The Invention of Nature

Binet himself later published a book called Esquisses Décoratives (Decorative Sketches) which showed how Haeckel’s illustrations could be translated into interior decoration. Tropical jellyfish became lamps, single-celled organisms transmuted into light switches and microscopic views of cell tissues turned into wallpaper patterns. Architects and designers, Binet urged, should ‘turn to the great laboratory of Nature’.

Corals, jellyfish and algae moved into the home, and Haeckel’s half-joking suggestion to Allmers, four decades previously, about using his radiolarian sketches from Italy to invent a new style had become true. In Jena, Haeckel had named his house Villa Medusa⁶ after his beloved jellyfish and decorated it accordingly. The ceiling rosette in the dining room, for example, was based on his own drawing of a medusa that he had discovered in Sri Lanka.

As humankind dismantled the natural world into ever smaller parts – down to cells, molecules, atoms and then electrons – Haeckel believed that this fragmented world had to be reconciled. Humboldt had always talked about the unity of nature, but Haeckel took this idea a step further. He became an ardent proponent of ‘monism’ – the idea that there was no division between the organic and the inorganic world. Monism turned explicitly against the concept of a dualism between mind and matter. This idea of unity replaced God, and with this, monism became the most important ersatz

religion at the turn of the twentieth century.

Binet’s designs for electric light switches which borrowed heavily from Haeckel’s drawings (Illustration Credit 22.4)

Haeckel’s drawing of the medusa that was painted on the ceiling at Villa Medusa (Illustration Credit 22.5)

Haeckel explained the philosophical foundation of this view of the world in his book Welträthsel (The Riddle of the Universe) which was published in 1899, the same year as the first issue of his Art Forms in Nature. It became a huge international bestseller, with 450,000 copies sold in Germany alone. Welträthsel

was translated into twenty-seven languages, including Sanskrit, Chinese and Hebrew and became the most influential popular science book at the turn of the century. In Welträthsel Haeckel wrote about the soul, the body and the unity of nature; about knowledge and faith; and about science and religion. It became the bible of monism.

Haeckel wrote that the goddess of truth lived in the ‘temple of nature’. The soaring columns of the monistic ‘church’ were slender palms and tropical trees embraced by lianas, he said, and instead of altars they would have aquaria filled with delicate corals and colourful fish. From the ‘womb of our Mother Nature’, Haeckel declared, flows a stream of ‘eternal beauties’ that never runs dry.

He also believed that the unity in nature could be expressed through aesthetics. To Haeckel’s mind, this nature-infused art evoked a new world. As Humboldt had already said in his ‘brilliant Kosmos’, Haeckel wrote, art was one of the most important educational tools as it nurtured the love for nature. What Humboldt had called the ‘scientific and aesthetic contemplation’ of the natural world, Haeckel now insisted, was essential for the understanding of the universe, and it was this appreciation that became a ‘natural religion’.

As long as there were scientists and artists, Haeckel believed, there was no need for priests and cathedrals.

¹ Haeckel’s reputation received the harshest blows in the second half of the twentieth century when historians blamed him for providing the Nazis with the intellectual foundation for their racial programmes. In his biography The Tragic Sense of Life, Robert Richards argued that Haeckel, who died more than a decade before the Nazis came to power, was not an anti-Semite. In fact Haeckel had placed Jews next to Caucasians on his controversial ‘stem-trees’. Though not acceptable today, Haeckel’s racial theories of a progressive path from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’ races were shared by Darwin and many other nineteenth-century scientists.

² Allmers replied to Haeckel that his cousin had appropriated one of the radiolarian drawings as a ‘crochet pattern’.

³ Haeckel’s books on Darwin’s evolutionary theory were translated into more than a dozen languages and sold a greater number of copies than Darwin’s book itself. More people learned about evolutionary theory from Haeckel than from any other source.