October 24, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



571 



maintained, would be, in one aspect, an 

 a priori theory, that is, it would be based 

 upon the general character of our own 

 knowledge of nature, and upon the demands 

 which are made by our reason. For, as 

 Schelling held, truth can not be accepted 

 by us, unless we can recognize it as in some 

 sense our own truth, the expression of our 

 own rational demands. Great stress was 

 thus laid, by the philosopher, upon the 

 share which our own self-conscious insight 

 has in defining for us the nature of things. 

 It would be a mistake, however, to suppose 

 that the youthful Schelling, even with all 

 his enthusiasm, actually ventured to at- 

 tempt to spin all the contents of his Natur- 

 philosophie out of his bare and unaided 

 inner consciousness. He was both ignorant 

 and contemptuous of the well-disciplined 

 procedure of the more abstruse experi- 

 mental sciences ; but he was not ignorant of 

 the broader results which the natural 

 sciences of his time reported; and he took 

 considerable interest in these results. 

 Moreover he was, in a way, an enthusiastic 

 although very undisciplined observer of 

 nature. His defect was thus not like the 

 defect of a modern christian scientist who 

 simply turns away from natural phenom- 

 ena, and denying that they mean anything 

 but mortal error, does indeed get a theory 

 of nature only by means of deliberately 

 ignoring natural truth. Schelling 's defect 

 was rather that of an esthetically minded 

 enthusiast who revels in the study of a 

 great variety of natural phenomena, but 

 who undertakes to interpret these phenom- 

 ena by means of personal intuitions. Mean- 

 while these intuitions themselves were, with 

 Schelling, by no means those of a mere 

 child, or of a savage, but of a wayward yet 

 highly cultivated young man of the close of 

 the eighteenth century. They were intui- 

 tions which presupposed, and undertook to 

 interpret, the results of much miscellaneous 



reading, and of a good deal of undisciplined 

 observation on Schelling 's part relating to 

 physical, chemical and biological facts and 

 theories. You can not doubt Schelling 's 

 capricious but extensive industry in the 

 study of nature. His fault lay in his self- 

 assurance, in his impatience, and in his 

 determination to tell nature at once upon 

 meeting her precisely what she meant. 

 Amongst his favorite classes of phenomena, 

 aboiat which he read and speculated, were 

 those of electricity and magnetism, of chem- 

 ical afSnity, so far as these phenomena were 

 then known, and of organic development. 

 He was indeed far beyond the uncultivated 

 fashions of interpretation which we know 

 so well in ordinary cranks. Yet much of 

 his work was as vain as circle-squaring in 

 its actually resulting relation to any con- 

 crete business of natural science. Schel- 

 ling had amongst other things a consider- 

 able and a somewhat mischievous interest 

 in medicine. What now is called psychical 

 research was a favorite occupation of the 

 time; and that too won a good deal of 

 Schelling 's attention. In 1806, after 

 Schelling had left Jena, he began to pub- 

 lish, in union with a friend and partial dis- 

 ciple of his, A. F. Marcus, a periodical 

 called Jahriiicher der Medicin als Wissen- 

 schaft. Of this periodical three volumes 

 appeared at Tiibingen, the third and last in 

 1808. The articles to be found in it include 

 an extensive series of aphorisms on the 

 Naturphilo Sophie by Schelling, papers on 

 animal magnetism by Schelling 's brother 

 (himself a physician), essays on the appli- 

 cation of various metals (iron, mercury) in 

 medicine by Marcus, papers on the relation 

 of botany to medicine by Steffens, on in- 

 flammation by Marcus, and so on. 



As the mention of this journal shows you, 

 the Naturphilosophie of Schelling had from 

 the first the tendency not to remain the ex- 

 pression of the individual philosopher, but 



