1] THE FINAL CAUSE 3 



dead and gone. The facts of embryology become for him, as 

 Wolff, von Baer and Fritz Miiller proclaimed, a record not only 

 of the life-history of the individual but of the annals of its race. 

 The facts of geographical distribution or even of the migration of 

 birds lead on and on to speculations regarding lost continents, 

 sunken islands, or bridges across ancient seas. Every nesting 

 bird, every ant-hill or spider's web displays its psychological 

 problems of instinct or intelhgence. Above all, in things both 

 great and small, the naturalist is rightfully impressed, and finally 

 engrossed, by the peculiar beauty which is manifested in apparent 

 fitness or "adaptation," — the flower for the bee, the berry for the 

 bird. 



Time out of mind, it has been by way of the "final cause," 

 by the teleological concept of "end," of "purpose," or of "design," 

 in one or another of its many forms (for its moods are many), 

 that men have been chiefly wont to explain the phenomena of 

 the living world; and it will be so while men have eyes to see 

 and ears to hear withal. With Galen, as with Aristotle, it was 

 the physician's way ; with John Ray, as with Aristotle, it was the 

 naturalist's way ; with Kant, as with Aristotle, it was the philo- 

 sopher's way. It was the old Hebrew way, and has its splendid 

 setting in the story that God made "every plant of the field before 

 it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew." 

 It is a common way, and a great way; for it brings with it a 

 glimpse of a great vision, and it lies deep as the love of nature 

 in the hearts of men. 



Half overshadowing the "efficient" or physical cause, the 

 argument of the final cause appears in eighteenth century physics, 

 in the hands of such men as Euler* and Maupertuis, to whom 

 Leibniz t had passed it on. Half overshadowed by the me- 

 chanical concept, it runs through Claude Bernard's LsQons siir les 



* " Quum enim mundi universi fabrica sit perfectissima, atque a Creatore 

 sapientissimo absoluta, nihil omnino in mundo contingit in quo non maximi 

 minimive ratio quaepiam eluceat; quamobrem dubium prorsus est nullum quin 

 onines mundi effectus ex causis finalibus, ope methodi maximorum et minimorum, 

 aeque feliciter determinari queant atque ex ipsis causis efficientibus." Methodtis 

 inveniendi, etc. 1744 (cit. Mach, Science of Mechanics, 1902, p. 455). 



t Cf. 0pp. (ed. Erdmann), p. 106, "Bien loin d'exclure les causes finales..., 

 c'est de la qu'il faut tout deduire en Physique." 



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