CONSERVATISM OF BIOLOGY. 79 



organic nature; but not one of them ever spoke of this 

 fundamental point, or even once alluded to the question of 

 the origin of species. Not a word was ever spoken in 

 reference to the earlier attempts toward understanding the 

 origin of the animal and vegetable species; it was never 

 thought worth while to allude to Lamarck's valuable 

 Philosophic Zoologique, in which that attempt had been 

 made in the year 1809. The enormous opposition which 

 Darwin met with when he first took up this question 

 again may, therefore, be understood. His attempt seemed 

 at first to be unsubstantial and unsupported by previous 

 labours. Even in 1859 the entire problem of creation, the 

 whole question of the origin of organisms, was considered 

 by biologists as supernatural and transcendental. Even in 

 speculative philosophy, in which this question should 

 necessarily be approached from various sides, no one dared 

 to take it seriously in hand. 



The dualistic position taken by Immanuel Kant, and the 

 extraordinary importance attached, during the whole of this 

 century, to this most influential of modern philosophers, 

 probably offer the best explanation of the last-mentioned 

 fact. For while this great genius, equally excellent as a 

 naturalist and a philosopher, in the field of inorganic nature 

 aided essentially in constructing a "Natural History of 

 Creation," he for the most part adopted the supernatural 

 view of the origin of organisms. On the one hand, Kant, 

 in his "Universal History of Nature and Theory of 

 the Heavens," made a most successful and important "at- 

 tempt to treat the constitution and the mechanical origin 

 of the entire universe according to Newtonian principles," 

 or, in other words, to treat it mechanically, to conceive 





