ORIGIN OF ORGANIC FORMS 317 



all sorts of organisms to be consecutively exposed 

 to the action of all sorts of external conditions in the 

 course of a sufficiently long lapse of time, we shall 

 clearly see that the great majority of these organisms 

 ought necessarily to disappear ; only those that 

 satisfy the fundamental law of equilibrium mentioned 

 above should survive. In all probability such a system 

 of elimination has established the biological harmony, 

 which we observe on our planet, and which goes on 

 changing before our eyes.' The similarity of both 

 opinions consists in that biological harmony, for both 

 Comte and Darwin, is the result of the elimination of all 

 that is inharmonious, and inconsistent with the funda- 

 mental law of equilibrium between the organism and its 

 environment. Comte does not indicate the mode of this 

 elimination of unsatisfactory organisms, nor the reason 

 of its inevitable and fatal necessity ; and besides, for him, 

 adherent as he was of the immutability of species, this 

 harmony ought to have appeared as something stable, 

 something that had already attained its end ; while for 

 Darwin, the advocate of the unlimited variation of 

 organic forms, this equilibrium is unstable, a harmony 

 ever progressing and never reaching its end. Now, if 

 this harmony is unstable it cannot be absolute ; and this 

 is altogether consistent with reality. We never meet 

 with absolute perfection in Nature. The eye is rightly 

 considered the most perfect of organs, and yet it is of 

 the eye that Helmholtz, the greatest authority in his 

 subject, and at the same time an enemy of all idle talk, 

 said that had he received from an optician an apparatus 

 with similar defects he would have sent it back to be 

 repaired ! 



We see, therefore, that Darwin's theory explains the 

 reason of the perfection of organisms by starting from 

 fundamental properties of bodies well known to every 

 one, and without having recourse to arbitrary premises. 

 Upon this rests its superiority to all former attempts of 



