ON THE GENETIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



277 



the types and epochs of the other and dominant school ; 

 but they were difficult to grasp, being not unfrequeutly 

 fantastic compromises between the legends of religious 

 tradition and the beginnings of scientific thought. For 

 a long time they evaded the endeavour to put them into 



encourage purely morphological 

 and to discourage genetic con- 

 siderations. Accordingly the many 

 beginnings of a scientific account 

 of the origin and historical develop- 

 ment of the things around us, of 

 which Lyell gave the first fairly 

 accurate summary in the first 

 volume of his ' Principles of Geol- 

 ogy' (1st ed., 1830), were hardly 

 noticed in the ' Kosmos ' (vol. i., 

 1845, vol. ii., 1847). None of the 

 celebrated cosmogonical hypotheses, 

 which we shall deal with in this 

 chapter, neither the, ' Protogaea ' 

 of Leibniz nor the ' Epoques de la 

 Nature' of Buffon, neither Kant's 

 nor Laplace's nebular theory, nor 

 even the brilliant introduction to 

 the ' Ossemens fossiles ' of Cuvier, 

 though the latter, and still more 

 Laplace, must have had a great 

 personal influence on him, re- 

 ceive any adequate attention in 

 the pages of ' Kosmos.' They are 

 rarely referred to, and then only as 

 works of imaginative value, for 

 which the true scientific ground- 

 work, extensive observation, and 

 especially the experiences and 

 results of travel, are wanting. 

 Humboldt, whose mind was stored 

 with these riches iu an abundance 

 and variety unequalled before or 

 since, limited himself to a por- 

 traiture, to a panoramic and mor- 

 phological, to a structural and 

 architectonic view of things, with 

 which he combined a deep sense of 

 the reaction which the contempla- 

 tion of nature must have on the 

 artistic faculty. (See the Intro- 

 duction to the second, the most 

 brilliant, volume of ' Kosmos.') 



Genetic theories were to his mind 

 premature and foreign to his pur- 

 pose. " The mysterious and un- 

 solved problems of development do 

 not belong to the empirical region 

 of objective observation, to the 

 description of the developed, the 

 actual state of our planet. The 

 description of the universe, soberly 

 confined to reality, remains averse 

 to the obscure beginnings of a 

 history of organic life, not from 

 modesty, but from the nature of 

 its objects and its limits" ('Kos- 

 mos,' vol. i. p. 367). "The world 

 of forms, I repeat, can in the enum- 

 eration of space relations only be 

 pictured as something actual, as 

 something existing in nature ; not 

 as a subject of an intellectual process 

 of reasoning on already known causal 

 connections. . . . They are facts of 

 nature, resulting from the conflict 

 of many, to us, unknown conditions 

 of active push - and - pull forces. 

 With unsatisfied curiosity we ap- 

 proach here the dark region of 

 development. We have here to do, 

 in the proper sense of the frequently 

 misused word, with world-events, 

 with cosmical processes of im- 

 measurable periods. . . . The 

 present form of things and the 

 precise numerical determination of 

 relations has not hitherto succeeded 

 in leading us to a knowledge of 

 states traversed, to a clear insight 

 into the conditions under which 

 they originated. These conditions 

 are not therefore to be termed 

 accidental, as man calls everything 

 that he cannot explain genetically " 

 (vol. iii. p. 431). 



