Ernst Haeckel Famous Quotes
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The ancestors of the higher animals must be regarded as one-celled beings, similar to the Amoebae which at the present day occur in our rivers, pools, and lakes. The incontrovertible fact that each human individual develops from an egg, which, in common with those of all animals, is a simple cell, most clearly proves that the most remote ancestors of man were primordial animals of this sort, of a form equivalent to a simple cell. When, therefore, the theory of the animal descent of man is condemned as a 'horrible, shocking, and immoral' doctrine, tho unalterable fact, which can be proved at any moment under the microscope, that the human egg is a simple cell, which is in no way different to those of other mammals, must equally be pronounced 'horrible, shocking, and immoral.
Nothing is constant but change! All existence is a perpetual flux of "being and becoming!" That is the broad lesson of the evolution of the world.
Mental differences between the lowest men and the animals are less than those between the lowest and the highest man.
Haekel's reasoning is simple: humans are nature, they are part of, and a result of, evolution. Our actions and our thoughts are products of this evolution. Accordingly, when humans come to know something, ultimately it reveals their own nature. Our knowledge
which has developed in and is subject to the laws of nature
is in itself nature (and according to Haeckel, nothing more.) The draftsman, his sensory organs, his motor activity, are results of a development with which, in the end, nature merely represents itself.
The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.
An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primaeval animals really existed as the direct ancestors of Man, is furnished according to the fundamental law of biogeny by the fact that the human egg is nothing more than a simple cell.
Among the Spartans all newly born children were subject to a careful examination or selection. All those that were weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity, were killed. Only the perfectly healthy and strong children were allowed to live, and they alone afterwards propagated the race.
The succession of individuals, connected by reproduction and belonging to a species, makes it possible for the specific form itself to last for ages. In the end, however, the species is temporary; it has no "eternal life." After existing for a certain period, it either dies or is converted by modification into other forms.
The cell never acts; it reacts.
There is no doubt that the course and character of the feared 'European war' ... will become the first world war in the full sense of the word.
By ecology we understand the total science of the connections of the organism to the surrounding external world.
Man is not above nature, but in nature.
We are compelled by reflection to recognize that God is not to be placed against the material world [as in Christianity], but must be placed as a 'divine power' or 'moving spirit' within the cosmos itself ... All the wonderful phenomena of nature around us, organic as well as inorganic, are only various products of one and the same original force.
Civilisation and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.
Where faith commences, science ends. Both these arts of the human mind must be strictly kept apart from each other. Faith has its origin in the poetic imagination; knowledge, on the other hand, originates in the reasoning intelligence of man. Science has to pluck the blessed fruits from the tree of knowledge, unconcerned whether these conquests trench upon the poetical imaginings of faith or not.
Phylogeny and ontogeny are, therefore, the two coordinated branches of morphology. Phylogeny is the developmental history [Entwickelungsgeschichte] of the abstract, genealogical individual; ontogeny, on the other hand, is the developmental history of the concrete, morphological individual.
Man is not distinguished from [the animals] by a special kind of soul, or by any peculiar and exclusive psychic function, but only by a higher degree of psychic activity, a superior stage of development.
As our mother earth is a mere speck in the sunbeam in the illimitable universe, so man himself is but a tiny grain of protoplasm in the perishable framework of organic nature. [This] clearly indicates the true place of man in nature, but it dissipates the prevalent illusion of man's supreme importance and the arrogance with which he sets himself apart from the illimitable universe and exalts himself to the position of its most valuable element.
