“This book offered a beautiful interpretation, informed by the character of the recent Naturphilosophie, of the geology of that time, and it was written with the intellect and eloquence that so distinguished Steffens. Its many bold and astute reflections drew much attention and were not without effect on its numerous readers; but now, looking back over almost half a century, we must confess that it did not enrich science with such clear results that they are here worth mentioning.”
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References
I wish to acknowledge the support of the Atkinson Faculty Committee on Research.
Hans Christian Ørsted, “Henrik Steffens: Gedächtnißrede, gehalten in der dänischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften am 6. März 1846”, in Kleinere Schriften von Hans Christian Ørsted, translated by K. L. Kannegiesser, 2 vols. (Leipzig: C. B. Borch, 1855), vol. i, pp. 107–120, at p. 111. All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.
Ibid. pp. 113, 116.
“One would not so readily have said then what can be heard almost daily now: that natural science goes about its business better when it keeps a distance from all philosophy; a statement that is as true as the claim that cookery does not proceed best for the person who wants to base everything on chemical principles”. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, “Aus einem öffentlichen Vortrag zu H. Steffens Andenken, gehalten am 24. April 1845”, in H. Steffens, Nachgelassene Schriften, with a preface by F. W. J. v. Schelling (Berlin: E. H. Schroeder, 1846), pp. iii–lxiii, at p. vi. The bulk of Schelling’s address focuses on church, state, and the character of German Protestantism.
For example, see Dorinda Outram, “The Language of Natural Power: The ‘éloges’ of Georges Cuvier and the Public Language of Nineteenth-Century Science”, History of Science 16 (1978): pp. 153–178.
See the helpful discussion by Stefan Collini in his “Introduction” to C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. vii–lxxi, at. pp. ix–xi.
The literature on science and Romanticism is considerable. Ørsted is a preeminent case; see, for example: Robert C. Stauffer, “Speculation and Experiment in the Background of Ørsted’s Discovery of Electromagnetism”, Isis 48 (1957): pp. 33–50; Thomas Kuhn, “Energy Conservation as an Example of Simultaneous Discovery”, [1959] in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1977), pp. 66–104; Dan Ch. Christensen, “The Ørsted-Ritter Partnership and the Birth of Romantic Natural Philosophy”, Annals of Science 52 (1995): pp. 153–185; Kenneth L. Caneva. “Colding, Ørsted, and the Meaning of Force”, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 27 (1997): pp. 1–138; Andrew D. Wilson, “Introduction” to Selected Scientific Works of Hans Christian Ørsted, translated and edited by Karen Jelved, Andrew D. Jackson, and Ole Knudsen, with an introduction by Andrew D. Wilson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. xv–xl; and Michael Friedman “Kant-Naturphilosophie-Electromagnetism”, in this collection. See also Kenneth L. Caneva, “Physics and Naturphilosophie: A Reconnaissance”, History of Science 35 (1997): pp. 35–106; Barry Gower, “Speculation in Physics: The History and Practice of Naturphilosophie”, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 3 (1972–1973): pp. 301–356; Dietrich von Engelhardt, Historisches Bewußtsein in der Naturwissenschaft von der Aufklärung bis zum Positivismus (Freiburg and München: Albers, 1979); David M. Knight, “The Physical Sciences and the Romantic Movement”, History of Science 9 (1975): pp. 54–75; Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth-Century German Biology [1982] (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Trevor H. Levere, Poetry Realized in Nature: Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Early Nineteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and the useful collection of papers in Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, Romanticism and the Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
On changing disciplines see: Rudold Stichweh, Zur Entstehung des modernen Systems wissenschaftlicher Disziplinen: Physik in Deutschland, 1740–1890 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1984); William Clark, “German Physics Textbooks in the Goethezeit”, parts 1 and 2, History of Science 35 (1997): pp. 219–239, 295–363; and Nicholas Jardine, “The Significance of Schelling’s ‘Epoch of a Wholly New Natural History’: An Essay on the Realization of Questions”, in Metaphysics and Philosophy of Science in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Essays in Honour of Gerd Buchdahl, ed. R. S. Woolhouse, The University of Western Ontario Series in the Philosophy of Science; 43 (Dordrecht The Netherlands; Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1988), pp. 327–350.
