Buddhist Romanticism

found fossils and old bones of animals—such as mammoths and giant
lizards—that had never been seen alive. The question was, were these
animals still living in unexplored regions of the Earth, or had they become
extinct? And when the fossils bore a familial relationship to known animals,
what was the relationship between them? One prominent German
paleontologist, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), proposed that
life evolved. In his eyes, the Bildungstrieb—drive to develop—forced plant
and animal life to generate new forms and new species in line with the
evolution of its physical environment, and had gone through three major
epochs, paralleling those of human society: the mythic, the heroic, and the
historical. In other words, the general trend was from larger and stronger
organisms—the giant lizards of mythic times, the mammoths of heroic
times—to the smaller, weaker, and more sensitive human beings of historic
times.
This theory went hand-in-hand with a new geological conception of the
Earth, as fossils were used to date the rock strata in which they were found,
revealing a picture of the Earth as immensely old and changing radically
with time. Two major German geologists, Johann Heinrich Merck (1741–
91), and Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749–1817)—Novalis’ geology professor
—proposed that the Earth had grown organically and was continuing to do
so.
Many of these theories were hotly debated, both from the side of religion
and from the side of religious skepticism. Fervent Christians were offended
by the huge time spans that the geologists were proposing, and by the idea
that current forms of life didn’t come directly from the hand of God.
Religious skeptics objected to the idea of a life force imbuing all matter, in
that it allowed God, as a living force, to play a continuing role in the affairs
of the world.
The most decisive event in strengthening the organic view of the
universe was the publication, in 1789, of a paper by the renowned
astronomer, William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus. Herschel, a
native of Germany living in England, had curried favor with George III by
originally naming his new planet “the Georgian star”—a name that
fortunately did not stand the test of time. It persisted long enough,
however, for his friends in the Royal Academy of Sciences successfully to
lobby the king to provide Herschel with the funds to build an immense
telescope outside of London, by far the largest telescope to that date in the
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