76 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



electro-magnetism; Kielmeyer, an anticipator of biogenesis; I. Dol- 

 linger, of Wiirzburg, who inoculated Von Baer with genetic ideas; Von 

 Baer himself, who, more objectively than any other scientific man, has 

 estimated the germinal significance of the Naturpliilosophie; Liebig, 

 the pioneer of laboratory methods in chemistry; Johannes Miiller, the 

 first main constructive power in modern physiology; Kieser, the early 

 exponent of plant phytotemy; Schonlein and Roschlaub, leaders in the 

 remarkable band who founded the Berlin school of medicine. Nay 

 more, his power burst forth again, significantly for psychology, as a 

 factor in the equipment of Fechner. Thus, like Hegel, Schelling paved 

 the way for his own fall, by sending others to search out the secrets of 

 nature. Accordingly, even if the vagaries of Oken disgusted manv, 

 and if Steffens's analogies between the catastrophies of the human 

 spirit and the disturbances of the earth's crust furnished queer geology, 

 there were no call to " swear at large," to rush around shouting 

 :i vitalism ! " or otherwise to evince complete lack of the objectivity 

 necessary to analysis of the crisis. Somnambulists haunt the fringes 

 of all movements, but we fool ourselves when we take them for 

 prototypes. New ideas ever were heady; this happens to be the price 

 set upon their power to reveal unsuspected problems, as Schelling and 

 his galaxy of scholars did. 



Johannes Miiller, then, found himself born into this surging age- 

 He tended the new scientific spirit to budding, but, unlike Von Baer, 

 he died ere it blossomed. Speaking under reservation, as an ignorant 

 man must, I would venture to suggest that he did not enter fully into 

 Hegel's epoch-making idea of process. So far as I can comprehend his 

 activity, he was a student chiefly of the organism in gross, that is, a 

 morphologist, more than an investigator of vital processes, a phys- 

 iologist. His importance lay in his ideals more than in his results. 

 " A profound teacher," as his pupil Helmholtz declared, he created an 

 atmosphere which his pupils breathed, and he lives in their splended 

 work rather than in any single achievement of his own. In essentials 

 this atmosphere contained the modern perspective. For, although, as 

 du Bois Beymond has recorded, he " assumed the existence of a vital 

 force . . . which in organisms acts the part of a supreme regulator," 

 this " force " ruled the realm of the unknown only. In all that could 

 be mastered by contemporary methods and means Miiller accepted the 

 chemico-physical view. His studies of nutrition, animal heat, motion 

 and reflex action, his contributions to acoustics and the phenomena of 

 speech embody, not simply his own work, they also supply a masterly 

 unification of previous knowledge. But, especially as concerns phys- 

 iological psychology, his major result undoubtedly consisted in his 

 doctrine of " specific energies." No matter what the stimulus, the 



6 Cf. Huxley, in the " Life of Owen," Vol. II., p. 295. 



