7 8 CREATIVE EVOLUTION 



antecedent invoked is in different degrees, of course 

 its occasion rather than its cause. Now, in saying 

 that the saltness of the water is the cause of the trans 

 formations of Artemia, or that the degree of tempera 

 ture determines the colour and marks of the wings 

 which a certain chrysalis will assume on becoming a 

 butterfly, is the word &quot; cause &quot; used in the first sense ? 

 Obviously not : causality has here an intermediary 

 sense between those of unwinding and releasing. 

 Such, indeed, seems to be Eimer s own meaning when 

 he speaks of the &quot; kaleidoscopic &quot; character of the 

 variation, 1 or when he says that the variation of 

 organized matter works in a definite way, just as 

 inorganic matter crystallizes in definite directions. 2 

 And it may be granted, perhaps, that the process is 

 a merely physical and chemical one in the case of 

 the colour-changes of the skin. But if this sort of 

 explanation is extended to the case of the gradual 

 formation of the eye of the vertebrate, for instance, it 

 must be supposed that the physico-chemistry of living 

 bodies is such that the influence of light has caused the 

 organism to construct a progressive series of visual 

 apparatus, all extremely complex, yet all capable of 

 seeing, and of seeing better and better. 3 What more 

 could the most confirmed finalist say, in order to mark 

 out so exceptional a physico-chemistry ? And will not 

 the position of a mechanistic philosophy become still 

 more difficult, when it is pointed out to it that the 

 egg of a mollusc cannot have the same chemical com 

 position as that of a vertebrate, that the organic sub 

 stance which evolved toward the first of these two 



1 Eimer, Orthogenesis der Schmetterlinge, Leipzig, 1897, p. 24. Cf. Die 

 Entstehung der Art en, p. 53. 



2 Eimer, Die Entstehung der Arten, Jena, 1888, p. 25. 



3 Ibid. pp. 165 ff. 



