No one expressed this objection with greater force than did von Baer, in a series of masterly essays[361] which the Darwinians, through sheer inability to grasp his point of view, dismissed as the maunderings of old age. In these essays von Baer pointed out the necessity for the teleological point of view, at least as complementary to the mechanistic. His general position is that of the "statical" teleology--to use Driesch's term--of Kant and Cuvier. His attitude to Darwinism is determined by his teleology. He admits, just as in 1834, a limited amount of evolution; he criticises the evolution theory of Darwin on the same lines exactly as forty or fifty years previously he had criticised the recapitulation and evolution-theories of the transcendentalists--principally on the ground that their deductions far outrun the positive facts at their disposal. He rejects the theory of natural selection entirely, on the ground that evolution, like development, must have an end or purpose (_Ziel_)--"A becoming without a purpose is in general unthinkable" (p. 231); he points out, too, the difficulty of explaining the correlation of parts upon the Darwinian hypothesis. His own conception of the evolutionary process is that it is essentially _zielstrebig_ or guided by final causes, that it is a true _evolutio_ or differentiation, just as individual development is an orderly progress from the general to the special. He believed in saltatory evolution, in polyphyletic descent, and in the greater plasticity of the organism in earlier times. The idea of saltatory evolution he took from Koelliker, who shortly after the publication of the _Origin_ promulgated in a critical note on Darwinism a sketch of his theory of "heterogeneous generation."[362]