550 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



8. 

 Laplace. 



definitions. 1 .And, on the other side, even those who 

 at the time most loudly declaimed against the doctrines 

 of Schelling were rarely free from philosophical general- 

 isations or traditional prejudices which proved to be 

 equally misleading. 



About the time when Schelling published his ' Philo- 

 sophy of Nature,' which professed to be an ideal in- 

 terpretation of nature, Laplace in France published 

 two works in which he made two important contribu- 

 tions to a mechanical philosophy of Nature. At the 

 end of his ' Exposition du Systeme du Monde ' he pro- 

 pounded what is now termed the nebular hypothesis, and 

 in the introduction to his ' Essai Philosophique sur les 

 Probability's ' he put forward in a similarly compre- 



direction through which he occa- 

 sionally anticipates, though indeed 

 in a crude form, more recent con- 

 ceptions. This is notably the case 

 in his evolutionary digressions. 

 ... If in recent times Schelling 

 has been occasionally extolled as 

 a forerunner of the theory of evolu- 

 tion, this is a complete mistake. 

 Schelling never understood the idea 

 of development otherwise than in 

 that ideal sense in which Goethe, 

 whose ' Metamorphose der Pflanzen ' 

 mainly influenced Schelling, con- 

 sidered the flower to be a higher 

 stage of the leaf. . . . Oken is, so 

 far as I can find, the only one 

 among these philosophers who 

 clearly looked upon organic de- 

 velopment as a real process and 

 applied this conception also to the 

 human race. He was, therefore, 

 in this sense a true forerunner of 

 the theory of descent, while his 

 ' infusorial bubbles' and his ' prim- 

 eval ooze' anticipate certain con- 

 ceptions of the cellular and proto- 

 plasmic theories " (p. 65). 



1 The most prominent thinker in 

 the middle of the nineteenth 

 century who adopted suggestions 

 contained in the writings of the 

 earlier school, and who forms, 

 as it were, a connecting link be- 

 tween the ideal and the mechani- 

 cal view of nature, was Fechner. 

 Prof. Wundt, in an appendix to his 

 Centenary Address in memory of 

 Fechner (1901, p. 63), has collected 

 valuable references showing how 

 various suggestions, put forward by 

 writers belonging to the school of 

 Schelling, have survived and been 

 elaborated by Fechner. Such an- 

 ticipations of Fechner's views are 

 notably to be found in the ' Natur- 

 philosophie' (1809-11) of Oken, 

 who, as Fechner himself says, 

 " Through his titanic audacity 

 raised me for the first time above 

 the ordinary view of nature and 

 forced me for some time into his 

 own channels of thought." And 

 Prof. Wundt goes on to show how : 

 "In Oken a real familiarity with 

 the facts of the natural sciences 

 gave to his fanciful speculations a 



