22 THE EVOLUTION THEORY 



purely scientific garb, being, in fact, bound up with the general 

 philosophical speculations which came increasingly into favour at 

 that time, chiefly through the writings of Schelling. In the same 

 year, 1809, m which Lamarck published his Philosophie zoologiquc, 

 Oken's Leltrhuch der Naturphilosophie appeared. 



This book is by no means simply a theory of descent ; its scope 

 is much wider, including the phenomena of the whole cosmos; on 

 the other hand, it goes too little into details and is too indefinite to 

 deserve its title. Its way of playing with ideas, its conjectures and 

 inferences from a fanciful basis, make it difficult for us now to think 

 ourselves into its mode of speculation, but I should like to give some 

 indication of it, for it was just these speculative encroachments 

 of the ' categories ' of the so-called ' Naturphilosophie ' which played 

 a fatal part in causing the temporary disappearance of the Evolution- 

 theory from science, so that, later on, it had to be established anew. 



Oken defines natural science as ' the science of the everlasting 

 transmutations of God (the Spirit) in the world ' : Every thing, 

 considered in the light of the genetic process of the whole, includes, 

 besides the idea of being, that of not-being, in that it is involved in 

 a higher form. ' In these antitheses the category of polarity is included. 

 The simpler elementary bodies unite into higher forms, which are 

 thus merely repetitions at a potential higher than that of their causes. 

 Thus the different genera of bodies form parallel and corresponding 

 series, the reasonable arrangement of which results as an intrinsic 

 necessity from their genetic connexion. In individuals these lowlier 

 series make their appearance again during development. The con- 

 trasts in the solar system between planets and sun are repeated in 

 plants and animals, and, as light is the principle of movement, animals 

 have the power of independent movement in advance of the plants 

 which belong to the earth.' 



Obviously enough, this is no longer the study of nature ; it is 

 nature-construction from a basis of guesses and analogies rather than of 

 knowledge and facts. Light is the principle of motion, and as animals 

 move, they correspond to the sun, and plants to the planets ! Here 

 there is not even a hint of a deepening of knowledge, and all these 

 deductions now seem to us quite worthless. 



On the other hand, it must be allowed that good ideas are by no 

 means absent from this ' philosophy,' nor can we deny to this restlessly 

 industrious man a great mind always bent on discovering what 

 was general and essential. Much of what we now know he even 

 then guessed at and taught, as, for instance, that the basis of all forms 

 of life in this infinitely diverse world of organisms was one and the 



