ABSTRACT
The speaker began by asserting that Father Wasmann had said in one of his lectures, he believed, in the first of all, that natural science by itself was not entitled to express an opinion regarding the problem, of the evolution of animals. Professor von Hansemann, however, believed that natural science alone had a right to express any opinion at all on this subject; it had therefore been a great mistake to drag religion, theology, and Christianity into this whole discussion. These things ought to be absolutely excluded from scientific deliberations, and, if this were done, it would be a much easier and speedier task to arrive at an agreement, for in his opinion it did not affect the questions under discussion at all whether a man had any religious sentiment, whether he was interested in theology, or whether he upheld the Christian theory of the position of man in the universe.
Before discussing this introduction to von Hansemann’s speech, I must make it clear that the first sentence contains a manifest error, which might easily have been avoided. He imputes to me a statement to the effect that the evolution of animals was not a problem within the scope of natural science, whereas I carefully proved the exact contrary in the first of my three lectures. The speaker confused the 145evolution of animals with that of man, with regard to which I showed in the third lecture that it was not a purely zoological problem. Von Hansemann is, however, perfectly right in saying that it was a mistake to drag religion and theology into the discussion of my lectures. The result of so doing has not been the refutation of my scientific and philosophical opinions by my opponents, but the transference of the whole discussion to a region lying beyond the province of a scientific conference. Unhappily von Hansemann was not able to avoid the mistake which he pointed out, as his subsequent remarks clearly show.
