ne is evolution... It has been a clumsy idea in
the older as well as in the newer philosophy of nature, to regard the
transformation and the transition from one natural form and sphere to
a higher as an outward and actual production." ("Encyclopaedie der
philosophischen Wissenschaften" (4th edition), Berlin, 1845, paragraph
249.)

The only one of the philosophers of Romanticism who believed in a
real, historical evolution, a real production of new species, was Oken.
("Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie", Jena, 1809.) Danish philosophers, such
as Treschow (1812) and Sibbern (1846), have also broached the idea of
an historical evolution of all living beings from the lowest to the
highest. Schopenhauer's philosophy has a more realistic character than
that of Schelling's and Hegel's, his diametrical opposites, though he
also belongs to the romantic school of thought. His philosophical and
psychological views were greatly influenced by French naturalists and
philosophers, especially by Cabanis and Lamarck. He praises the "ever
memorable Lamarck," because he laid so much stress on the "will to
live." But he repudiates as a "wonderful error" the idea that the
organs of animals should have reached their present perfection through
a development in time, during the course of innumerable generations. It
was, he said, a consequence of the low standard of contemporary French
philosophy, that Lamarck came to the idea of the construction of living
beings in time through succession! ("Ueber den Willen in der Natur" (2nd
edition), Frankfurt a. M., 1854, pages 41-43.)

The positivistic stream of thought was not more in favour of a real
evolution than was the Romantic school. Its aim was to adhere to
positive facts: it looked with suspicion on far-reaching speculation.
Comte laid great stress on the discontinuity found between the different
kingdoms of nature, as well as within each single kingdom. As he
regarded as unscientific every attempt to reduce the number of physical
forces, so he rejected entirely the hypothesis of Lamarck concerning the
evolution of species; the idea of species would in his eyes absolutely
lose its importance if a transition from species to species under the
influence of conditions of life were admitted. His disciples (Littre,
Robin) continued to direct against Darwin the polemics which their
master had employed against Lamarck. Stuart Mill, who, in the theory
of knowledge, represented the empirical or positivistic