As to the significance of the two names most prominently quoted in this
connection, I am not at all impressed, as so many of my colleagues
appear to be. An intimate friend of mine some twenty years ago was
several weeks en pension in the same house where Haeckel had his
apartment, and even then he was notorious for his hatred of foreigners
and of women. Those of us who have followed closely his career know how
often he has written with more than German professorial virulence
against those who differed from his theory of evolution, and that he is
at present scarcely more abusive of England than he has several times
been of his own Government and of the State Church because his system
was not made a matter of compulsory teaching. As to Eucken, the reasons
for his obsession are quite different. In his case the feeling and the
utterance are due to intellectual weakness rather than to virulence of
passion.
After all, however, the temper of military and imperial Germany under
the dominance of Prussia has been essentially the same from the
beginning. In illustration of this, let me quote for your readers from a
poem of Heine, written as long ago as 1842.
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