67 For a discussion of the difficulties and impossibilities of this theory see page 148 above.
68 “Preformation oder Epigenesis?” Outlines of a theory of the development of organisms. Jena, 1894. (Part I. of “Zeit- und Streit-fragen der Biologie.”) Translated by P. Chalmers Mitchell, “The Biological Problem of To-day.”
69 In his earlier period. Later he rejects both preformation and epigenesis, as mechanical distortions of vital processes.
70 See also Lotze’s interesting article “Instinct” in the same work.
71 Part II. of his “Zeit- und Streit-fragen der Biologie.”
74 “General Physiology.” Translated by Lee. London. 1899. P. 170.
75 As a remarkable instance and corroboration of this, we may refer to the ever-recurring, instinctive antipathy of deeply religious temperaments, from Augustine to Luther and Schleiermacher, to the Aristotelian mood and its conception of the world, and their sympathy with Plato’s (mostly and especially in their “Platonised” expressions). The clear-cut, luminous, conception of the world which expresses everything in terms of commensurable concepts is thoroughly Aristotelian. But it would be difficult to find a place in it for the peculiar element which lies at the root of all true devotional feeling, and which makes faith something more than the highest “reverence, love and trust.”
76 “Arch. für pathol. Anatomie und Physiologie,” Bd. VIII. 1855.
78 The same is true even of crystals, “_omne crystallum e crystallo_.”
_ 79 Cf._ “Ueber die Aufgabe der Naturwissenschaft,” Jena, 1876. “Naturwissenschaftliche Tatsachen und Probleme.” “Physiologie und Entwicklungslehre,” 1886, in the collection of the “Allgemeiner Vereins für Deutsche Literatur.” Also in the same collection, “Aus Natur- und Menschen-leben.”
80 These ideas are not fully worked out, and they are disguised in poetic form—for instance, when even the play of flames is compared to vital processes. But if they be stripped of their poetic garb, they lead to the same conclusions to which one is always led when one approaches the problem unprejudiced by naturalistic or anthropomorphic preconceptions of the relation of the infinite to the finite, or the divine to the natural. If we exclude the materialistic or semi-materialistic position which regards teleological phenomena, vital processes, and even states of sensation and consciousness as the function of a “substance” or of matter, we can quite well speak of them as general “cosmo-organic” functions of universal being, meaning that they occur of necessity wherever the proper conditions exist. According to the doctrine of potentiality and actuality, this is to say that all possible stages of the higher and highest phenomena are _semper et ubique_ potentially present in universal being, and that they become actual wherever the physical processes are far enough advanced to afford the necessary conditions.