Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/392

388 in Darwin himself. The main limitation of his theory results from its bondage to the idea of utility—a heritage from the eighteenth century. In illustration of these cross-currents, still inexplicable, recall that Monge, the mathematician, though born in 1746, was essentially a nineteenth century man; so was Lamarck, born two years earlier; so was Erasmus Darwin, even if sixty-nine of his seventy-one years belonged to the heyday of Pope, Johnson and Paley. Similarly, when we face towards the future rather than the past, we find the seminal ideas of the nineteenth century already astir soon after the middle of the eighteenth. Winckelmann, in 1758; Lessing, in 1766; and, more plainly. Herder, in 1786, are apostles of synthetic as opposed to analytic methods, of "life-history" as against mere taxonomy. Listen to Herder, and note how he prophesies the genetic era:

And again, on the side now of the human sciences:

You see the same thing in Goethe's "Iphigenie" (1787), in his "Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären" (1790), and his "Zur Morphologic" (1795-1807), above all, in "Faust," erster Theil (1808). Small wonder, then, that the systematic thinkers bred in the same movement, Kant aside, should be dominated by the genetic idea of development; and even Kant, especially in his "Kritik der Urtheilskraft" (1790), to say nothing of the extraordinary prevision of his "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels" (1755), is not without latent suspicions concerning the direction to be taken by the new tide. To mention none of his other manifold services—of which, in a company of investigators, the part he played at the foundation of the University of Berlin should merit particular remembrance—Fichte's "Der geschlossene Handelsstaat" (1800), originates a line of socio-economic thought thoroughly characteristic of Darwin's lepoch, and affiliated sometimes with biology. Schelling's "Einleitung zum Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie" (1799), as I have tried to show in another place, exercised no little formativepower over a group of his countrymen who made important contributions to the early modern phases of physiology, chemistry, botany,