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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 982 



of attack for such a type of research. In 

 my ' ' Spirit of Modem Philosophy, ' ' twenty 

 years or so since, I pointed out the 

 meaning and the historical source of this 

 general tendency of German science and 

 scholarship in the period in question. 

 While preparing that book I at one time 

 made for myself a list of those great treat- 

 ises belonging to the years between 1815 

 and 1835 — treatises issued in Germany, 

 each one of which may be called epoeh- 

 marking in its own branch of historical 

 or of more or less definitely evolutionary 

 research. It is a list of notable works, 

 which shows a constant widening and 

 deepening interest in the growth of insti- 

 tutions, civilizations, art, religion, organ- 

 isms, languages — in short, of whatever 

 lives and can grow. 



Now this interest in the evolutionary 

 aspect of things had not been characteristic 

 of the eighteenth-century science. It did 

 not until much later become as prominent 

 in English or in French science as, during 

 the decades in question, it already was in 

 Germany. Its relation during the years 

 after 1815 in Germany to the leading ideas 

 — to the dreams, if you will, of the previous 

 romantic period of the Naturphilosophie, 

 is historically obvious. Its relation to the 

 later organization of the general doctrine 

 of evolution is just as obvious. One has, 

 therefore, to give credit to the Naturphi- 

 losophie for an indirect influence upon the 

 course of the progress of the most various 

 sciences — an influence as salutary as the 

 direct influence of the Nahirphilosophen 

 had frequently been enervating or con- 

 fusing. The special worker might well 

 say, like Virchow, "You, the Naturphilos- 

 ophie, were my enemy, from whom I hap- 

 pily escaped. For you counseled dreamy 

 speculation; while I learned to look faith- 

 fully through my microscope at the facts 

 as they were." But the Naturphilosophie, 



had it still lived to follow its own indirect 

 influence, might have replied: "Yes, but 

 I dreamed of evolution, and you special 

 workers found it. I viewed the prom- 

 ised land from Pisgah and died. You 

 crossed the Jordan of hard work and en- 

 tered in." 



To drop metaphor, the sober facts are 

 these — facts of some importance in the his- 

 tory of science, although I have no wish to 

 give them any false importance. Some of 

 the most notable scientific discoverers of 

 Germany in the years between 1820 or 

 1830 and 1860 were men who had been in 

 their youth, sometimes directly, sometimes 

 indirectly, under the influence of the Na- 

 turphilosophie. "With this influence such 

 men had in general learned to quarrel. 

 They consciously turned away from it to 

 special research. But the influence after 

 all left in them a love for the universal, for 

 the connections of things, for reflection 

 upon the meaning of their special re- 

 searches, for synthesis. And above all, 

 this influence left in them an intense eager- 

 ness to study the connected story of the 

 growth of organisms — a sense for the mean- 

 ing of evolution — a disposition to interpret 

 facts in the light of the growth of organ- 

 ized processes. Herein lay then an instruct- 

 ive although indirect relation between 

 philosophy and science. 



In the inorganic sciences, where the evo- 

 lutionary idea was, at least at that time, 

 and except in geology, out of place, the 

 indirect influence of the Naturphilosophie 

 showed itself mainly in a disposition to 

 seek for the unity that binds into one sys- 

 tem the various forms of natural energy. 



As I before pointed out, the modern the- 

 ory of the conservation of energy, of the 

 equivalence of various forms of energy, 

 and of the conditions which determine the 

 transformations of energy, is not the prod- 

 uct of any one set of motives. It is in fact 



