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Much to his credit, it may be said that a good share of Agassiz's invincible aversion to evolution may be traced to the spirit in which it was taken up by his early associate, Vogt, and, indeed, by most of the German school then and since, which justly offended both his scientific and his religious sense. Agassiz always "thought nobly of the soul," and could in no way approve either materialistic or agnostic opinions. The idealistic turn of his mind was doubtless confirmed in his student days at Munich, whither he and his friend Braun resorted after one session at Heidelberg, and where both devotedly attended the lectures of Schelling then in his later glory and of Oken, whose "Natur-Philosophie" was then in the ascendant. Although fascinated and inspired by Oken's
The German physiology of the school of Oken, notwithstanding his acknowledged genius, is almost as metaphysical as Hegel, and there is in France a quite recent revival of the Animism of Stahl. These metaphysical explanations, besides their inanity, did serious harm, by directing the course of positive scientific inquiry into wrong channels.
There is a great distance between the man who, like Oken, attempts to construct the whole system of nature from general premises and the one who, while subordinating his conceptions to the facts, is yet capable of generalizing the facts, of recognizing their most comprehensive relations.
Had Oken never lived, there would still have been millions of persons trained from their childhood to believe that we are continually urged upwards by a force called the Will of God.
Men like Cuvier and Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who otherwise stand diametrically opposed to each other, unite in these and kindred ideas. The naturalist Oken attains the same result, tinged with the views of Schelling; the poet Goethe, from an intuitive knowledge of nature, arrived at the same conclusion.
There is a wide divergence in Schelling's school, as J.E. Erdmann accurately remarks, between the naturalistic pantheist Oken and the mystical theosophist Baader, in whom elements which had been united in Schelling appear divided. The Philosophers of Nature.% On Oken cf.
Oken and Goethe amplified it towards the end of the last, and at the beginning of the present century. Darwin, however, has systematized the theory of evolution, and now the branches of human knowledge can only be advantageously pursued if we trace in all phenomena, whether material or spiritual, a beginning and a gradual development.
His pupils were partly natural philosophers, who, like Oken, sought to comprehend all nature, her breathing unity, her hidden mysteries, in religion; partly mystics, who, like Eschenmaier, Schubert, Steffens, in a Protestant spirit, or, like Gorres and Baader, in a Catholic one, sought also to comprehend everything bearing reference to both nature and history in religion.
When, he said, a theory gets propounded over and over again, coming up afresh after each time orthodox criticism has buried it, and each time seeming solider and harder to abolish, you may be sure that there is truth in it. Oken and Lamarck and Chambers had been triumphantly despatched and buried, but here was Darwin making the very same heresy seem only more plausible.
Oken founded upon this idea and kindred analogies his profound philosophy of the system of animals and plants which comes very near to the evolution theory, and in his cosmogony traces all organisms to a protoplasm in such a way as to bring him in this respect also very near to Darwinism.
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