Why people refuse to see this cult for what it is, escapes me.
"Monism" was an organized cult -- the Monistenbund. It had thousands of members. Haeckel's books were translated into a dozen languages. But even 30 years before Victor Robinson wrote that chapter you see above, we find similar stuff in unlikely places (from some member of the Brooklyn Ethical Association who, I think, was involved in education):
The intelligent world owes a debt of gratitude to Prof. Haeckel. It is due to his labors, mainly, that the doctrine of evolution is now as well established as Kepler's laws of the motions of the planetary bodies, or Newton's law of gravitation. No careful student of modern scientific thought now doubts that the law of cause and effect prevails throughout all phenomena, whether physical or mental. Every effect is the exact product of antecedent causes. Thought is as much the product of the condition's under which it arises as is the formation of a crystal or the growth of a tree. There is no room for supernatural interference anywhere. Though the natural evolution of living forms out of non-living matter has not been demonstrated as a fact of present occurrence, there is no doubt in the mind of consistent evolutionists that the most primitive organisms were originally produced by spontaneous generation. Prof. Haeckel's investigations in embryology constitute a most important confirmation of the Darwinian theory, and entitle him to be placed in the front rank of experimental scientists.Weird and scary, and this stuff pops up all over the place in evolution books of the pre-Nazi era.-- Nelson J. Gates
It’s like the global warming cult. All evidence favors the myth, even evidence against it, like the Cambrian explosion of forms.
Humans have a need to worship a higher power and the evolution cult attempts to fulfill that need.