394 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



16. 



Influence of 

 Liebig. 



of organised nature. From this organic chemistry of 

 the modern school Liebig turned away continuing to 

 lead research in the older and less fashionable direc- 

 tion. This choice is explained by the peculiarity of 

 his great mind, which, while investigating details, never 

 lost sight of the organic whole of natural processes, 

 and which allowed itself many a flight of imagina- 

 tion into unexplored regions. In fact, if we review the 

 work of Liebig from the side of the history of thought 

 rather than from that of science, we must assign to 

 it a very great and lasting influence. He was prob- 

 ably the first man of science who conceived the two- 

 fold meaning which belongs to the words, life and 

 organism, a meaning which was known and appreciated 

 by practical men, but which had, at that time, hardly 

 received scientific recognition. 1 Life is not only defined, 

 as Bichat put it, by the contrast with death ; it is just as 

 much defined by the idea of co-operation or solidarity : 

 life is not only the property of individual beings, but 

 also of the collection or society of several individuals in 

 a larger organism. As such, political economy had con- 

 ceived it long before Liebig's time, but Liebig was prob- 

 ably the first scientific thinker who studied the economy 

 of nature, who fully realised the interdependence of 

 animal and plant life, and tried to reduce this larger life 

 of living things to scientific data and laws. Through 

 him and his school two terms have become current in 

 scientific and popular literature which, especially in the 



1 The idea of the dependence of 

 living things on the environment, 

 on the " milieu," was indeed fully 

 recognised and emphasised by 



Lamarck (see p. 314 supra) ; but the 

 philosophical ideas of that great 

 thinker were then unknown and 

 disregarded. 



