OF NATUKE. 555 



which they became fruitful in a direction not antici- 

 pated by their author himself. Had Schelling and his 

 followers confined their view to the purely natural, as 

 distinguished from the abstract physical, sciences, their 

 writings would have done less harm and led to less 

 opposition. Unfortunately, however, they applied it in 

 two directions where it proved to be either useless or 

 actually harmful. The first of these was marked by the 

 attempt to find a formula which would not only explain 

 the organic living creation, but also, by analogy, the 

 phenomena of the inorganic world. The second became 

 manifest in the sway which the ideas of Schelling 

 exercised over the medical sciences. 



Now, the whole tendency of the new or French school i3. 



*' statical 



of natural, as distinguished from mental, science in that i;'®^°^ 



' ^ ' French 



age was in the direction not of a genetic or dynamic, ^*='*°<=^- 

 but of a statical or morphological conception of pheno- 

 mena. This showed itself in the confidence with which 

 certain arithmetical or geometrical relations — such as 

 the laws of attraction and of fixed proportions, the 

 types of crystalline and organic forms — were applied to 

 the mechanical explanation or classification of cosmic, 

 molar, and molecular phenomena, of lifeless and living 

 things. And this view was confirmed by the many dis- 

 coveries and explorations through which the aspect of 

 nature and of things natural became vastly widened and 

 deepened. 



This was the age which inspired one of the most pro- u. 



Insuffici- 



minent students of nature, A. von Humboldt, with the encyofthia. 

 idea of writing a physical description of the Cosmos, a 

 scheme which was not carried out till much later, when 



