HAECKEL AND HIS TEACHINGS.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 869, 16 July 1910, Page 3

HAECKEL AND HIS TEACHINGS.

Sir,—l am not concerned with tho charge of fraud against Haeckel, although Mr. M'G'abe's method in defending his master is quito in harmony with the lattcr'a methods of controversy: e.g., both Kant and Romanes in maturo life strongly opposed Haeckel's Monistic creed, with its numerous gross and unwarranted assumptions, what does Haeckel do? He roughly sweeps both from his path by attributing tbeirchargo of conviction to softening of the brain. And this from ono who had already reached the allotted span of human lifo! Likewise tho burden of Mr. M'Cabe's. defence consists in abuse of _ his German opponents. Then his sneering reference to Sir Oliver Lodge is characteristic. Sir Oliver Lodge needs no defence: the Principal of Birmingham Univorsity is as great in his branch of scionco as Haeckel is in his. Then ho would have.us bo-' liovo that he voices tho findings of tho scientific world—that the great majority of the leaders of-science are on his side —a. thing notoriously incorrect. To speak as if tin's were so is, to use his own words,' "a pieco of amusing audacity." Here, for instance,- are tho names of a few scientists—of some little weight, I believe—who are directly and totally opposed to Haeckel's fundamental position: Sir Isaac Newton, Darwin, Wallace, Huxley, Tymlal, Romanes, Lord Kelvin, Virchow, Dn Bois Raymond, Sir AVm. Crookes, etc. . The actual, fact is summed up by Sir 0. Lodge when ho says:— .'JPiolflssor Haaiel's yotes ~ie thfl ;^Kaaoa

of one crying in the wilderness, not. asthe pioneer of an 'advancing army, but as the despairing shout of a standardbearer, still bold and unflinching, but abandoned by the retreating ranks of his comrades, as. they inarch".to new orders in a fresh Mr. jVl'Cabc's closing sentence in his letter of yesterday made, me stare a bit. It runs; "While men like Principal Lloyd Morgan openly profess themselves Monists." Now I happen to know. Lloyd Morgan personally. I was a member—one of six—of his geological class in Bristol University College, and know that he was no Monist then of the Haeckel type. But has he changed since? .Not 'certainly as recently as Juno, 1904, for in the "Contemporary Review" of that date he writes as , follows: "I here protest against the erroneous view that out of matter andenergy, consciousness and thought can be produced by any conceivable evolutionary process." (This "erroneous view" is fundamental to Haeckel's Monism.) The fact is, as Frank Ballard has demonstrated to the full, that Mr. M'Cabc, as a scientific exponent, is totally unreliable and- misleading. > I should much like to reply to. his. astounding and ridiculous assertions that the Church supports reform only when it becomes respectable; that the "Church did nothing for the slave; that where the Church predominates you have illiteracy, etc., but the exigencies of your space, sir, forbid.—l am, etc., T. A. WILLIAMS.Petone, July 11.