And Haeckel even goes considerably further, assuming "a quite independent stock for the vegetable kingdom, and a second for the animal kingdom", and between the two "a number of independent stocks of Protista, each of which, quite independently of the former, has developed out of one special archegone of the moneron type" [40] ( Schöpfungsgeschichte , p. 397)This primordial being was only invented by Dühring in order to bring it into as great disrepute as possible by drawing a parallel with the primordial Jew {D. Ph. 110} Adam, and in this he -- that is to say, Herr Dühring -- suffers the misfortune of not having the faintest idea that this primordial Jew had been shown by Smith's Assyrian discoveries [41] to have been a primordial Semite, and that the whole biblical history of creation and the flood turns out to be a part of the old heathen religious myths which the Jew have in common with the Babylonians, Chaldeans and Assyrians.
It is certainly a bitter reproach against Darwin, and one for which he has no defence, that he comes to an end at once at the point where the thread of descent breaks off. Unfortunately it is a reproach which has been earned by the whole of our natural science. Where the thread of descent breaks off for it, it "ends". It has not yet succeeded in producing organic beings without descent from others; indeed, it has not yet succeeded even in producing simple protoplasm or other albuminous bodies out of chemical elements. With regard to the origin of life, therefore, up to the present, natural science is only able to say with certainty that it must have been the result of chemical action. However, perhaps the philosophy of reality is in a position to give some help on this point as it has at its disposal independent parallel lines of products of nature not mediated by common descent. How can these have come into existence? By spontaneous generation?
But up to now even the most audacious advocates of spontaneous generation have not claimed that this produced anything but bacteria, embryonic fungi and other very primitive organisms -- no insects, fishes, birds or mammals.
But if these homogeneous products of nature -- organic, of course, as here we are only dealing with these -- are not connected by descent, they or each of their ancestors must, at the point "where the thread of descent breaks off", have been put into the world by a separate act of creation.
So we arrive once again at a creator and at what is called deism.
Herr Dühring further declares that it was very superficial on Darwin's part "to make the mere act of the sexual composition of properties the fundamental principle of the origin of these properties" {116}.
This is another free creation and imagination of our deep-rooted philosopher.
Darwin definitely states the opposite: the expression natural selection only implies the preservation of variations, not their origin (p.
63). This new imputation to Darwin of things he never said nevertheless helps us to grasp the following depth of Dühringian mentality:
"If some principle of independent variation had been found in the inner schematism of generation, this idea would have been quite rational; for it is a natural idea to combine the principle of universal genesis with that of sexual propagation into a unity, and to regard so-called spontaneous generation, from a higher standpoint, not as the absolute antithesis of reproduction but just as a production" {116}.
And the man who can write such rubbish is not ashamed to reproach Hegel for his "jargon" {D. K. G. 491}!
But enough of the peevish, contradictory grumbling and nagging through which Herr Dühring gives vent to his anger at the colossal impetus which natural science owes to the driving force of the Darwinian theory. Neither Darwin nor his followers among naturalists ever think of belittling in any way the great services rendered by Lamarck; in fact, they are the very people who first put him up again on his pedestal. But we must not overlook the fact that in Lamarck's time science was as yet far from being in possession of sufficient material to have enabled it to answer the question of the origin of species except in an anticipatory way, prophetically, as it were. In addition to the enormous mass of material, both of descriptive and anatomical botany and zoology, which has accumulated in the intervening period, two completely new sciences have arisen since Lamarck's time, and these are of decisive importance on this question:
research into the development of plant and animal germs (embryology) and research into the organic remains preserved in the various strata of the earth's surface (palaeontology). There is in fact a peculiar correspondence between the gradual development of organic germs into mature organisms and the succession of plants and animals following each other in the history of the earth. And it is precisely this correspondence which has given the theory of evolution its most secure basis. The theory of evolution itself is however still in a very early stage, and it therefore cannot be doubted that further research will greatly modify our present conceptions, including strictly Darwinian ones, of the process of the evolution of species.
What, of a positive character, has the philosophy of reality to tell us concerning the evolution of organic life?
"The ... variability of species is a presupposition which can be accepted"{D. Ph. 115}. But alongside it there hold also "the independent parallel lines of homogeneous products of nature, not mediated by common descent"{111}.
From this we are apparently to infer that the heterogeneous products of nature, i.e., the species which show variations, descend. from each other but not so the homogeneous products. But this is not altogether correct either; for even with species which show variations, "mediation by common descent is on the contrary quite a secondary act of nature" {114}.
