740 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



quired special importance through French mathematicians 

 and naturalists. They were eagerly seized by the school 

 of philosophers which centred in Schelling and termed 

 its doctrine the philosophy of Nature. As we have 

 seen, this school reacted harmfully upon the progress of 

 science itself, though some of its members, like Lamarck, 

 Oken, and Treviranus, anticipated later important de- 

 velopments ; and von Baer, unlike Liebig, appreciated its 

 deeper-lying truth. 



When the convertibility of heat and mechanical 

 motion was established, and mechanical forces took the 

 place of vital forces in biology, when the vaguely ex- 

 pressed principle of the conservation of force was added 

 to the equally vaguely expressed principle of the conser- 

 vation of matter, physiologists trained in the school of 

 Liebig attempted to build up a system of philosophy 

 upon the basis of these conceptions. This was the well- 

 7. known and popular philosophy of Kraft iind Stoff. It 



"Force and . i-t ^ • ^ 



Matter." coutamcd really nothmg new, but spread ideas which 

 had been expressed in a better style and in choicer 

 language by the French Encyclopaedists into circles in 

 Germany to which both French philosophy and that of 

 their own country was either foreign or unintelligible. 



If we read the current histories of philosophy of 

 the nineteenth century, nearly all written by German 

 scholars, we are unduly impressed by another contem- 

 porary movement of thought, the one just referred to 

 being mostly neglected and not counted a philosophy 

 at all. So different is the history of philosophy from 

 that of philosophical thought which I have attempted 

 to write. 



