Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 363 schemata, and confronting the problem of uniqueness. At various times through the book we see developments foreshadowing the doctrine of Verstehen. One must be grateful for the sheer bulk of the surveys of representative thinkers, and for the enormously useful lengthy quotations in the original and/or in translation from numerous hardto -find sources. This work is a valuable addition to the store of volumes on the intellectual life of eighteenthcentury Germany. It further illustrates the richness and variety of a period and an area too long clothed in obscurity and the scorn of both their secularist Western contemporaries and their Romantic successors. Because of the central position of history in the social sciences in that period the work is recommended not only to historians and philosophers, but also to historically minded theologians, literary critics, classical scholars interested in the history of their discipline, constitutional and legal theorists, and social scientists. And whatever the relationship between the Enlightenment thinkers and historicism, it needs to be considered. Reill has given us a solid and useful historical reconstruction. PHILIP W. CUMMINGS Trenton State College Fossils and Progress: Paleontology and the Idea of Progressive Evolution in the Nineteenth Century. By Peter J. Bowler. (New York: Science History Publications, 1976. Pp. viii + 191) At the peak of belief in the progressive development of organic forms, Louis Agassiz combined the separate views that the appearance of different species on earth is in temporal sequence , that this sequence represents a directional history of life, that this sequence forms a single linear progression from lower to higher forms, that this hierarchial sequence leads to a culmination in man, that it is the result of God's plan, and that God continuously executes the plan by discontinuously creating new species in proper temporal sequence. William Chambers drew a similar picture, differing by being Leibniz to Agassiz's Malebranche; that is, Chambers suggested that God could have programmed the preordained plan of development in the beginning so that his further attention would be unnecessary. Some such transcendental view was held at least by most British paleontologists up to Darwin, and some held it even after establishment of the theory of evolution by natural selection (which is generally sequential, but is multilinear, nondirectional, nonprogressional, nonhierarchial, nonteleological, and is naturalistic). What the British feared (the French seemed less concerned) was transmutationism, which might lead to the conclusion that man is just another (even if the highest) animal. Darwin's success justified their fears, and although Darwin basically denied progression, he did suggest that natural selection would result in higher levels of organization. Thus, Herbert Spencer and O. C. Marsh could argue that selection would lead naturally to progress and to man. The bulk of Bowler's excellent book is an exposition of progressionism, both the rise and fall of which are based in some large part on the increase of paleontological knowledge. Bowler states briefly--but does not defend--the hypothesis that the decline in the general belief in social progress helped eclipse belief in transcendental organic progression. His data better support the view that the advance of empirical knowledge that led to the naturalistic view of the origin of species helped--with the general advance of science--to undermine belief in Divine preordination and control of all sorts, including transcendental progression. Whatever the truth of Bowler 's hypothesis, his book is valuable for the light it throws on the intellectual milieu of nineteenth -century philosophy. RICHARD A. WATSON Washington University ...