TRANSCENDENTALISM AND EVOLUTION 215 



"one animal," a more morphological turn. Their recapitula- 

 tion theory was part and parcel of the same general idea. 



One understands how easily the notion of evolution could 

 arise in minds filled with the thought of the ideal progression 

 of the whole organic kingdom towards its crown and 

 microcosm, man. Their theory of recapitulation led them 

 to conceive evolution as the developmental history of the 

 one great organism. 1 Many of them wavered between the 

 conception of evolution as an ideal process, as a Vorstel- 

 hmgsart, and the conception of it as an historical process. 

 Bonnet, Oken, and the majority of the transcendentalists 

 seem to have chosen the former alternative ; Robinet, 

 Treviranus, Tiedemann, Meckel, and a few others held evolu- 

 tion to be a real process. 



We have already in previous chapters ' 2 briefly noticed 

 the relation of one or two of the transcendental evolution- 

 theories to morphology, and there is little more to be said 

 about them here. They had as good as no influence upon 

 morphological theory, nor indeed upon biology in general. 3 It 

 is different with the theory of Lamarck, which, although it 

 had little influence upon biological thought during and for 

 long after the lifetime of its author, is still at the present day 

 a living and developing doctrine. 



Lamarck's affinity with the transcendentalists was in 

 many ways a close one, but he differed essentially in being 

 before all a systematist. Nor is the direct influence of 

 the German transcendentalists traceable in his work his 

 spiritual ancestors are the men of his own race, the materialists 

 Condillac and Cabanis, and Buffon, whose friend he was. The 

 idea of a gradation of all animals from the lowest to the 

 highest was always present in Lamarck's mind, and links 

 him up, perhaps through Buffon, with the school of Bonnet. 

 The idea of the Eclielle ties ctres had for him much less a 



1 See Meckel, supra, p. 93 ; cf. Tiedemann, Zoologie, p. 65, 1808. 

 " Even as each individual organism transforms itself, so the whole 

 animal kingdom is to be thought of as an organism in course of 

 metamorphosis." Also p. 73 of the same book. 



2 Chapters vii. and ix. 



3 On early evolution-theories see, in addition to Osborn and Rndl, 

 J. Arthur Thomson, The Science of Life, 1899, and the opening essay in 

 Darwin and Modern Science, Cambridge, 1909. 



P 