Some exceptions that prove the rule are: Bernhard Fritscher, “A. G. Werner (1749–1817) als Lehrer der deutschen Naturphilosophie—Zum Werk von Henrik Steffens (1773–1845)”, Zeitschrift für geologische Wissenschaften 21 (1993): pp. 495–502; idem, “Bemerkungen zu einer historischen Epistemologie der romantisch-idealistischen Erdwissenschaften am Beispiel der ‘Geosophie’ Lorenz Okens”, Zeitschrift für geologische Wissenschaften 27 (1999): pp. 61–69; Fergus Henderson, “Practical Knowledge in Romantic Ordering of Nature: Werner’s Geognostical Method, Humboldt’s ‘Pasigraphie’, Novalis’s ‘Instrumentalsprache’, and the Encyclopaedism of the Individual”, in Toward a History of Mineralogy, Petrology, and Geochemistry, ed. Bernhard Fritscher and Fergus Henderson, Algorismus; 23 (München: Instititut für Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften, 1998), pp. 131–146; Gottfried Hofbauer, “Die sinnliche Naturgeschichte des Abraham Gottlob Werner. An der Grenze zwischen Empirismus und romantischer Naturphilosophie”, Zeitschrift für geologische Wissenschaften 21 (1993): pp. 545–558. The general connections between romanticism, geology, mining, and the subterranean world have been the subject of more study: Roger Cardinal, “Werner, Novalis and the Signature of Stones”, in Deutung und Bedeutung: Studies in German and Comparative Literature presented to Karl Werner Maurer, ed. Brigitte Schludermann et al. (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), pp. 118–133; Michael Dettelbach, “Humboldtian Science”, in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 287–304; Josef Dürler, Die Bedeutung des Bergbaus bei Goethe und in der deutschen Romantik (Frauenfeld-Leipzig: Huber, 1936); E. P. Hamm, “Unpacking Goethe’s Collections: the Public and the Private in Natural Historical Collecting”, British Journal for the History of Science 34 (2001): pp. 275–300; Alexander M. Ospovat, “Romanticism and Geology: Five Students of A. G. Werner”, Eighteenth Century Life 7 (1982): pp. 105–117; Nicholas A. Rupke, “Caves, Fossils and the History of the Earth”, in Romanticism and the Sciences (cited n. 7), pp. 241–259; Michael Shortland, “Darkness Visible: Underground Culture in the Golden Age of Geology”, History of Science 32 (1994): pp. 1–61; John Wyatt, Wordsworth and the Geologists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Theodore Ziolkowski, “The Mine: Image of the Soul”, in German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 18–63.
The “fundamental point” (Grundanschauung) that drew Schelling and Steffens to one another from the time of their first acquaintance was that Steffens “had won for the unfathomable history of the earth a whole series of epochs, in which one covers another, one becomes the foundation for the next, and not without undergoing change in the process”. Schelling, “Aus einem öffentlichen Vortrag zu H. Steffens Andenken” (cited n.4), p. v. On historical thinking in the natural sciences see Engelhardt, Historisches Bewußtsein (cited n. 7). For geology as an historical science see: Stephen J. Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); David R. Oldroyd, “Historicism and the Rise of Historical Geology”, parts 1 and 2, History of Science 17 (1979): pp. 192–217, 227–257; Rhoda Rappaport, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997); Martin J. S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
Biographical details are from H. Steffens, Was ich erlebte: Aus der Erinnerung niedergeschrieben, 10 vols. in 5 ( Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1995–1996, reprint of first edition, Breslau: Max und Komp. 1840–1844), vol. i, pp. 239–242, vol. ii, pp. 192, 211–212. The early publication was H. Steffens, “De fornemste Hypotheser, ved hvis Hjelp man har søgt at forklare Metallernes Forkalkning”, Physicalsk, oeconomisk og medicochirugisk Bibliothek for Danmark og Norge, parts 1 and 2, 1(1794): pp. 42–77, 161–164.
H. Steffens, Über Mineralogie und das mineralogische Studium (Altona: Hammerich, 1797), see also idem, Was ich erlebte (cited n.11), vol. iii, pp. 201–202.
Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, vol. 1 (Paris, 1749); idem, Les époques de la nature, ed. Jacques Roger (Paris: Editions du Muséum, 1962), in which Jacques Roger has shown that Buffon deserved to be taken seriously. My concern here is only about how Buffon was received. James Hutton’s Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations (Edinburgh: Creech, 1795) is an exception to this anti-theoretical trend, which may help explain why it received relatively little attention, at least at first. The late eighteenth-century has been characterized as a time when geology wanted “facts”, not new ideas, Karl Alfred von Zittel Geschichte der Geologie und Paläontologie bis ende des 19. Jahrhunderts, Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Deutschland. Neuere Zeit; 23 (Munich and Leipzig: R. Oldenbourg, 1899), p. 76.
