10 



Problems, Concepts and Their History 



gehorl zur Naturbeobachtung eine gewisse 

 ruhige Reinheit des Innern, das von gar 

 nichts gestort und praokkupiert ist" (Ecker- 

 mann, 1905 edition, II, 218, 220). 



He could, however, as sublimely ignore 

 his own precepts. Where was his inner pur- 

 ity without preoccupation, where was his in- 

 dependence of a particular confession, when 

 Eckermann came in to him with news of the 

 July Revolution to have him cry (ibid., II, 

 473): 



Nim . . . was denken Sie von dieser grossen Bege- 

 benheit? Der Vulkan ist zum Ausbruch gekommen; 

 alles steht in Flammen, und es ist nicht ferner eine 

 Verhandlung bei geschlossenen Thiiren, 



and heard him reply, when Eckermann 

 spoke of ministers and royal family (ibid., 

 II, 474-^75): 



Ich rede gar nicht von jenen Leuten; es handelt 

 sich bei mir um ganz andere Dinge. Ich rede von 

 dem in der Akademie zum offentlichen Ausbruch 

 gekommenen, f iir die Wissenschaft so hochst bedeu- 

 tenden Streit zwischen Cuvier und Geoffroy de 

 Saint-Hilaire! . . . Die Sache ist von der hochsten 

 Bedeutung. . . . Wir haben jetzt an Geoffroy de 

 Saint Hilaire einen machtigen Alliierten auf die 

 Dauer. . . . Das Beste . . . ist, dass die von Geoffroy 

 in Frankreich eingefiihrte synthetische Behand- 

 lungsweise der Natur jetzt nicht mehr riickgangig 

 zu machen ist. . . . Von nun an wird auch in Frank- 

 reich bei der Naturforschung der Geist herrschen 

 und iiber die Materie Herr sein. Man wird Blicke 

 in grosse Schopfungsmaximen thun, in die geheim- 

 nisvolle Werkstatt Gottes! — Was ist auch im Grunde 

 aller Verkehr mit der Natur, wenn wir auf analyti- 

 schem Wege bloss mit einzelnen materiellen Teilen 

 uns zu schaffen machen, und wir nicht das Atmen 

 des Geistes empfinden, der jedem Teile die Rich- 

 tung vorschreibt und jede Ausschweifung durch ein 

 iimewohnendes Gesetz bandigt oder sanktioniert! 



Here is the romantic fallacy that lies at 

 the hollow core of N aturphilosophie: here 

 it is that the Natur philosophen separate 

 from Kant. Kant did not question the valid- 

 ity of natural science in its own realm; in- 

 deed, he justified it. He simply defined the 

 regions in which it could operate, while the 

 Natur philosophen with their zeal for syn- 

 thesis and their preoccupation with the spirit 

 as the synthesizing element related the real 

 to the transcendent in such a confused way 

 that they could think clearly on neither. 



Idealism for the philosopher is one thing: 

 Kant felt that science could be accurate only 

 when mathematically expressed, which is 

 one kind of idealism. Huxley had the same 

 intuition; in a paper on the Mollusca he 

 wrote (1853a, p. 50): 



From all that has been stated, I think that it is 



now possible to form a notion of the archetype of 

 the Cephalous Mollusca, and I beg it to be under- 

 stood that in using this term, I make no reference to 

 any real or imaginary "ideas" upon which animal 

 forms are modelled. All that I mean is the concep- 

 tion of a form embodying the most general proposi- 

 tions that can be affirmed respecting the Cephalous 

 Mollusca, standing in the same relation to them as 

 the diagram to a geometrical theorem, and like it, 

 at once imaginary and true. 



Boyle had presented the problem earlier to 

 the physical scientist. His law was set for 

 the ideal gas, and it became the task of the 

 scientist to check experimentally the be- 

 havior of the real gas against that postu- 

 lated for the ideal. Such a conception lacks 

 meaning to the biologist; no such experi- 

 ment is possible for him in relating the real 

 to the ideal set up by the Natur philosophen. 

 Neither Boyle's kind of idealism, nor Hux- 

 ley's, is that of the Natur philosophen, 

 whose weakness was not so much that it left 

 no room for the experiment as that it closed 

 their minds to whole systems of possible in- 

 terpretations of the observed phenomena 

 which they collected to gain credence for 

 their fancies. 



The weakness of the Natur philosophen by 

 and large was that they tried to force a rigid 

 and fixed and obvious structure out of Spi- 

 noza's deeper and more fluid and subtle pan- 

 theism. Goethe, with more strength and with 

 more sensitivity, could like Herder pass be- 

 yond them to be carried away by the dynamic 

 wholeness of nature which to him was alive 

 in the sense of the new morphology which 

 was to follow later. Goethe, too, could grow 

 beyond the romantic in other realms of 

 thought than the scientific; but the profes- 

 sional biologists largely lacked his profundity 

 and maturity and remained at the static 

 phase too long. While Goethe's significance 

 as a prophet for N aturphilosophie is hardly to 

 be minimized, there were others who were to 

 bear the responsibility for working out the 

 biological details and who carried the doc- 

 trine to the illogical extremes which were so 

 to retard the progress of biology proper: 

 Goethe's friend, Nees von Esenbeck, who con- 

 sidered the entire vegetable world a leaf; 

 Goethe's hero Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire; 

 and Serres, who said, as Oken was saying too, 

 that the entire animal kingdom was a single 

 organism; Oken was going so far as to com- 

 pare the parts of a plant to fire, water, earth 

 and air. 



Yet it was against this dark background 

 that the students of the natural philosopher 

 Dollinger (cf. Temkin, '50) at Wiirzburg 



