The German Natural Philosophers

The great school that began with Buffon and continued with Lamarck, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Dugès in France and with Goethe and Kielmeyer in Germany, assembled large amounts of factual information and through a series of inductions, tried to use these facts to derive a general concept relating the various forms of life. It was hoped that this would lead to discoveries of new facts and relationships. Their approach was one that is commonly followed in many realms of science, and their methods were unusual only in the great mass of factual information that they used in their attempts to find broad, general relationships. Later philosophers chose a rather different approach: starting with a sweeping, abstract idea, they used a preconceived concept to deduce facts by pure reason. This is what was attempted in Germany at the beginning of this century by what is known as the school of naturphilosophie.