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rnst Haeckel, the foremost representative of Charles Darwin
and Social Darwinism in Germany, made the following com-
ment after reading The Origin of Species:
... [I] found in Darwin's great unified conception of nature and in his
overwhelming foundation for the doctrine of evolution the solution
of all the doubts which had bothered me since the beginning of my
biological studies. 1

Haeckel imagined that Darwin's book had lifted all his doubts,
but was of course mistaken. The theory of evolution, formulated
under the primitive conditions of the time, was unable to advance a
valid, consistent and (even more importantly) scientific explanation
of how life began. In The Wonders of Life, Haeckel summed up his irra-
tional views regarding the human races that he had developed on the
basis of Darwinism:
Though the great differences in the mental life and the civilization of
the higher and lower races of men are generally known, they are, as
a rule, undervalued, and so the value of life at different levels is
falsely estimated. … [The] lower races (such as the Veddahs or
Australian Negroes) are psychologically nearer to the mammals
(apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans; we must, therefore, as-
sign a totally different value to their lives. … The gulf between [the]
thoughtful mind of civilized man and the thoughtless animal soul of
the savage is enormous – greater than the gulf that separates the lat-
ter from the soul of the dog. 2

These claims of Haeckel's were devoid of any scientific founda-
tion. Nonetheless, his beliefs were adopted by a great many people as
scientific fact. Haeckel also developed a kind of materialist belief from
the theory of evolution, which he gave the name monism. This per-

The Social Weapon: Darwinism