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And he has the advantage over many of his successors of being very much clearer. The present state of the problem of life may be regarded as due to a reaction of biological investigation and opinion from the “vitalistic” theories which prevailed in the first half of last century, and which were in turn at once the root and the fruit of the German Nature-philosophy of that time.
The Theory of Descent had its way prepared by the evolutionist ideas and the speculative nature-philosophy of Goethe, Schelling, Hegel and Oken; by the suggestions and glimmerings of the nature-mysticism of the romanticists; by the results of comparative anatomy and physiology; was already hinted at, at least as far as derivation of species was concerned, in the works of Linné himself; was worked out in the “zoological philosophies,” by the elder Darwin, by Lamarck, Etienne Geoffrey St.
All imaginative metaphysics have a dynamic basis, e.g., the Platonic Ideas, Leibniz' Monadology, the Nature-philosophy of Schelling, Schopenhauer's Will, and Hartmann's Unconscious, the mystics, the systems that assume a world-soul, etc.
At any rate, theoretical physics has in recent years made an advance of fundamental importance and widest reach in our knowledge of nature, in that it has come nearer to a knowledge of this cosmic ether, and has forced the question of its essence, its structure, and its motion into the foreground of monistic nature-philosophy.
That he could, in a recent volume of the “Biologisches Zentralblatt,” write a respectful and sympathetic exposition of the Hegelian nature-philosophy—as regards its aims, though not its methods—is as remarkable a symptom as we can instance of the modern trend of views and opinions. Contrast Between Darwinian and Post-Darwinian Views.
It matters little that Goethe, when he thought of evolution, never had present to his mind the idea of Descent which is characteristic of “Darwinism,” but rather development in the lofty sense in which it is worked out in the nature-philosophy of Schelling and of Hegel.
These mythologies of atom-souls, molecule-souls, this hatred and love which are the inner aspects even of the simple facts of attraction and repulsion among the elements, fit better into the nature-philosophy of Empedocles and Anaxagoras than into ours.
He represents the nature-philosophy of Romanticism and especially of Schelling, a philosophy so vast and unsubstantial that all values of conduct and all incentives to action disappeared in its featureless abyss. Immermann intensely disliked it. He was, as he said, a lover of men; the worship of nature drained and exhausted the sympathies, the wills and the spirits of men.
He regards it as an undying glory of the school of Cos that after years of vague, restless speculation it introduces "steady sedentary habits into the intellectual life of mankind." 'Fiction to the right! Reality to the left! was the battle-cry of this school in the war they were the first to wage against the excesses and defects of the nature-philosophy.
But naturalism of this kind is by no means pure natural science; it consciously and deliberately oversteps in speculation the bounds of what is strictly scientific. In this respect it bears some resemblance to the nature-philosophy associated with what we called the first type of naturalism. But its very poverty enables it to have a strictly defined programme.
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