Dennis R. Dean, “The word ‘geology’”, Annals of Science 36 (1979): pp. 35–43; see also Rhoda Rappaport, “Borrowed Words: Problems of Vocabulary in Eighteenth-Century Geology”, British Journal for the History of Science, 15 (1982): pp. 27–44.
Steffens, Über Mineralogie und das mineralogische Studium (cited n. 12) p. 96.
Ibid. pp. 83, 85 cites Georg Lichtenberg, Göttingen Taschen Kalendar, 1778, p. 7.
Steffens, Über Mineralogie und das mineralogische Studium (cited n. 12), pp. 68–69, 87–88, 160.
Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, [1784] transl. with intro. and essay by James Ellington (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), pp. 4, 7.
Steffens, Über Mineralogie und das mineralogische Studium (cited n. 12), p. 113.
Ibid. pp. 52–69.
Ibid. p. 154.
Ibid. p. 158. Geologie treats minerals as a means of a Naturzweck, a “natural purpose” that can only be found in the inorganic world existing as a whole, not in the individual parts. Here Steffens made reference to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. See the helpful discussion of Naturzwecke in biology in Richards, The Romantic Conception (cited n. 7), pp. 65–70.
Steffens, Was ich erlebte (cited n. 11), vol. iii, pp. 337–339, at p. 338.
Ibid. vol. iv, pp. 1, 20; vol. iii, p. 341.
Steffens claimed he was the first trained expert in the natural sciences (“Naturforscher von Fach”) to offer unconditional support for Schelling, ibid. vol. iv, p. 76. Though technically true this needs to be qualified with the fact that Johann Wilhelm Ritter, though still a student at Jena and perhaps not unconditional in his support of Schelling, had already made a name for himself with his Beweis, dass ein beständiger Galvanismus den Lebensprocess in dem Thierreich begleite. Nebst neuen Versuchen und Bemerkungen über den Galvanismus (Weimar: im Verlage des Industrie-Comptoirs, 1798).
H. Steffens, “Recension der neuern naturphilosophischen Schriften des Herausgebers: F.W. J. Schelling, Von der Weltseele: eine Hypothese der höhern Physik zur Erklärung des allgemeinen Organismus (Hamburg: Perthes, 1798); Erster Etwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie. Zum Behuf der Vorlesungen (Jena and Leipzig: Gabler, 1799); Einleitung zum Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie: oder über den Begriff der speculativen Physik und die innere Organisation eines Systems dieser Wissenschaft (Jena and Leipzig: Gabler, 1799), Zeitschrift für speculative Physik, parts 1 and 2, 1, no. 1 (1800): pp. 1–48, and 1, no. 2 (1800): pp. 88–121. Such reviews cum summaries were typical in German journals of that time. Schelling took editorial liberty and on several occasions inserted footnotes to indicate where Steffens was misinterpreting his work.
Ibid. part 1, p. 4–5.
Ibid. part 1, p. 5.
Kant, Metaphysical Foundations (cited n. 18), pp. 40–94.
F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature: As Introduction to the Study of This Science, transl. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath, introduction by Robert Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 5. This translation is of the 1797 first edition and the 1803 supplements; all references in this paper are from the 1797 sections. See also Friedman, “Kant-Naturphilosophie-Electromagnetism” (cited n. 7).
Schelling, Einleitung zu dem Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie. Oder über den Begriff der spekulativen Physik, in Ausgewählte Schriften, 6 vols (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1985), vol. i, pp. 337–394, at p. 352.
Ibid. pp. 340–341.
Steffens, “Recension” (cited n. 26), part 1, pp. 36–37.
See Wilson, “Introduction”, to Selected Scientific Works (cited n. 7), pp. xxii–xxiii, and pp. xx–xxii for a discussion of the electrical conflict in Ørsted.
H. Steffens, “Über den Oxydations- und Desoxydations-Prozeß der Erde”, Zeitschrift für speculative Physik 1, no. 1 (1800): pp. 143–168. See also Schelling, “Vorbericht des Herausgebers”, Zeitschrift für speculative Physik 1, no. 1 (1800): pp. 139–142.
Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature (cited n. 30), pp. 59–64. On the reception of Lavoisier in Germany see Karl Hufbauer, The Formation of the German Chemical Community (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1982).
Steffens, “Über den Oxidations- und Desoxydations Proceß” (cited n. 35), p. 149.
Ibid. pp. 159–160.
Ibid. pp. 159–167.
Ibid. pp. 153, 155.
Schelling, “Vorbericht des Herausgebers”, Zeitschrift für Spekulative Physik 1, no. 1 (1800): pp. 139–142, at p. 139.
