On germinal selection as a source of definite variation / by August Weismann ; translated from the German by Thomas J. McCormack.

  • Weismann, August, 1834-1914.
Date:
1902
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: On germinal selection as a source of definite variation / by August Weismann ; translated from the German by Thomas J. McCormack. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/104 (page 6)
    б PREFACE. fashions science out of facts and is the indispensable precondition of every important scientific advance. Heinrich Hertz/ the discoverer of electric undula¬ tions, had the same thought in mind when he said: We form inward representations or constructs of outward objects, so constituted that the results that follow logically and necessarily from the constructs are in turn always constructs of the results flowing naturally and necessarily from the objects. These constructs or mental images copied after familiar ob¬ jects possessed of familiar properties, so constituted that from their manipulation effects result similar to those which we observe in the objects to be explained. Experience teaches us that the requirements here made can be fulfilled and that consequently such 'cor¬ respondences' between reality and the supposed images [or, as Hertz says, between nature and mind] actually exist. Having succeeded in extracting from the ac¬ cumulated experience of the past, representative images or constructs fulfilling all these necessary re¬ quirements, we can then reproduce by them in a short space of time, as we might by models, results that in the outward world require a long space of time for their actualisation or can be produced only through our personal intervention, etc. gravitation, of whose character Newton could form no con¬ ception and hence was unwilling to construct hypotheses concerning it. Indeed, such a wholesale repudiation of hy¬ potheses is antecedently incredible on the part of the inventor of the emission-theory of light, in which, to speak of only one daring conjecture, fits were ascribed to the luminous particles. Compare Newton, Philosophiac Naturalis Prin¬ cipia Mathematica, second edition, 1714, page 484. 1 H. Hertz, Die Principien der Mechanik.