The above-mentioned laws of development, together with some other general ones, which have been expressly admitted and justly emphasized by Agassiz, and some of which have first been set forth by him, are, as we shall see later, only explicable by the Theory of Descent, and without it remain perfectly incomprehensible. The conjoint action of Inheritance and Adaptation, as explained by Darwin, can alone be their true cause. But they all stand in sharp and irreconcilable opposition to the hypothesis of creation maintained by Agassiz, as well as to the idea of a personal Creator who acts for a definite purpose. If we seriously wish to explain those remarkable phenomena and their inter-connection by Agassiz’s theory, then we are necessarily driven to the curious supposition that the Creator himself has developed, together with the organic nature which he created and modelled. We can, in that case, no longer rid ourselves of the idea that the Creator himself, like a human being, designed, improved, and finally, with many alterations, carried out his plans. “Man grows as higher grow his aims,” and the same supposition, so unworthy of a God, must be applied to him. Although, from the reverence with which, in every page, Agassiz speaks of the Creator, it might appear that, on his theory, we attain to the sublimest conception of the divine activity in nature, yet the contrary is in truth the case. The divine Creator is degraded to the level of an idealized man, of an organism progressing in development!
Considering the wide popularity and great authority which Agassiz’s work has gained, and which is perhaps justified on account of earlier scientific services rendered by the author, I have thought it my duty here to show the utter untenableness of his general conceptions. So far as this work pretends to be a scientific history of creation, it is undoubtedly a complete failure. But still it has great value, being the only detailed attempt, adorned with scientific arguments, which an eminent naturalist of our day has made to found a teleological or dualistic history of creation. The utter impossibility of such a history has thus been made obvious to every one. No opponent of Agassiz could have refuted the dualistic conception of organic nature and its origin more strikingly than he himself has done by the intrinsic contradictions which present themselves everywhere in his theory.
The opponents of the monistic or mechanical conception of the world have welcomed Agassiz’s work with delight, and find in it a perfect proof of the direct creative action of a personal God. But they overlook the fact that this personal Creator is only an idealized organism, endowed with human attributes. This low dualistic conception of God corresponds with a low animal stage of development of the human organism. The more developed man of the present day is capable of, and justified in, conceiving that infinitely nobler and sublimer idea of God which alone is compatible with the monistic conception of the universe, and which recognizes God’s spirit and power in all phenomena without exception. This monistic idea of God, which belongs to the future, has already been expressed by Giordano Bruno in the following words:—“A spirit exists in all things, and no body is so small but contains a part of the divine substance within itself, by which it is animated.” It is of this noble idea of God that Goethe says:—“Certainly there does not exist a more beautiful worship of God than that which needs no image, but which arises in our heart from converse with Nature.” By it we arrive at the sublime idea of the Unity of God and Nature.
CHAPTER IV.
THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT ACCORDING TO GOETHE AND OKEN.
Scientific Insufficiency of all Conceptions of a Creation of Individual Species.—Necessity of the Counter Theories of Development.—Historical Survey of the Most Important Theories of Development.—Aristotle.—His Doctrine of Spontaneous Generation.—The Meaning of Natural Philosophy.—Goethe.—His Merits as a Naturalist.—His Metamorphosis of Plants.—His Vertebral Theory of the Skull.—His Discovery of the Mid Jawbone in Man.—Goethe’s Interest in the Dispute between Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hilaire.—Goethe’s Discovery of the Two Organic Formative Principles, of the Conservative Principle of Specification (by Inheritance), and of the Progressive Principle of Transformation (by Adaptation).—Goethe’s Views of the Common Descent of all Vertebrate Animals, including Man.—Theory of Development according to Gottfried Reinhold Treviranus.—His Monistic Conception of Nature.—Oken.—His Natural Philosophy.—Oken’s Theory of Protoplasm.—Oken’s Theory of Infusoria (Cell Theory).—Oken’s Theory of Development.
All the different ideas which we may form of a separate and independent origin of the individual organic species by creation lead us, when logically carried out, to a so-called anthropomorphism, that is, to imagining the Creator as a man-like being, as was shown in our last chapter. The Creator becomes an organism who designs a plan, reflects upon and varies this plan, and finally forms creatures according to this plan, as a human architect would his building. If even such eminent naturalists as Linnæus, Cuvier, and Agassiz, the principal representatives of the dualistic hypothesis of creation, could not arrive at a more satisfactory view, we may take it as evidence of the insufficiency of all those conceptions which would derive the various forms of organic nature from a creation of individual species.
Some naturalists, indeed, seeing the complete insufficiency of these views, have tried to replace the idea of a personal Creator by that of an unconsciously active and creative Force of Nature; yet this expression is evidently merely an evasive phrase, as long as it is not clearly shown what this force of nature is, and how it works. Hence these attempts, also, have been absolute failures. In fact, whenever an independent origin of the different forms of animals and plants has been assumed, naturalists have found themselves compelled to fall back upon so many “acts of creation,” that is, on supernatural interferences of the Creator in the natural course of things, which in all other cases goes on without interference.