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Without it the perfect Self-recognition of Spirit from the Individual standpoint, which we shall presently find is the means by which the Creative Process is to be carried forward, would be impossible; and therefore, so far from matter being an illusion, it is the necessary channel for the self-differentiation of Spirit and its Expression in multitudinous life and beauty.
These are the functions and capacities of living organisms in general, and in particular those of variation and inheritance, of development and self-differentiation. What is, and whence comes this mysterious power of the organism to build itself up from the smallest beginnings, from the germ? And the equally mysterious power of faithfully repeating the type of its ancestors?
It is exactly the standpoint of the popular naturalism we have already described, which here mingles unsuspectingly and without scruple Lamarckian and other principles with the Darwinian, which is enthusiastic on the one hand over the “purely mechanical” interpretation of nature, and on the other drags in directly psychical motives, unconscious consciousness, impulses, spontaneous self-differentiation of organisms, which nevertheless adheres to “monism” and possibly even professes to share Goethe’s conception of nature!
Bronn, who translated Darwin’s works into German, was and remained loyal to the idea of a “developmental law”—that there is within the organism an innate tendency towards self-differentiation and progress, thus a purely teleological principle.
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