I] OF TELEOLOGY AND MECHANISM 7 



et si elles sont interdites il faut renoncer a parler de ces 

 choses." 



The search for differences or essential contrasts between the 

 phenomena of organic and inorganic, of animate and inanimate 

 things has occupied many mens' minds, while the search for 

 community of principles, or essential simiUtudes, has been followed 

 by few; and the contrasts are apt to loom too large, great as 

 they may be. M. Dunan, discussing ^the "Probleme de la Vie*" 

 in an essay which M. Bergson greatly commends, declares: "Les 

 lois physico-chimiques sont aveugles et brutales ; la oil elles 

 regnent seules, au lieu d'un ordre et d'un concert, il ne pent y 

 avoir qu'incoherence et chaos." But the physicist proclaims 

 aloud that the physical phenomena which meet us by the way 

 have their manifestations of form, not less beautiful and scarce 

 less varied than those which move us to admiration among living 

 things. The waves of the sea, the Kttle ripples on the shore, the 

 sweeping curve of the sandy bay between its headlands, the 

 outUne of the hills, the shape of the clouds, all these are so many 

 riddles of form, so many problems of morphology, and all of 

 them the physicist can more or less easily read and adequately 

 solve : solving them by reference to their antecedent phenomena, 

 in the material system of mechanical forces to which they belong, 

 and to which we interpret them as being due. They have also, 

 doubtless, their immanent teleological significance; but it is on 

 another plane of thought from the physicist's that we contemplate 

 their intrinsic harmony and perfection, and "see that they are 

 good." 



Nor is it otherwise with the material forms of hving things. 

 Cell and tissue, shell and bone, leaf and flower, are so many 

 portions of matter, and it is in obedience to the laws of physics 

 that their particles have been moved, moulded and conformed f. 



* Revue Philosophique. xxxiii, 1892. 



t This general prineiple was clearly grasped by Dr George Rainey (a learned 

 physician of St Bartholomew's) many years ago, and expressed in such words 



as the following : " it is illogical to suppose that in the case of vital organisms 



a distinct force exists to produce results perfectly withm the reach of physical 

 agencies, especially as hi many instances no end could be attained were that the 

 case, but that of opposing one force by another capable of effecting exactly 

 the same purpose." (On Artificial Calculi, Q.J. M.S. (Trans. Microsc. Soc), vi, 

 p. 49, 1858.) Cf. also Helmholtz. Infm rit.. p. 9. 



