THE "GENERAL MORPHOLOGY" 195 



laws were detected, and in which category of 

 thought were they to be found ? Miiller had the 

 theory, but was weak on the practical side. There 

 were the "forms" of animals and plants. What 

 was it that really connected them? What was 

 the reality that corresponded to the philosophic 

 craving of the intelligence ? Miiller' s next school, 

 the generation immediately preceding Haeckel, 

 that of Du Bois-Eeymond, Virchow, and many 

 others, had apparently indicated the solution. 

 They had replaced Miiller's vague general con- 

 ception of the laws of morphology and life, which 

 was undermined by older influences, by a single 

 great demand. We want to grasp nature as a 

 unity. At one point in nature we have reached 

 deep and apparently fundamental factors — in 

 physics and chemistry and their plain natural 

 laws or forces. Now let us try, starting from 

 the idea of unity and from the plainest of all 

 philosophical principles, that of proceeding from 

 the known to the unknown, to reduce the forms 

 and phenomena of life to these natural laws of 

 chemistry and physics. Let us find out whether 

 the whole form-world of the animals and plants — 

 in other words, the whole province of morphology 

 in the narrower sense — can be traced to the same 

 natural laws that we have in chemical and physical 

 phenomena. The globe is the object of chemistiy 

 and physics. Shall these few green or other- 

 coloured things that lie at the limit of the air, 

 water, and rocks, a small minority in nature, the 

 things we call animals and plants, alone in the 



