ON THE MORPHOLOGICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 215 



present chapter will deal with the morphological, the 

 following with the genetic, views of nature. 1 



Were the real world only one out of many possible 

 worlds which the mathematical mind can imagine, though 

 through its complication and intricacy it might still 

 far surpass its powers of analysis ; were the actual forms 

 of nature only some of the infinitely possible states of 

 equilibrium, the events and changes surrounding us in 

 space and time only a few of the countless combinations 

 of motion taught in dynamics; were the actual course 

 of things as mathematicians since Laplace have fanci- 

 fully put it only one particular solution of the general 

 differential equations of the world -motion, then the 

 two great domains of morphology and genesis would 

 exhaust the subject and satisfy all the interests by which 

 natural history has been created. Unfortunately for the 15 - 

 pure mathematician, but fortunately for the rest of man- 8 P ects - 

 kind, notably the poet and the artist, it is not so. An 

 enormous gulf separates the creations of nature from the 

 most perfect machine ; and the fact that, with all the 

 most delicate methods at her command, her most perfect 

 machines, like the human eye, do not come up to the 

 demands of the optician, 2 shows us that other agencies 



1 As in abstract mechanics, the 

 study of the conditions of equili- 

 brium, i.e., statica, preceded in time 

 the study of the phenomena of 

 motion, i.e., dynamics, so in the 

 study of nature the apparently 

 finished or developed forms at- 

 tracted attention before their 

 genesis was inquired into ; and as 

 the key to statics has in the course 

 of time been discovered to lie in 

 dynamics, so the key to an under- 

 standing of form and structure has 



been found to lie in the dynamical 

 theory of descent or evolution. In 

 animal biology a separate influence 

 the medical interest led, how- 

 ever, very early to a study of func- 

 tion and of the processes in the 

 living organism. 



2 This refers to a well-known re- 

 mark of Helmholtz in his popular 

 lectures on the ' Theory of Light ' 

 (1868), where he enlarges on the 

 remarkable imperfections of the eye 

 as an optical instrument. His real 



