However, in order to appreciate Goethe’s views on morphology, one must associate his decidedly monistic conception of nature with his pantheistic philosophy. The warm and keen interest with which he followed, in his last years, the controversies of contemporary French scientists, and especially the struggle between Cuvier and Geoffroy St. Hilaire (see chap. iv of _The History of Creation_), is very characteristic. It is also necessary to be familiar with his style and general tenour of thought in order to appreciate rightly the many allusions to evolution found in his writings. Otherwise, one is apt to make serious errors.
He approached so close, at the end of the eighteenth century, to the principles of the science of evolution that he may well be described as the first forerunner of Darwin, although he did not go so far as to formulate evolution as a scientific system, as Lamarck did.
Chapter V. THE MODERN SCIENCE OF EVOLUTION
We owe so much of the progress of scientific knowledge to Darwin’s _Origin of Species_ that its influence is almost without parallel in the history of science. The literature of Darwinism grows from day to day, not only on the side of academic zoology and botany, the sciences which were chiefly affected by Darwin’s theory, but in a far wider circle, so that we find Darwinism discussed in popular literature with a vigour and zest that are given to no other scientific conception. This remarkable success is due chiefly to two circumstances. In the first place, all the sciences, and especially biology, have made astounding progress in the last half-century, and have furnished a very vast quantity of proofs of the theory of evolution. In striking contrast to the failure of Lamarck and the older scientists to attract attention to their effort to explain the origin of living things and of man, we have this second and successful effort of Darwin, which was able to gather to its support a large number of established facts. Availing himself of the progress already made, he had very different scientific proofs to allege than Lamarck, or St. Hilaire, or Goethe, or Treviranus had had. But, in the second place, we must acknowledge that Darwin had the special distinction of approaching the subject from an entirely new side, and of basing the theory of descent on a consistent system, which now goes by the name of Darwinism.