Attempting to create his own philosophy of nature, giving 

 it a logical basis and providing it with new terminology, 

 Baer mobilized the differences of shades of meaning which 

 had characterized in German the words ZWECK and ZIEL. 

 Rejecting the understanding of purpose (ZWECK) for the 

 organic world,, in whose phenomena he did not discover the 

 presence of a conscious intelligent activity, he strove 

 for the words ZIEL and ZIELSTREBIGKEIT to designate 

 expediency, i.e. adaptive to the building and function of 

 living beings, and in particular their development either 

 individual or historical. The development of the individual 

 which is steadily (ZIELSTREBIG, ZIELMASSIG) producing 

 in each generation all principal signs of the species, was 

 for Baer an especially conclusive proof that the processes 

 of development cannot be directed by accidental actions of 

 the physico-chemical powers. 



Baer's frequently repeated assertions that the final 

 end (ZIEL) of development of an individual is the formation 

 of the organism, that in development a steady movement 

 towards this find end (ZIELSTREBIGKEIT) appears, do not 

 have in Baer that outspokenly idealistic opinion expressed 

 by the analogies of vitalists and antidarwinists at the end 

 of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. 

 Even using the expression — which is interesting in the 

 idealistic form — that the development of the individual is 

 directed by the idea of the species, Baer apparently had 

 in mind primarily an idea that the direction of ontogeny in 

 each given generation repeats the ontogeny of the previous 

 generation, i.e. that the development of the individual is 

 determined by specific peculiarities which may appear more 

 distinctly in the adult condition. It can be recognized 

 that in Baer's discussions and mainly in his terminology, 

 the knife's edge of difference between ZIEL and ZWECK 

 is so minute that he continuously risked sliding from the 

 meaning of ZIEL into the meaning of ZWECK; undoubtedly 

 this happened in many of his statements. It can be recognized 

 that Baer was insufficiently constant in his struggle against 

 fideism and that some of his expressions are open to deistic 

 and pantheistic interpretations. However, neither these 

 separate idealistic discussions nor the appearance of incon- 

 sistency should interest those who want to make for themselves 

 a correct estimation of the views of the great naturalist. 



510 



