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August 1, 1779

 Lorenz Oken (August 1, 1779 to August 11, 1851) was a German zoologist, who described his goals this way:

I have worked so hard at my " Sketch of Physiophilosophy," that I believe I shall soon be able to publish it. What I have principally striven to render clear, was the identity of Nature's dealings with those of Mathematics, and ... I intend dividing it into two parts, the first of which is [about] .... " Theory of the Senses, and the classification of animals based thereupon." ....

The above is from a letter, and here is another excerpt from a letter to a colleague, Friedrich Schelling. I quote it in some detail for the graceful portrait Oken limns of a certain kind of intellectual, one we all have encountered. This is the thinker who does not grasp his own capacities and yet has a position of some authority, one he gained, perhaps,because his father was famous. This type is genuinely given to abstract thought, but lacks some ambition for testing thought against facts.

Gottingen, May 24th, 1805

. ...."Entre nous," be it said, [Johann Friedrich ] Blumenbach is in his lectures—well, what shall I call him —not a charlatan, but a merry Andrew and old curiosity monger, the like of which I have never seen before. What is really important he scarcely makes a subject of conversation, and if he does so, he has no other resource than mere words such as he has picked up from some of the big wigs of Gottingen or out of a book-store. Upon trifles, however, caricatures and trivialities, as he himself calls them, he will chatter away for whole hours at a time, and that with a circumstantiality of detail. .... When he comes into the college.... he tells you for about half an hour how a certain pastor in the Thuringen forest tamed a company of mice who played about and eat off a fork, how a maiden from Bern taught twenty-four different beasts to take their dinners out of one dish, such e.g. as a fox and hen, martin and pigeon, a dog and a cat, etc., etc. And then, after stating that he would not waste his words like other professors upon the utility of natural history as ...[that was so obvious] , he would proceed to descant for a whole hour, as to how necessary it was to a theologian for understanding his Bible, so that I used literally to wonder why he did not haul in the very beasts out of the Apocalypse. ....

As to the arrangement of animals, he would read it off the diagram as if it was a mathematical verity that must stand just as he had disposed it. Not a word was said as to its justification. Not a hint given as to any other classification being possible, or ....as to a bettering of the one before us. .... in short, I have not heard a single intelligent word from him except the ready made ones [from...] card boxes. .... In God's name, what kind of zoologists will such people make, what kind of tendency will they introduce among the naturalists of Germany! when their highest instinct consists only in sweeping together and picking up all sorts of strange things. ....

The preceding description we found in this book, Lorenz Oken: A biographical Sketch(1883), written by Alexander Ecker, and translated by Alfred Tulk. Whoever Tulk was, he certainly did a good job translating.

Oken had the ambition to apply philosophical principles to the study of the natural sciences. This is probably why he is forgotten today, for his ambition was parallel chronologically with the opposite, and even sillier, idea -- to apply the principles of natural science to the study of philosophy. The latter of course is still flourishing.



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