Steffens, Was ich erlebte (cited n. 11), vol. iv, pp. 202–204; for those who studied at Freiberg see C. G. Gottschalk, “Verzeichniss Derer, welche seit Eröffnung der Bergakademie und bis zum Schluss des ersten Säculum’s auf ihr studirt haben”, in Festschrift zum hundertjährigen Jubiläum der Königlich Sächsische Bergakademie zu Freiberg am 30. Juli 1866, 2 vols. (Dresden: Hofbuchdruckerei von C. C. Meinhold & Söhne, 1866), vol. i, pp. 221–295.
Abraham Gottlob Werner, Von den äußerlichen Kennzeichen der Fossilien (Leipzig: S. L. Crusius, 1774). The word fossil was used here in its 18th-century sense, i.e. anything dug out of the ground, and was not restricted to petrified organic remains.
There are several published versions of Werner mineral classification. The first authorized publication was C. A. S. Hoffmann, “Mineralsystem des Herrn Inspektor Werners mit dessen Erlaubnis herausgegeben”, Bergmännisches Journal 1 (1789): pp. 369–398.
Martin J. S. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, 2nd ed., (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 126.
Rachel Laudan, From Mineralogy to Geology: The Foundations of a Science (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 94.
Abraham Gottlob Werner, Kurze Klassifikation und Beschreibung der verschiedenen Gebirgsarten (Dresden: Waltherischen Hofbuchhandlung, 1787), p. 5. First published as an article in 1786, the Kurze Klassifikation is available in an excellent annotated translation, Short Classification and Description of the Various Rocks, edited and translated by Alexander M. Ospovat (New York: Hafner, 1971).
Werner, Kurze Klassifikation (cited n. 47), p. 5. For the evidence in support of a “wet” origin of granite see Sally Newcomb, “The Laboratory Evidence of Silica Solution Supporting Wernerian Theory”, Ambix 33 (1986): pp. 88–93.
Charles Lyell, The Principles of Geology, [1830–1833] 3 vols., intro. Martin J. S. Rudwick (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), vol. i, pp. 56–57. See also Alexander M. Ospovat, “The Distortion of Werner in Lyell’s Principles of Geology”, British Journal for the History of Science 9 (1976): pp. 190–198, and Mott T. Greene, Geology in the Nineteenth Century: Changing Views of a Changing World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1982), pp. 19–45.
For a helpful discussion of the debate see Otfried Wagenbreth, “Abraham Gottlob Werner and der Höhepunkt des Neptunistenstreites um 1790”, Freiberger Forschungshefte, Reihe C, 223 (1955): pp. 183–241.
Werner respected Christianity but his personal position was deism. There is no evidence to suggest that his scientific views were shaped by religious considerations. See Martin Guntau, Abraham Gottlob Werner (Leipzig: BSB B. G. Teubner, 1984), pp. 94–103.
Charles C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 45.
Werner developed a classification for an encyclopaedia, Abraham Gottlob Werner Nachlass, Bd. 76, Blatt, 5, Wissenschaftlicher Altbestand der Bibliothek der Technischen Universität Bergakademie Freiberg. See also Henderson, “Practical Knowledge in Romantic Ordering of Nature” (cited n. 9).
Steffens, Was ich erlebte (cited n. 11), vol. iv, pp. 227–228. For a general discussion of Freiberg and Werner see ibid., vol. iv, pp. 203–233.
H. Steffens, Beyträge zur innern Naturgeschichte der Erde (Freiberg: im Verlag der Crazischen Buchhandlung, 1801), p. 93; idem, Was ich erlebte (cited n. 11), vol. iv, p. 286.
Steffens, Beyträge (cited n. 55), pp. 80–81.
Hans Christian Ørsted, “On the Harmony Between Electrical Figures and Organic Form [1805]”, in Selected Scientific Works (cited n. 7), pp. 185–191, at p. 189–188; idem, “First Introduction to General Physics: A Prospectus of Lectures on this Science [1811]”, in ibid. pp, 282–309, at p. 305. See also idem, “The Series of Acids and Bases [1806]”, in ibid. 227–242, at p. 242. Ørsted’s praise for Schelling was more qualified: the philosopher had “beautiful and grand ideas…but…insufficiently rigorous method”, “Fundamentals of the Metaphysics of Nature Partly According to a New Plan”, [1799] in ibid. pp. 46–78, at p. 77. See also Wilson, “Introduction”, to ibid. pp. xxiv–xxv.
