Glaube, p. 207.

The difference existing between materialistic monism. and the idealistic monism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, may be expressed as follows: The former emphatically denies all finality; whereas the latter, inspired by Kant's Critique of Judgment, recognizes in nature, if not the designs of a transcendent Creator, at least an immanent finality. The Idea of Hegel is the highest end of nature realizing itself by means of an evolution that is both physical and logical: physical, in so far as it is unconscious; logical, in so far as it excludes chance. Hence, it is really identical with what Schelling and, above all, Schopenhauer, call by its true name: Will.

Now, we may ask ourselves the question: Does not the Darwinian principle, which materialism invokes with such absolute confidence, corroborate, rather than overturn, the hypothesis of immanent teleology? Is it really true that the struggle for existence is a first cause and exclusively mechanical? Does not the struggle for life, in turn, presuppose Schopenhauer's will-to-live, will or effort, without which, according to the profound remark of Leibniz, there can be no substance?1 Does it not, therefore, presuppose an anterior, superior, and immaterial cause? What can the formula: struggle for existence, mean, except: struggle in order to exist? Now, that carries us right into teleology. Besides, we cannot deny that the entire Darwinian terminology is derived from the teleological theory: the terms, selection, choice, evidently introduce an intellectual element into nature.2 These are mere images, it is

1 Haeckel himself says: In the last analysis, the impulses which determine (bedingen, condition) the struggle and its diverse forms, are merely those of self-preservation (Selbsterhaltung). See his Natural History of Creation, pp. 282 ff. Here we no longer have materialism, but pure voluntarism.

[See Darwin's answer to such objections, Origin of Species, 6th ed., chap. IV., pp. 58 f. TR.]