MODERN BIOLOGY 317 



is so often pronounced as if it referred to a particular being — - should not 

 appear to us as anything else than the comprehension of things, embracing: 

 (i) all physical bodies that exist, (x) the general and particular laws which 

 direct the changes in the condition and position of these bodies, and (3) the 

 motion that is current in different forms among them, eternally maintained 

 and renewed, infinitely varying in the products it creates . . . . " But he 

 is so little capable of adhering to this view that only a few pages further 

 on he is able to say: "Every step which Nature takes when making her 

 direct creations consists in organizing into cellular tissue the minute masses 

 of viscous or mucous substances that she finds at her disposal under favour- 

 able circumstances."^ A personal god could not have acted more personally. 

 And Lamarck's belief in creative nature is as dogmatic as was Linn^eus's 

 belief in God. He develops afresh his old statement that life is nothing but 

 motion, and that motion is produced by this wonderful and ubiquitous 

 ethereal fire, which is to Lamarck what the soul was to Stahl; we can apply 

 to the one as to the other the saying of Bonnet, that it performs anything 

 that one requires of it and its non-existence can never be proved. On this 

 basis Lamarck creates an extremely curious psychological theory. To his 

 mind the soul-life is a purely mechanical process, which is dependent for 

 its nature upon those organs that the animal in question possesses; animals 

 that lack muscles and nerves have practically no sense-impressions; they are 

 "apathetic, " they move only as a result of influences from outside, through 

 the ethereal fire's penetrating them and stimulating them. Animals having 

 a nervous system certainly receive sensible impressions, but they react to 

 them purely schematically and are incapable of combining the impressions 

 as a guide for their actions; animals that possess a brain can retain the sense- 

 impressions they receive and combine them to form ideas as a guide for their 

 actions. Lamarck's way of explaining all the manifestations of the human 

 soul-life — sense-impressions, ideas, and moral conceptions — with the aid 

 of the ubiquitous and universally applicable ethereal-electrical fluid, is in 

 itself of but little interest; in this he associates himself with thinkers of 

 the eighteenth century: Locke, Condillac, and in particular the physician 

 Cabanis (1757-1808), all of whom taught that ideas are exclusively based on 

 sense-impressions; the last-named, the most pronounced materialist of them 

 all, was, however, a far more trained, and therefore also a more cautious, 

 thinker than Lamarck, who blindly relied on his fluid, by means of which 

 he explained everything, while his predecessors were content to analyse cer- 

 tain definite phenomena in the soul-life. 



Lamarck managed to complete one or two further important works in 

 his old age : the above-mentioned lengthy systematic survey of the Invertebrata 



* Philosophic zoologiqu(, cd. cit., Part I, pp. 349, 362.. 



