THE WONDERS OF LIFE 



value. His "infamous " theory of a primitive slime, and 

 the development of infusoria out of it, is merely the 

 fundamental idea of the theory of protoplasm and the 

 cell which was long afterwards fully recognized. These 

 and other services of the older natural philosophy were 

 partly ignored and partly overlooked, because they went 

 far beyond the scientific horizon of the time, and their 

 authors to an extent lost themselves in airy and fantastic 

 speculations. The more scientists confined themselves 

 in the following half -century to empirical work and the 

 observation and description of separate facts, the more 

 it became the fashion to look down on all "natural 

 philosophy. ' ' The most paradoxical feature of the situa- 

 tion was that purely speculative philosophy and idealist 

 metaphysics had a great run at the same time, and their 

 castles in the air, utterly destitute of biological founda- 

 tion, were much admired. 



The magnificent reform of biology which Darwin 

 initiated in 1859 by his epoch-making Origin of Species 

 gave a fresh impulse to natural philosophy. As this work 

 not only used the rich collection of facts already made 

 in proof of the theory of descent, but gave it a new 

 foundation in the theory of selection (Darwinism prop- 

 erly *SQ called), everything seemed to call for the 

 embodiment of the new conception of nature in a 

 monistic system. I made the first effort to do this in 

 my General Morphology (1866). As this found few 

 supporters among my colleagues, I undertook in my 

 History of Creation (1868) to make the chief points of the 

 system accessible to the general reader. The remarkable 

 success of this book (a tenth edition of it appearing in 

 1902) emboldened me at the end of the nineteenth 

 century to state the general principles of my monistic 

 philosophy in my Riddle of the Universe. About the 

 same time (1899) there appeared the work of the Kiel 

 botanist, Johannes Reinke, The World as Reality; and 



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