e in nature, no matter where we turn
our eyes, does that idyllic peace, celebrated by the poets, exist; we find
everywhere a _struggle_ and a _striving to annihilate_ neighbors and
competitors. _Passion and selfishness, conscious or unconscious, is
everywhere the motive force of life._ Man in this respect certainly forms
no exception to the rest of the animal world." On page 237, vol. I, he
professes the most extreme naturalistic determinism: "The will of the
animal, _as well as that of man_, is never free. The widely spread dogma of
the freedom of the will is, from a scientific point of view, altogether
untenable." And on page 170, vol. I, he even says: "If, as we maintain,
natural selection is the great active cause which has produced the whole
wonderful variety of organic life on the earth, all the interesting
phenomena of _human life_ must also be explicable from the same cause. For
man is after all {238} only a most highly-developed vertebrate animal, and
all aspects of human life have their parallels, or, more correctly, their
lower stages of development, in the animal kingdom. The _whole history of
nations_, or what is called _universal history, must therefore be
explicable by means of natural selection,--must be a physico-chemical
process_, depending upon the interaction of adaptation and inheritance in
the struggle for life. And this is actually the case." That in his ethical
naturalism he sees a real reform of morality, he expressly declares on the
page next to the last of his "Natural History of Creation": "Just as this
new monistic philosophy first opens up to us a true understanding of the
real universe, so its application to practical human life must open up _a
new road towards moral perfection_." (Vol. II, p. 367.)

In the low conception of morality and its principle, Haeckel is perhaps
seconded only by Seidlitz who says in his "Die Darwin'she Theorie"
("Darwin's Theory"), p. 198: "Rational and moral life consist in the
satisfaction of all physical functions, in correct proportion and relation
to one another. Man is immoral through excessive satisfaction of one
function and through neglect of the others."

As in the religious question, so in the ethical, Carneri also takes a
peculiar position. In reducing all the phenomena of existence, together
with the whole spiritual life of mankind, to a close development of nature
according to the causal law, in expressly grouping also the utterances of
the will of m