The German Genius

absent in inanimate nature. 38 Though it may sound primitive to us, Haller’s irritability concept was important because he was not a vitalist: for him organic matter was different from inorganic matter but the difference, however mysterious, was a natural and not a supernatural process. This helped form a climate of opinion whereby it was in Germany, toward the end of the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century, that the strongest resistance developed against the purely mechanistic understanding of the followers of Newton (though this is not to dismiss the role played in eighteenth-century biology by the Frenchman George Buffon, 1707–88, and the French-Swiss Charles Bonnet, 1720–93). 39 Three biologists in particular may be mentioned, not forgetting the important role played by Immanuel Kant in Königsberg.
    Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) led the way. The influence of his experiments and observations was immense—roughly half the important German biologists during the early nineteenth century studied under him or were inspired by him: Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer, Georg Reinhold Treviranus, Heinrich Friedrich Link, Johann Friedrich Meckel, Johannes Illiger, and Rudolph Wagner, several of whom we shall meet again. Friedrich Schelling and Kant agreed that Blumenbach was “one of the most profound biological theorists of the modern era.” 40
    His foundational theories were set out in a short work, Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäfte (On the Formative Drive and the History of Generation). In this book, Blumenbach considered how the sperm, “by the subtle odour of its parts which are particularly adapted to causing irritation,” awakens the germ “from its eternal slumber.” 41 And he identified a crucial question: “Why is it that progeny always differs from its original progenitor?” while observing too that offspring often display a blend of parental traits. He was homing in on the idea of both genetics and evolution, except that he had parts of the theory upside down: in his view all the various peoples around the world were a degeneration from the Caucasian race.
    Blumenbach’s central idea, the one that influenced Kant and Schelling so much, was that there is a kind of “Newtonian force” in the biological realm, which is the agent for organic structure and which he called the Bildungstrieb . 42 He had conceived this model after several experiments with the humble polyp. What struck Blumenbach about this organism was, first, that it could regenerate amputated parts “without noticeable modification of structure” and second, that the regenerated parts were always smaller than the originals. Furthermore, this seemed to be true more generally. Where humans had suffered serious flesh wounds, Blumenbach observed that the repaired area was never quite as good as new but always retained a depression. He was led to conclude “First that in all living organisms, a special inborn Trieb [drive, or motivating force] exists which is active throughout the entire lifespan of the organism, by means of which they receive a determinate shape originally, then maintain it, and when it is destroyed repair it where possible. Second, that all organized bodies have a Trieb which is to be distinguished from the general properties of the body as a whole as well as from the particular forces characteristic of that body. This Trieb appears to be the cause of all generation, reproduction, and nutrition. I call it the Bildungstrieb .” 43
    Blumenbach believed that the Bildungstrieb was teleological in character and “immanent” in the material constitution of the organism. In a way, of course, the Bildungstrieb doesn’t explain anything—it is merely a name for a mysterious process. But that is what appealed to Kant. For what he insisted upon was that, even if nature somehow uses mechanical means to construct organized bodies, humans can never understand that process even from a theoretical point of view. The problem for Kant was that human understanding can only construct scientific theories that use the “linear” mode of causation. In the organic realm, on the other hand, “cause and effect are so mutually interdependent that it is impossible to think of one without the other…This is a teleological mode of explanation, for it involves the notion of a ‘final cause.’” Kant became convinced that it is impossible to produce functional organisms by mechanical