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Holbach had eliminated God the Creator, leaving in His place a soulless machine con-
trolled by natural laws based on the equations of Newton and Boyle— meager compensation
for the rich brocade of universal certainties woven by religion. Atheism also posed heuristic
problems for late eighteenth- century biologists. Faced with a paucity of data, naturalists
routinely cited God’s wisdom in lieu of a physical mechanism for the baffling complexity
and seeming purposefulness of living organisms. Because Newton’s and Boyle’s equations
failed to describe life processes, atheism would have deprived naturalists of their fall- back
explanation.
At the same time, young seminarians in German universities were busily expanding the
Protestant Reformation by rejecting religious fundamentalism. The American and French
revolutions were greatly admired for they seemed to demonstrate the power of reason and
idealism to overturn antiquated systems of thought and governance. Some young schol-
ars were attracted to the field of comparative religion, which exposed them to the histori-
cal antecedents of Judaeo- Christian traditions. Before long, the biblical account of the
Creation was being downgraded from revealed truth to the status of myth. Such a radical
departure from fundamentalist thinking set German intellectuals apart from most of their
European colleagues. With the enthusiasm of converts, German philosophers took up the
challenge of providing an alternative explanation for the Creation in more rational and
historical terms.
The problem was how to account for the manifold forms and patterns of living organisms
and the reciprocal interactions among their parts if not by the intervention of a Creator
God. With God now banned from eighteenth- century scientific discourse, a suitable substi-
tute (short of atheism) had to be found. Naturphilosophie, a diverse amalgam of pantheistic
notions and physical laws, fit the bill nicely. A consensus emerged that the best way to dis-
cover the rules governing the growth and development of a living organism was to describe
its history. But if God is not directly involved at each stage of an organism’s development,
where did the apparent purposefulness of development come from? This was one of the
thorniest questions that Immanuel Kant posed in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), and,
over the next few decades, Kantian ideas were enthusiastically elaborated by his youthful
disciples into a confusing web of convoluted and often contradictory schemes.
In effect, the powers of the old Creator God were disbursed to two new pantheistic forces
borrowed from Spinoza and eastern religions, “subjective consciousness” and “universal
consciousness,” with some favoring the former and others favoring the latter. However,
neither of these two supposed forces quite explained the “purposefulness” of nature. The
missing piece of the puzzle was, of course, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution published
in 1859. The frustrating historical predicament that Goethe and his fellow Romantics faced
as they tried to make sense of the natural world without resorting to a traditional Creator
God was the absence of the concept of natural selection.Immanuel Kant: On Empiricism, Bildungstrieb,
and Archetypes
Eighteenth- century empiricism rested on the assumption that the senses were accurate
reporters of external reality. Induction was the process by which the mind used reason to
infer truths about external objects from the raw, unfiltered data of the senses. By this pro-
cess, an accurate and complete view of the natural world could be obtained.