242 LAMARCK AND DARWIN 



of development, that there must have been manifested in 

 evolution some definite and orderly tendency towards 

 perfection. 1 



No one expressed this objection with greater force than 

 did von Baer, in a series of masterly essays 2 which the 

 Darwinians, through sheer inability to grasp his point of 

 view, dismissed as the maunderings of old age. In these 

 essays von Baer pointed out the necessity for the teleological 

 point of view, at least as complementary to the mechanistic. 

 His general position is that of the " statical " teleology to 

 use Driesch's term of Kant and Cuvier. His attitude to 

 Darwinism is determined by his teleology. He admits, 

 just as in 1834, a limited amount of evolution ; he criticises 

 the evolution theory of Darwin on the same lines exactly 

 as forty or fifty years previously he had criticised the 

 recapitulation and evolution-theories of the transcendentalists 

 principally on the ground that their deductions far outrun 

 the positive facts at their disposal. He rejects the theory of 

 natural selection entirely, on the ground that evolution, like 

 development, must have an end or purpose (Zi'eF) " A 

 becoming without a purpose is in general unthinkable" 

 (p. 231); he points out, too, the difficulty of explaining the 

 correlation of parts upon the Darwinian hypothesis. His 

 own conception of the evolutionary process is that it is 

 essentially zielstrebig or guided by final causes, that it 

 is a true evolntio or differentiation, just as individual 

 development is an orderly progress from the general to the 

 special. He believed in saltatory evolution, in polyphyletic 

 descent, and in the greater plasticity of the organism in 

 earlier times. 



The idea of saltatory evolution he took from Kollikcr, 

 who shortly after the publication of the Origin pro- 



1 See the excellent treatment of the difference between the " realism " 

 of Darwin and the "rationalism" of his critics, in Kadi, ii., particularly 

 pp. 109, 135. The most elaborate criticism of Darwinism from the 

 older standpoint was that given by A. Wigand in Der Danoinismus 

 nnd <iic Naturforschung New tons und Citviers, 3 vols., Braunschweig, 

 1X72. 



' In vol. ii. of his Rcden, St Petersburg (Petrograd), 1876 

 Uebcr den Ziveck in den Vbrgdngen der Natur ; Uebcr Ziektrebigkeit in 

 den organischen l\<<rpcrn insbesondere j and Uebcr Da nviri's LeJirc, 



