88 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Organic types might change, but in accordance with a perfecting prin- 

 ciple that should lead finally to the crowning glory of the evolutionary 

 series, the human species. Perfecting principles are not unknown — 

 witness Lamarck and Nageli — in the speculative biology of the last 

 century. In the hands of no one, however, have they proved to be in- 

 struments by means of which discoveries are made. Their influence has 

 been conspicuously negative. 



It was essentially Aristotle's teleology that Darwin, as late as 1859, 

 overmastered with the doctrine of natural selection. It was Aristotle's 

 evolutionary series, ending with man, that, fashioned into the semblance 

 of a pine tree by Lamarck, was finally displaced by Darwin's conception 

 of a genealogical tree without a central axial trunk flowering at the tip 

 in man, but branching polychotomously in all directions from a common 

 center. This modern conception harmonizes with the fact that there is 

 no evidence that man has been fashioned, whether by special act of an 

 external creator as in the old Hebrew account, or by the less direct 

 process of evolution under the guidance of a final principle inherent in 

 nature, as in the Aristotelian tradition, to be the lord and highest 

 product of organic creation. 



The Hebrew tradition embodies too naive a conception of final causes 

 for the philosophic as for the scientific minds of to-day, although it still 

 lingers in various forms of religious doctrines that typically compose 

 themselves, as President Jordan has somewhere aptly remarked, out of 

 the debris of our grandfathers' science. Aristotelian evolution still 

 lingers, though negative and barren on the fertile soil of modern ex- 

 perience, in the minds of those who admit with Aristotle the evolution 

 of the physical man, but view, with him, the mind as a thing apart. It 

 is characteristic of a faith in final causes that it permits distinctions of 

 this sort. To the average biologist, however, to admit the validity of the 

 distinction would be to question the validity of organic evolution itself. 

 For the evolution of the body is neither more nor less certain than the 

 evolution of consciousness. Both, for the student of objective science, 

 rest upon evidence of the same order. 



It was to be expected that Aristotle, a pioneer in science, would over- 

 estimate the simplicity of his problem of creating order where order had 

 not reigned before, that he would seek for final causes with a suggestion 

 of the simple confidence of the woodsman who traces smoke to fire or 

 hunts his quarry to its lair. He was, scientifically, of necessity unsophis- 

 ticated. 



It is on other grounds that we must seek an interpretation of the 

 persistence of this phase of his influence in contemporary thought; a 

 phase which I suspect he would now agree was the portion of his legacy 

 least worthy of our regard. There is something foreign to the spirit of 

 Aristotle, something savoring of a sophistication born of conflict he 



