THE SCIENCE OF LIFE 



sense is very undesirable, because it is the only name 

 we have for the totality of the organic sciences. 



Like every other science, biology has a general and a 

 special part. General biology contains general informa- 

 tion about living nature ; this is the subject of the present 

 study of the wonders of life. We might also describe 

 it as biological philosophy, since the aim of true philos- 

 ophy must be the comprehensive survey and rational 

 interpretation of all the general results of scientific 

 research. The innumerable discoveries of detailed facts 

 which observation and experiment give us, and which 

 are combined into a general view of life in philosophy, 

 form the subject of empirical science. As the latter, on 

 the side of the organic world, or as empirical biology, 

 forms the first object of the science of life, and seeks to 

 effect in the system of nature a logical arrangement and 

 summary grouping of the countless special forms of life, 

 this special biology is often wrongly called the science 

 of classification. 



The first comprehensive attempt to reduce to order 

 and unity the ample biological material which systematic 

 research had accumulated in the eighteenth century was 

 made by what we call "the older natural philosophy" 

 at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Reinhold 

 Treviranus (of Bremen) had made a suggestive effort to 

 accomplish this difficult task on monistic principles in 

 his Biology, or Philosophy of Living Nature (1802). 

 Special importance attaches to the year 1809, in which 

 Jean Lamarck (of Paris) published his PhilosopJiie 

 Zoologique, and Lorentz Oken (of Jena) his Manual of 

 Natural Philosophy. I have fully appreciated the service 

 of Lamarck, the founder of the theory of descent, in my 

 earlier writings. I have also recognized the great merit 

 of Lorentz Oken, who not only aroused a very wide 

 interest in this science by his General Natural History, 

 but also put forward some general observations of great 



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