Klácel was no doubt a radicalizing influence on his impressionable young friend. By the time Mendel met him in 1843, Klácel was in many ways a beaten man. Within a few years he would be relieved of his teaching duties as a philosophy professor in Brünn because of his writings in defense of Naturphilosophie, a German philosophy that combined evolutionary thought, a belief in purposeful activity in nature, and a view that the material world was a projection of a deeper spiritual reality. Among the most prominent German adherents of Naturphilosophie, which originated with the thinkers F. W. J.
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