n,
never had present to his mind the idea of Descent which is characteristic
of "Darwinism," but rather development in the lofty sense in which it is
worked out in the nature-philosophy of Schelling and of Hegel. The chief
point is, that to him nature was the all-living and ever-living, whose
creating and governing cannot be reduced to prosaic numbers or
mathematical formulae, but are to be apprehended as a whole by the
perceptions of genius rather than worked out by calculation or in detail.
Any other way of regarding nature Goethe early and decisively rejected.
And he has embodied his strong protest against it in his "Dichtung und
Wahrheit":

"How hollow and empty it seemed to us in this melancholy, atheistical
twilight.... Matter, we learnt, has moved from all eternity, and by means
of this movement to right and left and in all directions, it has been
able, unaided, to call forth all the infinite phenomena of existence."

The book--the "Systeme de la Nature"--"seemed to us so grey, so Cimmerian,
so deathlike that it was with difficulty we could endure its presence."

And in a work with remarkable title and contents, "Die Farbenlehre,"
Goethe has summed up his antagonism to the "Mathematicians," and to their
chief, Newton, the discoverer and founder of the new
mathematical-mechanical view of nature. Yet the mode of looking at things
which is here combated with so much labour, wit, and, in part, injustice,
is precisely that of those who, to this day, swear by the name of Goethe
with so much enthusiasm and so little intelligence

The two Kinds of Naturalism.

But let us return to the two kinds of naturalism we have already
described. Much as they differ from one another in reality, they are very
readily confused and mixed up with one another. And the chief peculiarity
of what masquerades as naturalism among our educated or half-educated
classes to-day lies in the fact that it is a mingling of the two kinds.
Unwittingly, people combine the moods of the one with the reasons and
methods of the other; and having done so they appear to themselves
particularly consistent and harmonious in their thought, and are happy
that they have been able thus to satisfy at once the needs of the
intellect and those of the heart.

On the one hand they stretch the mathematical-mechanical view as far as
possible from below upwards, and even attempt to explain the activities of
life and consciousness as the results of complex ref