mistry existed at first only in a childish, phlogistic form. Biology
still lay in swaddling clothes; the organism of plants and animals was
examined only in a very cursory manner, and was explained upon purely
mechanical grounds; just as an animal was to Descartes nothing but a
machine, so was man to the materialists of the eighteenth century. The
exclusive application of the measure of mechanics to processes which are
of chemical and organic nature and by which, it is true, the laws of
mechanics are also manifested, but are pushed into the background by
other higher laws, this application is the cause of the peculiar, but,
considering the times, unavoidable, narrowmindedness of the French
materialism.

The second special limitation of this materialism lies in its incapacity
to represent the universe as a process, as one form of matter assumed in
the course of evolutionary development. This limitation corresponded
with the natural science of the time and the metaphysic coincident
therewith, that is the anti-dialectic methods of the philosophers.
Nature, as was known, was in constant motion, but this motion, according
to the universally accepted ideas, turned eternally in a circle, and
therefore never moved from the spot, and produced the same results over
and over again. This idea was at that time inevitable. The Kantian
theory of the origin of the solar system was at first exhibited and
considered as a mere curiosity. The history of the development of the
earth-geology was still unknown, and the idea that the living natural
objects of to-day are the result of a long process of development from
the simple to the complex could not be scientifically established at
that time. This anti-historical comprehension of nature was, therefore,
inevitable. We cannot reproach the philosophers of the eighteenth
century with this, as the same thing is also found in Hegel. According
to him, nature is the mere outward form of the Idea, capable of no
progress as regards time, but merely of an extension of its manifoldness
in space, so that it displays all the stages of development comprised in
it at one and the same time together, and is condemned to a repetition
of the same processes. And this absurdity of a progress in space but
outside of time--the fundamental condition of all progress--Hegel loads
upon nature, just at the very time when geology, embryology, the
physiology of plants and animals, and inorganic chemistry, were being
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