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 ideological, 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 



