Henrik Steffens[1] (a Norwegian, 1773-1845; professor in Halle, Breslau, and Berlin) makes individual development the goal of nature—­which is first completely attained in man and in his peculiarity or talent—­and holds that the catastrophes of the spirit are reflected in the history of the earth.  Lorenz Oken[2] (1779-1851; professor in Jena 1807-27, then in Munich and Zurich) identifies God and the universe, which comes to self-consciousness in man, the most perfect animal; teaches the development of organisms from an original slime (a mass of organic elements, infusoria, or cells); and looks on the animal kingdom as man anatomized, in that the animal world contains in isolated development that which man possesses collected in minute organs—­the worm is the feeling animal, the insect the light animal, the snail the touch animal, the bird the hearing animal, the fish the smelling animal, the amphibian the taste animal, the mammal the animal of all senses.

[Footnote 1:  Steffens, Contributions to the Inner Natural History of the Earth, 1801; Caricatures of the Holiest, 1819-21; Anthropology, 1822.]

[Footnote 2:  Oken:  On the Significance of the Bones of the Skull, 1807; Text-book of the Philosophy of Nature, 1809-11, 2d ed. 1831, 3d ed. 1843; the journal Isis, from 1817.  On Oken cf.  C. Guettler, 1885.]

While in Steffens geological interests predominate, and in Oken biological interests, Schubert, Carus, and Ennemoser are the psychologists of the school.  Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert[1] (1780-1860; professor in Erlangen and Munich) brings the human soul into intimate relation with the world-soul, whose phantasy gives form to all that is corporeal, and delights to dwell on the abnormal and mysterious phenomena of the inner life, the border-land between the physical and the psychical, on the unconscious and the half-conscious, on presentiments and clairvoyance, as from another direction also Schelling’s philosophy was brought into perilous connection with somnambulism.  A second predominantly contemplative thinker was Karl Gustav Carus[2] (1789-1869; at his death in Dresden physician to the king; Lectures on Psychology, 1831; Psyche, 1846; Physis, 1851), greatly distinguished for his services to comparative anatomy.  Carus endows the cell with unconscious psychical life,—­a memory for the past shows itself in the inheritance of dispositions and talents, just as the formation of milk in the breasts of the pregnant and the formation of lungs in the embryo betray a prevision of the future,—­and points out that with the higher development of organic and spiritual life the antitheses constantly become more articulate:  individual differences are greater among men than among women, among adults than among children, among Europeans than among negroes.

[Footnote 1:  G.H.  Schubert:  Views of the Dark Side of Natural Science, 1808; The Primeval World and the Fixed Stars, 1822; History of the Soul, 1830 (in briefer form, Text-book of the Science of Man and of the Soul, 1838).]