Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich
Haeckel, Ernst Heinrich
(1834-1919) Was a German biologist whose early espousal of Darwinism led him to found upon the evolutionary hypothesis a thoroughgoing materialistic monism which he advanced in his numerous writings particularly in his popular The Riddle of the Universe. Believing in the essential unity of the organic and the inorganic, he was opposed to revealed religions and their ideals of God, freedom and immortality and offered a monistic religion of nature based on the true, the good and the beautiful. See Darwin, Evolutionism, Monism. — L.E.D.