THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN GERMANY. 



209 



and medical 



illustrious name, carried on within the pale of the 

 philosophical school of science itself a successful opposi- 

 tion to the philosophy of Nature. 1 But whilst much good 

 and sound work was done by many who were content 

 to remain outside of the favoured studies which set the 

 tone of university culture during the classical and philo- 

 sophical period of German thought, the great attack 

 upon the mistaken canons of the philosophy of Nature 31. 

 came from that science which had probably suffered of Nature 

 more than any other under the baneful influence of 

 hollow theories and empty phraseology. 



Helmholtz describes the despair which had taken hold 

 of thinking minds in the medical profession 2 : " My edu- 

 cation fell within a period of the development of medi- 

 cine when among thinking and conscientious minds there 

 reigned perfect despair. It was not difficult to under- 

 stand that the older and mostly theorising methods of 

 treating medical subjects had become absolutely useless. 

 But with the theories the facts which underlay them 

 were so indissolubly entangled that these too were mostly 

 cast overboard. How the science must be newly built up 

 the example of the other natural sciences had made clear, 

 but yet the new task stood of giant-height before us. A 

 beginning was hardly made, and the first beginnings were 



chologist Beneke and the theologian 

 De Wette, these were principally 

 members of the Jena school, Apelt, 

 Schlomilch, and others, who edited 

 ' Abhandlungeu der Fries'schen 

 Schule,' Jena, 1847 ; and foremost 

 .among them Schleiden, the reformer 

 of botany in Germany. Schleiden's 

 great work appeared with the title 

 ' Botany as an Inductive Science.' 

 It opened with a philosophical in- 



VOL. I. 



troduction of 131 pages, in which 

 inductive reasoning is recommended 

 in opposition at once to the trans- 

 cendental Naturphilosophie, and to 

 dry empiricism. See Sachs, 'Ges- 

 chichte der Botanik,' p. 203, &c. 



1 See Schleiden, ' Schelling's und 

 Hegel's Verhiiltniss zur Naturwis- 

 senschaft,' Leipzig, 1844. 



2 See Helmholtz, ' Vortriige und 

 Reden,' vol. i. p. 361. 







