248 Dr. A. Braun on the Vegetable Individual. 



later physiological investigations are hastening, grounded on the 

 positive results of investigations in the physical sciences. Even 

 vegetable physiology cannot resist this tendency of science, al- 

 though it struggles more or less against these conclusions*. 

 The operations by which plants, and all organic beings, form 

 and preserve their organisms, were formerly ascribed to peculiar 

 vital forces ; but the physiology of our day would recognize in 

 the vital functions of the organism the same forces by which the 

 processes of inorganic nature are performed. Thus physiology 

 Ijccomes physics and chemistry, or, according to the usual con- 

 ception of the physical and chemical processes themselves, the 

 " mechanics '^ of organic nature in the most comprehensive mean- 

 ing of the term mechanics. And thus the life of the enchanter 

 is unveiled, who had seemed to be the immediate cause of his 

 own works ; the lofty partition-wall between organic and inor- 

 ganic nature falls, and one common foundation is laid for inves- 

 tigating all material processes in every realm of nature. This 

 important result is reached : the existence of the higher orders 

 of natural phsenomena, which had been regarded as the peculiar 

 realm of Life, is referred to the same natural causes (the same 

 material substance and the same kind of forces) by which the 

 lower orders, those of ^'^ inanimate ^^ nature, have their being and 

 perform their functions. Still further conclusions may be at- 

 tempted, and it is in the nature of scientific progress that these 

 attempts should be made. As physical forces seem to be every- 

 where indissolubly connected with matter, and as a fixed regu- 

 larity displays itself in their operations, men were found bold 

 enough to consider the totality of natural phsenomena as the re- 

 sult of original primary substances, cooperating with determinate 

 forces, according to the laws of a blind necessity ; — a natural 

 mechanism revolving in its endless orbit f. 



Though this view. seems to explain ail the phsenomena of na- 

 ture from one principle, in fact it precludes any real explanation 



* Even Schleiden, the most prominent and most decided of the repre- 

 sentatives of this tendency, seeks to counterbalance the deadening effects 

 of the purely raateriahstic view by an aesthetic one (Die Pflanze und ihr 

 Leben ; last lecture, D. iEsthetik der Pflanzenwelt). 



t As far as concerns natural history these views are developed, e. g. in 

 both of Mohlschott's works, D. Physiol, des Stoffwechsels in Pflanzen u. 

 Thieren (1851), and D. Kreislauf des Lebens (1852) ; in the last-mentioned 

 work we find such sentences as these : " The miracle of nature is the inter- 

 change of matter, the first cause of physical life," p. 83. " Creative omni- 

 potence means the relations of matter," p. 258. " The hinge round which 

 the wisdom of the present day is turning is the doctrine of the interchanges 

 of matter," p. 363. — The doctrine, that the universe is the play of attra- 

 heut and repellant atoms, belongs, after all, to the " wisdom " of the past, 

 professed by Deraocritus and Epicurus. 



