Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckelwas a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theoryclaiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth16 February 1834
CityPotsdam, Germany
CountryGermany
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.
By ecology we understand the total science of the connections of the organism to the surrounding external world.
The whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all. ... The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of an unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world.
Mental differences between the lowest men and the animals are less than those between the lowest and the highest man.
Ontogeny re-capitulates phylogeny.
Civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.
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.
Man is not above nature, but in nature.
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.
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.