Ernst Haeckel Quotes

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Our science of evolution won its greatest triumph when, at the beginning of the twentieth century, its most powerful opponents, the Churches, became reconciled to it, and endeavored to bring their dogmas into line with it.

Ernst Haeckel
All natural phenomena, without exception, from the motions of the celestial bodies to the growth of plants and the consciousness of men.... Are ultimately to be reduced to atomic mechanics.

Ernst Haeckel
The struggle for life in natural selection acts with as much selective power as does the will of man in artificial selection. The latter, however, acts according to a plan and consciously, the former without a plan and unconsciously.

Ernst Haeckel
The great regard which mathematics enjoys as an exact science in all branches of knowledge is chiefly due to its formal accuracy, and to the possibility of expressing infallibly spatial and time quantities in number and mass.

Ernst Haeckel
Darwinism is (like Hegel's philosophy) the delusion of a generation.

Ernst Haeckel
God is, in fact, nothing more than a gaseous vertebrate.

Ernst Haeckel
Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis. The connection between them is not of an external or superficial, but of a profound, intrinsic, and causal nature.

Ernst Haeckel
The highest triumph of the human mind, the true knowledge of the most general laws of nature, ought not to remain the private possession of a privileged class of learned men, but ought to become the common property of all mankind.

Ernst Haeckel
The anthropomorphic notion of a deliberate architect and ruler of the world has gone forever from this field; the "eternal iron laws of nature" have taken its place.

Ernst Haeckel
Phylogenesis is the mechanical cause of ontogenesis. The connection between them is not of an external or superficial, but of a profound, intrinsic, and causal nature.

Ernst Haeckel
[Ecology is] the science of relations between organisms and their environment.

Ernst Haeckel
Our concern is rather with the unparalleled influence that Darwinism, and its application to man, have had during the last forty years on the whole province of science; and at the same time, with its irreconcilable opposition to the dogmas of the Churches.

Ernst Haeckel
This determination of the position of man in nature, and of his relation to the totality of things - this question of all questions for mankind as Huxley justly calls it - is finally solved by the knowledge that man is descended from animals.

Ernst Haeckel
Without prejudice and without fear, philosophy would tear the mantle from "the veiled statue of Sais," and attain a full vision of the truth.

Ernst Haeckel
Ontogeny is a short and quick repetition, or recapitulation, of Phylogeny, determined by the laws of Inheritance and Adaptation.

Ernst Haeckel
Perhaps nothing will make the full meaning of the theory of descent clearer than calling it "the non-miraculous history of creation."

Ernst Haeckel
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.

Ernst Haeckel
Ontogenesis, or the development of the individual, is a short and quick recapitulation of phylogenesis, or the development of the tribe to which it belongs, determined by the laws of inheritance and adaptation.

Ernst Haeckel
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.

Ernst Haeckel
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.

Ernst Haeckel
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.

Ernst Haeckel
Civilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life.

Ernst Haeckel
The nucleus has to take care of the inheritance of the heritable characters, while the surrounding cytoplasm is concerned with accommodation or adaptation to the environment.

Ernst Haeckel
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.

Ernst Haeckel
The real cause of personal existence is not the favor of the Almighty, but the sexual love of one's earthly parents.

Ernst Haeckel
Mental differences between the lowest men and the animals are less than those between the lowest and the highest man.

Ernst Haeckel
An irrefutable proof that such single-celled primæval 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.

Ernst Haeckel
In the course of individual development, inherited characters appear, in general, earlier than adaptive ones, and the earlier a certain character appears in ontogeny, the further back must lie in time when it was acquired by its ancestors.

Ernst Haeckel