Darwin and Contemporary Philosophy 449 



could go on — a condition comparable with that in the mind of the 

 poet when one image follows another with imperceptible change* 

 Goethe's ideas of evolution, as expressed in his Metamorphose u der 

 PJlanzen und tier Thiere, belong to this category ; it is, therefore, 

 incorrect to call him a forerunner of Darwin. Schelling and Hegel 

 held the same idea ; Hegel expressly rejected the conception of a 

 real evolution in time as coarse and materialistic. "Nature," he 

 says, " is to be considered as a system of stages, the one necessarily 

 arising from the other, and being the nearest truth of that from 

 which it proceeds ; but not in such a way that the one is naturally 

 generated by the other ; on the contrary [their connection lies] in the 

 inner idea which is the ground of nature. The metamorplwsis can 

 be ascribed only to the notion as such, because it alone is evolution. 

 ...It has been a clumsy idea in the older as well as in the newer 

 philosophy of nature, to regard the transformation and the transition 

 from one natural form and sphere to a higher as an outward and 

 actual production 1 ." 



The only one of the philosophers of Romanticism who believed in 

 a real, historical evolution, a real production of new species, was 

 Oken 2 . Danish philosophers, such as Treschow (1812) and Sibbern 

 (1846), have also broached the idea of an historical evolution of all 

 living beings from the lowest to the highest. Schopenhauer's 

 philosophy has a more realistic character than that of Schelling's 

 and Hegel's, his diametrical opposites, though he also belongs to 

 the romantic school of thought. His philosophical and psychological 

 views were greatly influenced by French naturalists and philosophers, 

 especially by Cabanis and Lamarck. He praises the " ever memorable 

 Lamarck," because he laid so much stress on the " will to live." But 

 he repudiates as a "wonderful error" the idea that the organs of 

 animals should have reached their present perfection through a 

 development in time, during the course of innumerable generations. 

 It was, he said, a consequence of the low standard of contemporary 

 French philosophy, that Lamarck came to the idea of the construction 

 of living beings in time through succession 3 ! 



The positivistic stream of thought was not more in favour of a 

 real evolution than was the Romantic school. Its aim was to adhere 

 to positive facts : it looked with suspicion on far-reaching speculation. 

 Comte laid great stress on the discontinuity found between the 

 different kingdoms of nature, as well as within each single kingdom. 

 As he regarded as unscientific every attempt to reduce the number 

 of physical forces, so he rejected entirely the hypothesis of Lamarck 



1 Encyclopadie der philosophised h WUsemchaflen (4th edit.), Berlin, 1845, §249. 



2 Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie, Jena, 1809. 



3 Ueber den Willen in der Natur (2nd edit.), Frankfurt a. M., 1854, pp. 41—43. 



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