3 i4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



muscles of the blood-vessels ; such are the movements of the respira- 

 tory organs, etc. Again, there are a great number of cases in which 

 the adaptation between the excitement and the act must have been 

 originally regulated by conscious intelligence; but, the habit once 

 acquired, the concurrence of intelligence has become useless. The 

 player on a musical instrument needs at first to combine, by an act of 

 his will, the movements of the fingers with the visual perception of 

 the notes ; but, after a sort of organic coexistence between these facts 

 is established by repetition and practice, the one may become directly 

 the cause of the other, without the concurrence of the power that 

 regulated their adaptation; the movements of the hand then follow 

 the impressions on the sight mechanically, while the intellect may be 

 occupied with something quite different. Thus a machine, once con- 

 structed and regulated, has no need of the intelligent workman, who 

 adjusted its cogs and wheels, to keep it going. If we pinch a frog 

 after its brain is removed, it makes motions as though to repel the 

 hand that hurts it ; it is a reflex action resulting from habits contracted 

 under the cerebral influence, and strongly enough established to sur- 

 vive the removal of the intellectual organs. After this we do not deny 

 that a certain degree of intelligence may exist in other nervous cen- 

 tres besides the brain ; we grant that they may have a peculiar con- 

 sciousness of their modifications and their movements. But we go no 

 further, and we refuse to follow Hartmann, as soon as his hypotheses 

 needlessly take on a metaphysical or supernatural character. 



Still less shall we follow him when, throwing himself into theories 

 which remind us of those of Stahl, he insists that the organization of 

 living bodies can be formed no otherwise than by the action of an in- 

 telligent but unconscious principle ; that, in diseases, a regulating in- 

 telligence, a vis medicatrix natures, presides over the restoration of 

 the functions to their normal state ; that the reproduction of organs 

 observed in some animals is caused by the unconscious idea of the 

 usefulness of such organs, for the preservation of the individual ; that 

 in every part of the living being there resides an unconscious idea of 

 the type of the species, which directs the reproduction of the organ 

 removed, the reparation of tissues, etc. These facts, all having rela- 

 tion to the study of forms, types, or species, are exactly those which 

 Darwin's theory best succeeds, as we think, in explaining. Hartmann, 

 however, does not altogether reject the ideas of the great English nat- 

 uralist; but he limits their application considerably, and interprets 

 them in a manner quite contrary to their author's. He admits natural 

 selection, indeed, in the struggle for existence; but this selection is 

 not, in his view, a primordial fact, resulting from the force of things ; 

 he calls it simply one of the means that unconscious intelligence would 

 employ in arriving at its ends. Besides, selection would be insufficient 

 still, according to Hartmann, to account for the organic forms of the 

 species, for what he calls the morphological facts, and ought to be ap- 



