388 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ence in Darwin himself. The main limitation of his theory results 

 from its bondage to the idea of utility — a heritage from the eighteenth 

 century. In illustration of these cross-currents, still inexplicable, re- 

 call that Monge, the mathematician, though born in 1746, was essen- 

 tially a nineteenth century man; so was Lamarck, born two years 

 earlier; so was Erasmus Darwin, even if sixty-nine of his seventy-one 

 years belonged to the heyday of Pope, Johnson and Paley. Similarly, 

 when we face towards the future rather than the past, we find the 

 seminal ideas of the nineteenth century already astir soon after the 

 middle of the eighteenth. Winckelmann, in 1758; Lessing, in 1766; 

 and, more plainly. Herder, in 1786, are apostles of synthetic as opposed 

 to analytic methods, of " life-history " as against mere taxonomy. 

 Listen to Herder, and note how he prophesies the genetic era : 



Among millions of creatures whatever could preserve itself abides, and 

 still after the lapse of thousands of years remains in the great harmonious 

 order. Wild animals and tame, carnivorous and graminivorous, insects, birds, 

 fishes and man are adapted to each other. 



And again, on the side now of the human sciences: 



All the songs of primitive peoples turn on actual things, doings, events, 

 circumstances, incidents, on a living, manifold world. All this the eye has 

 seen, and since the imagination reproduces it as it has been seen, it must needs 

 be reproduced in an abrupt fragmentary manner. There is no other connection 

 between the different parts of these songs than there is between the trees and 

 bushes of the forest, the rocks and caverns of the desert, and between the 

 different scenes of the events themselves. 



You see the same thing in Goethe's " Iphigenie " (1787), in hia 

 "Versueh die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklaren " (1790), and 

 his "Zur Morphologic" (1795-1807), above all, in "Faust," erster 

 Theil (1808). Small wonder, then, that the systematic thinkers bred 

 in the same movement, Kant aside, should be dominated by the genetic 

 idea of development ; and even Kant, especially in his " Kritik der 

 Urtheilskraf t " (1790), to say nothing of the extraordinary prevision 

 of his " Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels " 

 (1755), is not without latent suspicions concerning the direction to be 

 taken by the new tide. To mention none of his other manifold services 

 — of which, in a company of investigators, the part he played at the 

 foundation of the University of Berlin should merit particular remem- 

 brance — Fichte's "Der geschlossene Handelsstaat " (1800), originates 

 a line of socio-economic thought thoroughly characteristic of Darwin's 

 lepoch, and affiliated sometimes with biology. Schelling's " Ein- 

 leitung zum Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie " (1799), 

 as I have tried to show in another place,^ exercised no little formative- 

 power over a group of his countrymen who made important contribu- 

 tions to the early modern phases of physiology, chemistry, botany, 



* " The Movement Towards ' Physiological ' Psychology," pp. 75 f. 



