548 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



the first time, the modern way of putting the matter 

 made its appearance viz., that Nature demands from 

 the human mind to be mechanically described on the 

 one side, and on the other, to be ideally interpreted, or, 

 in other words, that every fact and phenomenon is as 

 much the consequence of a mechanical cause as it is the 

 means towards an ideal end. 



With the movement which originated in England and 

 culminated in Goethe, we have not at present to deal. 

 It was not a movement of philosophical thought, although 

 it very largely influenced the latter. This I have had, 

 and shall have in the sequel, abundant occasion to show. 

 One of the principal aims of the present section of this 

 history, indeed, will be to make evident to my readers 

 how all philosophical thought leads us back, for its ulti- 

 mate sources, to a deeper experience of the human mind 

 which finds its immediate expression in the subjective 

 regions of art, poetry, and religion. 



For the moment we must confine ourselves to those 

 contributions to a solution of the problem of nature 

 which were either distinctly and directly put forward 

 by Schelling and his followers or which, later on, in- 

 directly resulted from the purely scientific or exact 

 study of natural phenomena just referred to. 



Now, although it has become the fashion violently to 

 denounce the " Philosophy of Nature " l and to place it 



1 It is again Lotze who, first 

 among more recent thinkers, put 

 forward a just estimate of the 

 aims of Schelling's ' Philosophy of 

 Nature,' and whose own entire 

 speculation turns upon the distinc- 

 tion between the mechanical and 

 the teleological view, between the 



description and the interpretation 

 of nature. This clear demarcation 

 of two entirely different but com- 

 plementary tasks, which will always 

 occupy the thinking mind, is set 

 forth in the earliest of Lotze's 

 writings, and untiringly repeated 

 on many occasions, most clearly 



