188 THEORY OF THE CELLS. 
and by this second view we are just as little compelled to 
conclude that the fundamental powers of organization operate 
according to laws of adaptation to a purpose, as we are in 
inorganic nature. 
The first view of the fundamental powers of organized bodies 
may be called the teleological, the second the physical view. 
An example will show at once, how important for physiology 
is the solution of the question as to which is to be followed. 
If, for instance, we define inflammation and suppuration to be 
the effort of the organism to remove a foreign body that has 
been introduced into it; or fever to be the effort of the or- 
ganism to eliminate diseased matter, and both as the result of 
the “autocracy of the organism,” then these explanations 
accord with the teleological view. For, since by these pro- 
cesses the obnoxious matter is actually removed, the process 
which effects them is one adapted to an end; and as the 
fundamental power of the organism operates in accordance with 
definite purposes, it may either set these processes in action 
primarily, or may also summon further powers of matter to its 
aid, always, however, remaining itself the ‘“ primum movens.” 
On the other hand, according to the physical view, this is just 
as little an explanation as it would be to say, that the motion 
of the earth around the sun is an effort of the fundamental 
power of the planetary system to produce a change of seasons 
on the planets, or to say, that ebb and flood are the reaction 
of the organism of the earth upon the moon. 
In physics, all those explanations which were suggested by 
a teleological view of nature, as “horror vacui,” and the like, 
have long been discarded. But in animated nature, adaptation 
—individual adaptation—to a purpose is so prominently 
marked, that it is difficult to reject all teleological explanations. 
Meanwhile it must be remembered that those explanations, 
which explain at once all and nothing, can be but the last 
resources, when no other view can possibly be adopted; and there 
is no such necessity for admitting the teleological view in the 
case of organized bodies. The adaptation to a purpose which 
is characteristic of organized bodies differs only in degree from 
what is apparent also in the inorganic part of nature; and the 
explanation that organized bodies are developed, like all the 
phenomena of inorganic nature, by the operation of blind laws 
