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Updated: June 16, 2025
It is needless to proceed further with the analysis; else might we detail the steps by which Oken arrives at the conclusions that "the planets are coagulated colours, for they are coagulated light; that the sphere is the expanded nothing;" that gravity is "a weighty nothing, a heavy essence, striving towards a centre;" that "the earth is the identical, water the indifferent, air the different; or the first the centre, the second the radius, the last the periphery of the general globe or of fire."
But this was only his ignorance; for man may deny his descent from an ape and be eligible as a churchwarden without being any the less a convinced Evolutionist. What is more, the religious folk can claim to be among the pioneers of Evolutionism. Weismann, Neo-Darwinist though he was, devoted a long passage in his History of Evolution to the Nature Philosophy of Lorenz Oken, published in 1809.
All the value which attaches to Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa, Cardan, Kepler, Swedenborg, Schelling, Oken, or any other who introduces questionable facts into his cosmogony, as angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and so on, is the certificate we have of departure from routine, and that here is a new witness.
Reason itself is only an under-servant. It has no creative skill. Memory makes no discoveries. But the imagination is a wonder-worker. One day, chancing upon a large bone of the mammoth in the Black Forest, Oken, the German naturalist, exclaimed: "This is a part of a spinal column."
"The Natural History of Creation," or, as Professor Haeckel admits it would have been better to call his work, "The History of the Development or Evolution of Nature," deals, in the first six lectures, with the general and historical aspects of the question, and contains a very interesting and lucid account of the views of Linnaeus, Cuvier, Agassiz, Goethe, Oken, Kant, Lamarck, Lyell, and Darwin, and of the historical filiation of these philosophers.
With this hope the friends were obliged to content themselves, for after a few weeks of alternate encouragement and despondency their bright vision faded. Oken fulfilled his promise and wrote to Humboldt, recommending them most warmly. Humboldt answered that his plans were conclusively settled, and that he had chosen the only assistants who were to accompany him, Ehrenberg and Rose.
Dollond's, applied to the microscopic object-glass, has left all his achievements a mere matter of curious history. Few have been more remarkable for perceiving resemblances and differences than Oken. This is the poetical side of the scientific mind; and he shares with Goethe the honor of that startling and far-reaching discovery, the vertebral character of the bones of the cranium.
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.
VEGA. Schmidt represents this peculiar formation, situated S.E. of Oken, as having a regular curved unbroken rampart on the E., while the opposite border is occupied by four large partially overlapping ring-plains, two of which contain small craters. The floor is devoid of detail.
Another such land faintly referred to in the Edda is Breidablick, governed by Baldur, the Light-god. II., s. 47 The Parsees believe that it is the salutation which meets the soul of the good on entering the next world. Through it we become acquainted with universal relations, this being reason. Without the eye there would be no reason.” Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physio-Philosophy, p. 475.
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