a conscious and
all-wise agent; the same Herr Duehring who breaks out into unmeasured
moral indignation at the least tendency towards spiritism on the part
of other people, tells us that "sex sensations are certainly mainly
directed towards the gratification which is bound up in their
exercise." He tells us moreover that "poor Nature must always hold the
objective world in order" and it has besides to perform acts which
require more subtlety from Nature than we usually attribute to her.
But nature knows not only why she does this and that. She has not only
her housemaid's duties to perform, she has not only subtlety, which is
a very pretty accomplishment, in subjective conscious thought, she has
also a will, for "we must regard the additional natural desires which
occur, such as feeding and propagation, not as directly but as
indirectly willed." We now arrive at a consciously thinking and acting
nature, and we therefore stand right at the bridge, not indeed between
the static and dynamic but between pantheism and deism, or perhaps
Herr Duehring is pleased to indulge himself in a little
"natural-philosophical half-poetry."

Impossible. All that the realistic philosophy has to say on organic
nature is limited to a war against this natural philosophical
half-poesy against "Charlatanism with its wanton superficialities and
pseudo-scientific mysticism, against the poetic features of
Darwinism."

Darwin comes in for a share of blame chiefly because he transferred
the Malthusian theory of population from political economy to natural
science, because he is entangled by his notions of breeding, so that
his work is a sort of unscientific half-poetic attack against design
in creation, and that the whole of Darwinism, after what he has
borrowed from Lamark has been deducted, is a piece of brutality aimed
against humanity.

Darwin had brought home with him as the result of his scientific
journeys the conclusion that species of plants and animals are not
fixed but are subject to variations. In order to pursue this idea he
entered upon experiments in the breeding of plants and animals. Just
for this reason England has become a classic land. The scientists of
other countries, Germany, for example, have nothing to offer
comparable with England in this respect. Moreover, most of the
conclusions belong to the last century so that the establishment of
the facts presented few difficulties. Darwin found that this
artificial breeding pr