The first issue of Nature, the British weekly journal of science, opened in 1869 with an article by Thomas Huxley, entitled “Nature: Aphorisms by Goethe.” For the most part this consisted of a translation of a short piece from 1781, from a period in which Goethe’s interest in the sciences had just awakened. It is the vivid expression of “a sort of Pantheism,” a conception of nature as “an unfathomable, unconditional, humorously self-contradictory I … underlying the phenomena.” It was, to put it differently, the manifesto of a monistic naturalism, not unlike some of the views the French Enlightenment had produced in works like d’Holbach’s Système de la nature: “Nature! We are surrounded and embraced by her: powerless to separate ourselves from her, powerless to penetrate beyond her.” Huxley thought this piece especially fitting to open a journal that “aims to mirror the progress of that fashioning by Nature of a picture of herself, in the mind of man, which we call the progress of Science.”

Whatever else Huxley’s choice of text may reveal about the scientific and philosophical context of the 1870s, it illustrates that a historical view of conceptions of nature during the preceding century will have to focus on developments within a largely German tradition. This focus can be justified by noticing that it is only in this tradition that philosophers placed emphasis on nature as a special aspect of reality that was in need of, and worthy of, philosophical attention – to such a degree, in fact, that the philosophy of nature, at times, became synonymous with philosophy in general. In England and France, by contrast, the dominant philosophical views tended early on toward a methodology of scientific inquiry (Comte, Mill), leaving substantive pronouncements about nature to the sciences themselves. This trend caught on in Germany only somewhat later, around the middle of the century (in part as a reaction to the perceived excesses of Naturphilosophie), and then became one of the central tenets of the varieties of neo-Kantianism. The term ‘Naturphilosophie’ was generally avoided and the topic itself rarely treated in lectures and seminars until toward the end of the century, when scientists-turned-philosophers, like Ostwald and Haeckel, revived it in opposition to academic philosophy.