182 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



his UrSchleim ( ? protoplasm) and vesicular cell 

 theory. His Lehrhuch der Naturphilosophie ap- 

 peared in 1810, a year after Lamarck's Philoso- 

 phie Zoologique; again Oken suffers severely by 

 comparison. Lamarck's approaches a work of 

 science, Oken's is a tissue of speculation. In es- 

 timating Oken further, we must remember that 

 he is a follower of the purely speculative school 

 of Schelling, and that Schelling's method was to 

 rapidly abandon scientific induction for deduc- 

 tion, and to pass to the interpretation of Nature 

 from a subjective standpoint. Oken's writings 

 show that he was consistent in this method, and 

 Erdmann recalls that Oken's conversion of the 

 whole of philosophy into the philosophy of Na- 

 ture is a carrying out of what Schelling merely 

 touched upon. 



It is in the famous Ur-Schleim doctrine that 

 Oken's admirers erroneously read notions of the 

 original protoplasmic and cellular basis of all 

 life, and in which it is said he saw the fundamen- 

 tal substance out of which by differentiation life 

 has arisen. According to Oken,^ every organic 

 thing has arisen out of slime, and is nothing but 

 slime in different forms. This primitive slime 

 originated in the sea, in the course of planetary 

 evolution. The origin of life (generatio origi- 

 naria) occurred upon the shores, where water, 



^See Tulk's translation of the Elements of Physio'philoso'phy, 

 1847, Pt. Ill, pp. 185-7. 



