his _Philosophie des Unbewussten_ (1868) and in his
valuable essay on _Wahrheit und Irrtum im Darwinismus_ (1874) criticised
Darwinism in a most suggestive manner from the vitalistic standpoint. He
drew attention to the importance of active adaptation, the necessity for
assuming definite and correlated variability, and to the evidence for
the existence of an immanent, purposive, but unconscious principle of
evolution, active as well in phylogenetic as in individual development.

In France H. Milne-Edwards[365] stated the problem thus:--"In the present
state of science, ought we to attribute to modifications dependent on
the action of known external agents the differences in the organic types
manifested by the animals distributed over the surface of the globe
either at the present day, or in past geological ages? Or must the
origin of types transmissible by heredity be attributed to causes of
another order, to forces whose effects are not apparent in the present
state of things, to a creative power independent of the general
properties of organisable matter such as we know them to-day?" (p. 426)

He concluded that the action of environment, direct or indirect, was
insufficient to account for the diversity of organic forms, and rejected
Darwin's theory completely. He thought it likely that the successive
faunas which palaeontology discloses have originated from one another by
descent. But he thought that the process by which they evolved should
rightly be called "creation." The word was of course not to be taken in
a crude sense. When the zoologist speaks of the "creation" of a new
species, "he in no way means that the latter has arisen from the dust,
rather than from a pre-existing animal whose mode of organisation was
different; he merely means that the known properties of matter, whether
inert or organic, are insufficient to bring about such a result, and
that the intervention of a hidden cause, of a power of some higher
order, seems to him necessary" (p. 429).

The criticism of Darwinism exercised by the older currents of thought
remained on the whole without influence. It was under the direct
inspiration of the Darwinian theory that morphology developed during the
next quarter of a century.

[333] Radl, _loc. cit._, i., p. 71.

[334] _Kritik der Urtheilskraft_, 1790.

[335] Eng. Trans. by J. H. Bernard, p. 337, London, 1892.

[336] H. F. Osborn, _From the Greeks to Darwin_, p. 145,
New Yor