I. Haeckel and His Opponents

How far he had run ahead of his time with such conceptions becomes apparent when one reflects that at the same time when Goethe published his Metamorphosis, Kant sought to prove scientifically, in his Critique of Judgment, the impossibility of an explanation of the living according to the same principles as hold for the lifeless. He maintained: “It is quite certain that we cannot even adequately learn to know, far less explain to ourselves, the organised beings and their inner possibility according to purely mechanical principles of nature; and, indeed, it is so certain that we can boldly say it is senseless for man even to conceive such a purpose, or to hope that sometime perhaps a Newton may arise who will make comprehensible the production of a blade of grass according to natural laws which no purpose has ordered; rather one must simply and flatly deny any such insight to man.” Haeckel repudiates this thought with the words: “Now, however, this impossible Newton really appeared seventy years later in Darwin, and, as a matter of fact, solved the problem whose solution Kant had declared to be absolutely unthinkable!”