Ørsted developed an almost identical series of earths independently of Steffens and, as he carefully pointed out, he did so first. In his éloge for his colleague, Ørsted could find nothing in Contributions that had stood the test of time, but in the first decade of the 19th century priority did matter, see Ørsted, “The Series of Acids and Bases”, in ibid. p. 242.
Werner, Kurze Klassifikation (cited n. 47), p. 16; for a discussion of formation suites see the work of the Edinburgh Wernerian, Robert Jameson, System of Mineralogy, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Constable, 1804–1808), vol. iii, pp. 96–97, and the discussion in Laudan, From Mineralogy to Geology (cited n. 46), pp. 97, 143, 181.
Steffens, Beyträge (cited n. 55), pp. 1–17, 29, 56–58, 69, 174–176, 196.
Ibid. p. 277.
See Ørsted’s works cited in n. 57.
Steffens, Beyträge (cited n. 55), p. 96, italics in original.
See Steffens, Was ich erlebte (cited n. 11), vol. iv, pp. 292–294 for some of the varied reactions to Beyträge.
Steffens, Beyträge (cited n. 55), p. 86, and on p. 87 where Steffens writes approvingly of Georges Cuvier’s palaeontological work in the Paris basin.
Ørsted, “Reflections on the History of Chemistry, a Lecture”, in Selected Scientific Works (cited n. 7), pp. 243–260, at p. 259.
H. Steffens to Johann Wolfgang Goethe, 3 September, 1806, Briefe an Goethe, ed. Karl Robert Mandelkow, 2 vols. (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1988), vol. i, pp. 454–455, at p. 455.
H. Steffens, Grundzüge der philosophischen Naturwissenschaft. Zum Behuf seiner Vorlesungen (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1806), pp. 196–197.
Goethe to F. A. Wolf, 31 August, 1806, Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, 4 parts, 133 vols. in 144 [1887–1919] (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), pt IV, vol. xix, pp. 186–188, at p. 187.
On chemistry in geology see the helpful discussion in Laudan, From Mineralogy to Geology (cited n. 46), chs. 3, 5, 7, and 8, and Bernhard Fritscher, Vulkanismusstreit und Geochemie: Die Bedeutung der Chemie und des Experiments in der Vulkanismus-Neptunismus-Kontroverse, Boethius; 25 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1991).
Alexander von Humboldt, “Über den Bau und die Wirkungsart der Vulcane in verschiedenen Erdstrichen”, Abhandlungen der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin aus dem Jahren 1822–23 (Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1825), pp. 137–156, pp. 144, 153.
Laudan, From Mineralogy to Geology (cited n. 46), pp, 194–197. Buch’s theory did not last, in part because of chemistry. Jakob Berzelius argued there were no such things as magnesia vapours for the simple reason that magnesia could not sublimate.
Leopold von Buch letter to Karsten, 17 May 1804, in Buch, Briefe an D.L. G. Karsten. Zu seinem 150. Geburtstag, ed. Julius Schuster and Robert Bloch (Berlin: W. Junk, 1924), p. 26, emphasis in original. Later Buch was slightly more generous: “As always there is lots of truth in it [Steffens’s work] mixed up with half-baked ideas”. Letter to Karsten, 27 January 1805, ibid. p. 29.
Leopold von Buch, “Ueber das Forstschreiten der Bildungen in der Natur”, in Gesammelte Schriften, edited by J. Ewald, J. Roth, H. Eck, and W. Dames, 4 vols. (Berlin, 1867–1885), vol. ii, pp. 4–12, at p. 6 and passim. Steffens was aware of how closely Buch’s ideas followed his own, Steffens, “Ueber das Verhältnis der Naturphilosophie zur Physik unserer Tage”, in Alt und Neu, 2 vols. (Breslau: J. Max, 1821), vol. i, pp. 67–84, p. 77.
Goethe’s essays on granite were unpublished in his lifetime, see “Granit I [1784]” and “Granit II [1785]”, in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke: Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, 40 vols. (Frankfurt a. M.: Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985–1999), vol. xxv, pp. 311–316. The irony here is that the theory of mountain formation that Buch would develop was absolutely anathema to Goethe. It was the sort of violent change that hindered peaceful Goethean Bildung.
Steffens, “Ueber die Vegetation”, in Alt und Neu (cited n. 74), vol. ii, pp. 36–109, at p. 102.
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Hamm, E.P. (2007). Steffens, Ørsted, And The Chemical Construction Of The Earth. In: Brain, R.M., Cohen, R.S., Knudsen, O. (eds) Hans Christian Ørsted And The Romantic Legacy In Science. Boston Studies In The Philosophy Of Science, vol 241. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-2987-5_9
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