United States or Tanzania ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Oken tells us that "all life is from the sea;" that "when the sea organism, by self-elevation, succeeds in attaining into form, there issues forth from it a higher organism;" and that "the first organic forms, whether plants or animals, emerged from the shallow parts of the sea."
It was a curious intellectual experience to listen day after day to the lectures of Oken, while following at the same time Schelling's courses, where he was shifting the whole ground of his philosophy from its negative foundation as an a priori doctrine to a positive basis, as an historical science.
But, fortunately, one is rescued from this most un-German predicament by the porter of a waiting hotel omnibus, and so at last we have time to look about us, and to awaken to a realizing sense that we have reached the land of traditions; that we have come to Mecca; that we are in the quondam home of Guericke, Fichte, Goethe, Schiller, Oken, and Gagenbaur; in the present home of Haeckel.
But the thoughtful student recognizes the truth of the child's feeling, and with his knowledge of nature his wonder does but grow more and more. . . Arrival in Munich. Lectures. Relations with the Professors. Schelling, Martius, Oken, Dollinger. Relations with Fellow-Students. The Little Academy. Plans for Traveling. Advice from his Parents. Vacation Journey.
My wife still holds in warm remembrance the days when you, a bright, pleasant young fellow, used to come and see us, what a long stretch of time lies between. Much is changed about me. Of former friends only Kobell and Vogel remain; Zuccarini, Wagner, Oken, Schelling, Sieber, Fuchs, Walther, all these have gone home.
There was interesting talk on all sorts of subjects, bringing us gradually to the Ural and then to Humboldt's journey, and finally Oken asked if we would not like to go with Humboldt.
Oken, "how, and in accordance indeed with what laws, the Material took its origin, and, therefore, how something took its existence from nothing.
If any of our readers doubt what must be the result of such speculations carried to their logical and legitimate conclusion, let them turn to the pages of Oken, and see for themselves the end of that path the opening of which is decked out in these pages with the bright hues and seemingly innocent deductions of the transmutation-theory.
Matter developes from simple to complex forms, growing by its own properties, in directions determined by the circumstances and surroundings of its existence. Buchner and, in earlier days, of Oken. If I may put this a little less in the abstract, but more at length, I should describe it thus :
The same doctrine reappears in various forms: in the popular works of Derham and Paloy and the Bridgewater Treatises; in the learned and thoughtful pages of Burdach, and in the mystical rhapsodies of Oken. But never, we believe, was it before enforced and illustrated by so imperial a survey of the whole domain of Natural Science as in the volumes before us.
Word Of The Day