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devalued. humanity must not figure in a true science of the earth, gerland
argued, precisely because (european) humans were not passively subject to
natural conditions.
gerland broke with anthropologists like tylor, Ratzel, and Lasch, who
were struck by the parallels between mythical and scientific explanations
of earthquakes. gerland argued instead that the history of geographical
thought illustrated clear disjunctures in human intellectual evolution. he
insisted on the distance between primitive anthropomorphism and modern
science, with its capacity to transform “the entire range of telluric influences
into psychic force.” gerland made this point in 1901, just as the iSA was
taking shape, in a series of lectures at the University of Strasbourg on Kant's
physical geography and anthropology.
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it was there that he identified Kant
as the first modern seismologist. Why, at the dawn of the twentieth century,
would a geophysicist have taken up Kantian philosophy?
gerland sought to prove that Kant's “pragmatic” geography had never
been merely pragmatic. in a convoluted and often implausible argument,
gerland argued that Kant's geography and anthropology were merely “pro-
paedeutic” to his critical philosophy. Apparently, the inventor of modern
seismology never intended it to serve practical ends. hence gerland's in-
sistence that seismology was not a practical but a “pure” science, and that
earthquakes were not “disasters” but “microseisms.” gerland went so far
as to attribute an “anthropomorphic” perspective, from which earthquakes
did appear as disasters, to a stage of barbarism. to speak of geophysical
cataclysms in human terms was to regress to a pre-enlightened age: the age
before Kant.
gerland stood in a tradition of central europeans, including gustav the-
odor Fechner and ernst haeckel, who yearned to reconcile materialism and
evolutionary theory with the romantic need to find meaning and purpose
in nature. “the atomic-mechanistic point of view is not only
not
hostile to a
religious and aesthetic conception of life and of cosmic evolution,” gerland
insisted. “to the contrary, it leads to it, and only through it becomes com-
plete, vital, indeed becomes capable of life—and reciprocally, this second
conception of life is nothing without the first.”43
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gerland could not accept
the pragmatic views of scientific knowledge that were gaining ground at
this time, and which proved so fruitful to seismology. indeed, what united
various contributions to seismology as a science of disaster—from eduard
Suess to harry Wood—was a certain suspicion of claims to absolute truth.
For these seismologists, the primary criterion for valid knowledge was its
utility for human welfare.
For gerland, the resolution of the tension between materialism and
