CHAPTER VII 



THE GERMAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS 



To complete our historical survey of the morphology of the 

 early ipth century we have now to turn back some way and 

 consider the curious development of morphological thought 

 in Germany under the influence of the Philosophy of 

 Nature. We have already seen many of these notions 

 foreshadowed by Goethe, who had considerable affinity with 

 the transcendentalists, but the full development of trans- 

 cendental habits of thought comes a little later than the 

 bulk of Goethe's scientific work, and owes more to Kielmeyer 

 and Oken than to Goethe himself. 



A great wave of transcendentalism seems to have passed 

 over biological thought in the early igth century, arising 

 mainly in Germany, but powerfully affecting, as we have seen, 

 the thought of Geoffrey and his followers. Many ideas were 

 common to the French and German schools of transcendental 

 anatomy, the fundamental conception that there exists a 

 unique plan of structure, the idea of the scale of beings, 

 the notion of the parallelism between the development of the 

 individual and the evolution of the race. It is difficult to 

 disentangle the part played by each school and to determine 

 which should have the credit for particular theories and 

 discoveries. The philosophy seems to have come chiefly from 

 Germany, the science from France. It must be borne in 

 mind that German comparative anatomy was largely 

 derivative from French, that the Paris Museum was the 

 acknowledged anatomical centre, and that Cuvier was its 

 acknowledged head. 



It is probably correct to say that the credit mainly 

 belongs to the German transcendental school for the law 



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