124 EVOLUTIONISTS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. 



naturalist, it is evident that most of his conclusions 

 were reached purely a priori. Haeckel extrava- 

 gantly writes in his praise that " no doctrine ap- 

 proaches so nearly to the natural theory of descent 

 as that contained in Oken's much-decried Natur 

 Philosophie. " Yet in his cellular conception of 

 the primordial forms of life, Oken was, in part, 

 anticipated by Buffon, by the elder Darwin and by 

 Lamarck ; as has been said in his sea-slime theory, 

 he follows so primitive a naturalist as Anaximander ; 

 and in judging of his supposed anticipation of the 

 cell doctrine of Schleiden and Schwann, we must 

 keep in mind the stress that is laid throughout all 

 his philosophy upon the spherical form of his meta- 

 physical ' All." The skull, for example, he believed 

 to be one of these manifestations of the archetypal 

 sphere ; it is not surprising that he conceived the 

 cell as a sphere. 



There is thus room for wide differences of opin- 

 ion about Oken ; his writings are such compounds 

 of apparent sense and actual nonsense, that only by 

 selecting and putting together certain favourably 

 read passages, can we accord him the rank Haeckel 

 claims for him as a prophet, whereas if we review 

 as a whole his elements of ' physio-philosophy,' it 

 appears that his prophecies of one page are capable 

 upon the following page of interpretation as the 

 vaguest speculations and absurdities. He published 

 his outline of the Philosophie der Natur in 1802, in 

 the same year in which Lamarck and Treviranus 



