The German Genius

Schelling was the great advocate of the marriage of biology and poetry, though Friedrich Schlegel agreed. 29 In the treatise Von der Weltseele ( On the World Soul ; 1798), Schelling explored the latest scientific research, concluding that “teleological structures characterised all living creatures.” He thought that nature was infinitely productive (he had no idea of genetics) and that it took the forms it did as a result of being continuously inhibited or limited by opposing forces. These forces—magnetism, electricity, chemical processes—brought about changes in the powers of organization (sensibility, irritability, and Bildungstrieb ). “Schelling conceived the infinite productivity of nature as an unending evolution ( unendliche Evolution ), with its products as momentary resting places, a slowing of the evolutionary process but not a cessation of it.” 30 In its way, this was a pre-Darwinian notion of adaptation.
    In general terms, then, we may say that one significant achievement of Romantic science in Germany was a pre-Darwinian idea of evolution. A second was a pre-Freudian notion of insanity. Johann Christian Reil was one of the most famous medical theorists of his time. Born in the far north, the grandson of a Lutheran pastor, he worked on several studies of mental illness before his seminal work, Rhapsodien über die Anwendung der psychischen Curmethode auf Geisteszerrüttungen (Rhapsodies on the Application of Psychiatric Methods of Cure to the Mentally Disturbed). 31 This became perhaps the most influential work in shaping German psychiatry before Freud. Reil’s view was that insanity arose from the “fragmentation of the self, from an incomplete or misformed personality and from the inability of the self to construct a coherent world of the non-ego—all of which resulted from a malfunction of self-consciousness, that fundamentally creative activity of the mind.” A marked element in Reil’s system was that civilization had its dark side. Self-consciousness, he maintained, “synthesises the mental man, with his different qualities, into the unity of a person.” This is clearly very modern. 32
    Reil also had an evolutionary view. He believed that new species would go on occurring and that higher, more-developed forms would evolve in the wake of less-developed species. The force behind this process, he claimed (as did Kielmeyer), was the same as that which drove the development of the fetus. He believed that, over time, more fully evolved individuals would emerge that would come to epitomize more completely the potential of the species. It was not as if species were pushed from behind toward a predetermined future; instead they developed closer and closer to “the realisation of the ideal of absolute organism.” 33 This was a form of biological Idealism.
    G OETHE’S U RPHENOMENA
     
    Goethe had always had an interest in science; this is evident from the fact that, after he matriculated at the University of Strasbourg in 1770, he chose a liberal arts course which included political science, history, anatomy, surgery, and chemistry. 34 But his interest didn’t begin to mature until he returned from his extended visit to Italy in 1786–88. For the next two decades, more or less, he spent a great deal of time studying the history of science and investigating two interests, plant morphology and color theory, even as he wrote some of his best poetry. When he died, on March 22, 1832, besides his letters and other writings and his 5,000 books, he left a museum of scientific instruments and cabinets of flora, fauna, and countless minerals that Werner would have coveted—50,000 artifacts in all. The Leopoldina edition of Goethe’s scientific writings was published from 1947 on. 35
    Goethe’s contributions to science fell into five main categories—geology, anatomy, botany, optics, and the nature of the experiment. Karl Fink underlines Goethe’s very modern view of science: he was aware that scientific “facts” are, as often as not, interpretations that owe as much to the scientist himself as to what is “out there.” Goethe was never in thrall to the experiment as others were, seeing it as less about “proof” and more about the way science “presented” itself. In his science Goethe also inhabited that world between doubt and Darwin. He thought that the nature of reality could best be glimpsed “at the borders” of objects, that change was where nature revealed herself. Famously,