THE DOCTRINE OF FINAL CAJSES. 489 



and they are accompanied by several other organs which vertebrates 

 have not ; while these on the other hand have several which are want- 

 ing in cephalopods.'" 



"We shall see afterwards the general principles which Cuvier himself 

 considered as the best guides in these reasonings. But I will first add 

 a few words on the disposition of the school now under consideration, 

 to reject all assumption* of an end. 



2. That the parts of the bodies of animals are made in order to 

 discharge their respective offices, is a conviction which we cannot 

 believe to be otherwise than an irremovable principle of the philoso- 

 phy of organization, when we see the manner in which it has con- 

 stantly forced its,elf upon the minds of zoologists and anatomists in all 

 ages ; not only as an inference, but as a guide whose indications they 

 could not help following. I have already noticed expressions of this 

 conviction in some of the principal persons who occur in the history 

 of physiology, as Galen and Harvey. I might add many more, but I 

 will content myself with adducing a contemporary of Geoffrey's whose 

 testimony is the more remarkable, because he obviously shares with 

 his countryman in the common prejudice against the use of final 

 causes. " I consider," he says, in speaking of the provisions for the 

 reproduction of animals, 15 " with the great Bacon, the philosophy of 

 final causes as sterile ; but I have elsewhere acknowledged that it was 

 very difficult for the most cautious man never to have recourse to 

 them in his explanations." After the survey which we have had tc 

 take of the history of physiology, we cannot but see that the assump- 

 tion of final causes in this branch of science is so far from being 

 sterile, that it has had a large share in every discovery which is 

 included in the existing mass of real knowledge. The use of every 

 organ has been discovered by starting from the assumption that it 

 must have some use. The doctrine of the circulation of the blood 

 was, as we have seen, clearly and professedly due to the persuasion of 

 a purpose in the circulatory apparatus. The study of comparative 

 anatomy is the study of the adaption of animal structures to their 

 purposes. And we shall soon have to show that this conception of 

 final causes has, in our own times, been so far from barren, that it has, 

 in the hands of Cuvier and others, enabled us to become intimately 

 acquainted with vast departments of zoology to which we have no 

 other mode of access. It has placed before us in a complete state 



16 Cabanis, Rapports du Physique et du Morale de VHomme, i 229. 



