ON THE GENETIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



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tlie types and epochs of the other ami <lominant school ; 

 liut they were difficult to grasp, being not unfrequently 

 fantastic compromises between Iho legends of religious 

 tradition and the l)eginnings of scientific thought. For 

 a long time they evaded the endeavour to put them into 



purely lUDipliolugical 

 and to discourage genetic con- 

 siderations. Acconlingly the many 

 beginnings of a scientific account 

 of the origin and historical develo|>- 

 ment of the things around us, of 

 whicli Lyell gave the first fairlj- 

 accuiate summary in the first 

 volume of his 'Principles of Geol- 

 ogy ' (1st ed., 1S30), were hardly 

 noticed in the 'Kosmos' (vol. i., 

 184.5, vol. ii., 1847). None of the 

 celebrated cosmogonical hypotheses, 

 which we shall deal with in this 

 cliapter, — neither tiie 'Protogica' 

 of Leibniz nor the ' Epoques de la 

 Nature' of Buffon, neither Kant's 

 uor Laplace's nebular theory, nor 

 even tiie brilliant introduction to 

 the ' Ossemens fossiles ' of Cuvier, 

 though the latter, and still more 

 Laplace, must have had a great 

 personal influence on him, — re- 

 ceive any adequate attention in 

 the pages of ' Kosmos. ' They are 

 rarely referred to, and then only as 

 works of imaginative value, for 

 which the true .scientific ground- 

 work, extensive observation, and 

 especially the experiences and 

 results of travel, are wanting. 

 Humboldt, whose mind was stored 

 with these rii'hes in an abundance 

 and variety unequalled before or 

 since, limited himself to a por- 

 traiture, to a panoramic and mor- 

 jiliological, to a structural and 

 architectonic view of things, with 

 which he combined a deep sense of 

 the reaction which the ccntempla- 

 tion of nature must have on the 

 artistic facultj'. (See the Intro- 

 <luction to the second, the most 

 brilliant, volume of 'Kosmos.') 



Genetic theoi-ies were to his mind 

 premature and foreign to his pur- 

 pose. " The mysterious and un- 

 solved problems of development <lo 

 not belong to the empirical region 

 of objective observation, to the 

 description of the developed, the 

 actual state of nur planet. The 

 description of the universe, soberly 

 contined to reality, lemaius averijc 

 to the obscure beginnings of a 

 history of organic life, not from 

 modesty, but from the nature of 

 its object and its limits" ('Kos- 

 mos,' vol. i. p. 367). "The world 

 of forms, I repeat, can in the enum- 

 eration of space relations only be 

 pictured as something actual, as 

 something existing in nature ; not 

 as a subject of an intellectual pi'ocess 

 of reasoning on already known causal 

 connections. . . . They are facts of 

 nature, resulting from the conflict 

 of many, to us, unknown conditions 

 of active push -and - pull forces. 

 With unsatisfied curiosity we aj)- 

 proach here the dark I'egion of 

 develojjment. We have here to do, 

 in the proper sense of the frequently 

 misused word, with world-events, 

 with cosmical processes of im- 

 measui'able periods. . . . The 

 present form of things and the 

 precise numerical determination of 

 relations has not hitherto succeeded 

 in leading us to a knowledge of 

 states traversed, to a clear insight 

 into the conditions under which 

 they originated. These comlitions 

 are not therefore to be termed 

 accidental, as man calls everything 

 that he cannot explain genetically " 

 (vol. iii. p. 431). 



