the form. The two concepts, Goethe's form-fulfilment and Darwin's evolution, are in as complete opposition as destiny to causality, and (be it added) as German to English thought, and German to English history.
There is no more conclusive refutation of Darwinism than that furnished by palæontology. Simple probability indicates that fossil hoards can only be test samples. Each sample, then, should represent a different stage of evolution, and there ought to be merely "transitional" types, no definition and no species. Instead of this we find perfectly stable and unaltered forms persevering through long ages, forms that have not developed themselves on the fitness principle, but appear suddenly and at once in their definitive shape; that do not thereafter evolve towards better adaptation, but become rarer and finally disappear, while quite different forms crop up again. What unfolds itself, in ever-increasing richness of form, is the great classes and kinds of living beings which exist aboriginally and exist still, without transition types, in the grouping of to-day. We see how, amongst fish, the Selachians, with their simple form, appear first in the foreground of history and then slowly fade out again, while the Teleostians slowly bring a more perfected fish-type to predominance. The same applies to the plant-world of the ferns and horsetails, of which only the last species now linger in the fully developed kingdom of the flowering plants. But the assumption of utility-causes or other visible causes for these phenomena has no support of actuality.[1] It is a Destiny that evoked into the world life as life, the ever-sharper opposition between plant and animal, each single type, each genus, and each species. And along with this existence there is given, also a definite energy of the form — by virtue of which in the course of its self-fulfilment it keeps itself pure or, on the contrary, becomes dull and unclear or evasively splits into numerous varieties — and finally a life-duration of this form, which (unless, again, incident intervenes to shorten it) leads naturally to a senility of the species and finally to its disappearance.
As for mankind, discoveries of the Diluvial age indicate more and more pointedly that the man-forms existing then correspond to those living now; there is not the slightest trace of evolution towards a race of greater utilitarian "fitness." And the continued failure to find man in the Tertiary discoveries indicates more and more clearly that the human life-form, like every other, originates in a sudden mutation (Wandlung) of which the "whence," "how," and "why" remain an impenetrable secret. If, indeed, there were evolution in the English sense of the word, there could be neither defined earth-strata nor specific animal-classes, but only a single geological mass and a chaos of living singular forms which we may suppose to have been left over from the struggle for existence. But all that we see about us impels us to the conviction that again and
- ↑ The first proof that the basic forms of plants and animals did not evolve, but were suddenly there, was given by H. de Vries in his Mutation Theory (1886). In the language of Goethe, we see how the "impressed form" [See Vol. I, p. 157. — Tr.] works itself out in the individual samples, but not how the die was cut for the whole genus.
