§ 174.3. =The Sciences.=-Schelling’s profound theories were of all the more significance from their not being restricted to the philosophical strivings of his time, but inspiring the other sciences with the breath of a new life. To the fullest extent the natural sciences exposed themselves to this influence. There was not wanting indeed a certain shadowy mysticism, to which especially the fancies of mesmeric magnetism largely contributed; but this fog gradually cleared away, and the Christian elements were purified from their pantheistic surroundings. Steffens and Von Schubert taught that the divine book of nature is to be regarded as the reflex and expansion of the divine revelation in Scripture. The Hegelian philosophy, too, seemed at first likely to infuse a Christian spirit into the other sciences. In Göschel, at least, there was a thinker who imparted to jurisprudence a Christian character, and to Christianity a juristic construction. In other respects Hegel’s philosophy in its application to the other departments of science gave in many ways a predominance to an abstruse dialectic tendency. Its adherents of the extreme left sought to construct all sciences _a priori_ from the pure idea, and at the same time to root out from them the last vestiges of the Christian spirit. The greatest names in natural science, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Haller, Davy, Cuvier, etc., are household words in Christian circles. All these and many more were firmly convinced that there was no conflict between their most brilliant discoveries and Christian truth. In A.D. 1825 the Earl of Bridgwater founded a lectureship, and treatises on the power, wisdom, and goodness of God as manifested in the creation, have been written by Buckland, Chalmers, Whewell, Bell, etc. It was otherwise in Germany. Even Schleiermacher, in his “Letters to Lücke,” in A.D. 1829, expressed his fears of the prophesied overthrow of all Christian theories of the world by the incontrovertible results of physical research, and Bretschneider in his “Letters to a Statesman,” in A.D. 1830, proclaimed to the world without regret that already what Schleiermacher only feared had actually come to pass. Physicists, awakening from the glamour of the Schelling nature philosophy, pronounced all speculation contraband, and declared pure empiricism, the simple investigation of actual things, the only permissible object of their labour. And although they handed over to theologians and philosophers questions about spirit in and over nature, as not belonging to their province, a younger generation maintained that spirit was non-existent, because it could not be discovered by the microscope and dissecting knife. Carl Vogt defined thought to be a secretion of the brain, and Moleschott regarded life as a mere mode of matter and man’s existence after life only as the manuring of the fields.