Why Haeckel belongs beside the iron necessity
Haeckel may talk as much fatalism about that fact as he pleases: it really must be.
Haeckel supplies a concrete target for the language of necessity. In The Riddle of the Universe, chapter XIV, he says individual and national destinies are determined by mechanical causality with "iron necessity"; every phenomenon has antecedent causes. In the following discussion he allows chance only for the coincidence of independently caused events, preserving universal mechanical causation. The inspected witness is Joseph McCabe's English translation, Harper's 1905 printing (English copyright 1900), not the German original. Haeckel, chapter XIV, pp. 272–274.
Chesterton's concession is carefully limited: fatalistic language is appropriate to an unavoidable logical relation, such as the reversal of older and younger. He then asks whether it has been justified for physical events. Haeckel's stated determinism makes the polemical target intelligible, but does not prove that Haeckel himself explicitly equated mathematical necessity with physical causation. That further equation is Chesterton's accusation.
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