ON THE GENETIC VIEW OF NATURE. 315 



of nature, so also opposes a great resistance to any sudden 

 change of opinion. " But it is better," he says, " that a 

 truth once perceived should struggle a long time to obtain 

 merited attention than that everything that the ardent 

 imagination of man produces should be easily accepted." ] 

 Whereby it may appear to us worthy of note that 

 Lamarck did not stop to reflect on the existence of those 

 sudden changes by which such powers as the " ardent 

 imagination of man " are continually breaking through 

 the slow action of habit. The doctrine of the mutability 

 and variability of species, of the influence of the environ- 

 ment on the habits, and through them and inheritance 

 on the forms of living creatures, was thus opposed to 

 the prevalent doctrine of the fixity of species and the 

 permanence and recurrence of types. Through these 

 generalisations, and through the larger view which 

 Lamarck took of the phenomena of nature and of life, 

 he stepped outside of that school of natural studies 

 which was then dominant in his country, and approached 

 the teachings of the German philosophers of nature, such 22. 



The " Natur- 



as Schellina;, Oken, and Steffens, with whom Goethe is philoso- 

 phic." 



frequently associated, who, rather than limit themselves 

 to the patient study of detail, indulged in fanciful 

 theories on the origin of life, the genesis and metamor- 

 phosis of forms, and the ideal significance of natural 

 phenomena and processes. A wide gap separated the 

 speculations of the author of the ' Flore franqaise,' the 

 ' Histoire des Animaux sans Vertebres,' and the ' Memoires 

 sur les Coquilles fossiles des environs de Paris ' from those 

 of the German school, yet it cannot be denied that in 



1 Philos. Zoo}., p. 15. 



