Muller was a Jena man, too, and he gave Haeckel letters to the bigwigs. The wise men of Jena discovered that there was merit in Haeckel's discoveries.
Original investigators are rare--most of us write about the men who have done things, or else we tell about what they have done, and so we reach greatness by hitching our wagon to a star. For the essay on Rhizopods, Haeckel was made Professor Extraordinary of the University of Jena. This was in Eighteen Hundred Sixty-two; Haeckel was then twenty-eight years old; there he is today, after a service of forty-nine years.
Haeckel is married, with a big brood of children and grandchildren about him. Some of his own children and the grandchildren are about the same age, for Haeckel has two broods, having had two wives, both of whom sympathized with the Teddine philosophy.
With the whole household, including servants, the great scientist is on terms of absolute good camaraderie. The youngsters ride on his back; the older girls decorate him with garlands; the boys work with him in the garden, or together they tramp the fields and climb the hills.
But when it comes to study he goes to his own room in the Zoology Building, enters in and locks the door. When he travels he travels alone, without companion or secretary. Travel to him means intense work; and intense work means to him intense pleasure. Solitude seems necessary to close, consecutive thinking; and in the solitude of travel, through jungle, forest, crowded city, or across wide oceans, Haeckel finds his true and best self. Then it is that he puts his soul in touch with the Universal and realizes most fully Goethe's oft-repeated dictum, "All is one." And, indeed, to Goethe must be given the credit of preparing the mind of Haeckel for Darwinism.
In his book, "The Freedom and Science of Teaching," Haeckel applies the poetic monistic ideas of Goethe to biology and then to sociology. "All is one." And this oneness that everywhere exists is simply a differentiation of the original single cell.
The evolution of the cell mirrors the evolution of the species: the evolution of the individual mirrors the evolution of the race.
This law, expressed by Goethe, is the controlling shibboleth in all Haeckel's philosophy.