Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/203

 securing of the facts demands all the powers which specially display the individual character of the observer. Thus serious attention to microscopy was one of the causes which introduced the best observers to the practice of inductive enquiry, and gave them an insight into its nature; and in a few years' time when the actual results of these investigations began to appear, and when a wholly new world disclosed itself to botanists, especially in the Cryptogams, then questions arose on which the dogmatic philosophy had not essayed its ancient strength; the facts and the questions were new and untouched, and presented themselves to unprejudiced observation in a purer form than those, which during the first three centuries had been so mixed up with the old philosophy and with the principles of scholasticism. Von Mohl, who only occasionally occupied himself with morphological subjects, was a firm adherent of the inductive method, and was bent on the establishment of individual facts rather than of general principles; but the founders also of the new morphology, Schleiden and Nägeli, started from philosophical points of view, which, different as they were in the two men, had yet two things in common, a demand for severely inductive investigation as the foundation of all science, and the rejection of all teleological modes of explaining phenomena, in which latter point their opposition to the idealistic nature-philosophy school was most distinctly manifested. They had indeed one very important point of contact with this school, the belief in the constancy of organic forms; but this belief, not being connected with the Platonic doctrine of ideas, was with them only a recognition of evcry-day observations, and was therefore of less fundamental importance, being felt merely as an inconvenient element in the science. Treating the question in this way, and influenced by the results of the new researches, they either inclined to entertain the idea of descent before the appearance of Darwin's great work, or gave a ready assent to the principle of the new doctrine, though they expressed some