ON THE VITALISTIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



435 



organism, is the apparent design and purpose, without 

 which neither could be conceived to have been formed. 1 

 Here, then, the idea that it was a process of natural 

 choice, of automatic adjustment, which produced the 

 apparent end and purpose at the moment when the 

 structure itself was produced, came as a great relief. 2 

 It explained how it comes about that nature, even 

 with unloaded dice, so often yet not always throws 

 doublets. It permitted naturalists and physiologists 

 to use purpose and final cause, not as an explana- 

 tion, but as an indication where to look for causal 

 that is, for mechanical connections. Accordingly the 

 first systematic attempt to use natural selection in 

 the explanation of the adjustment of the internal 

 parts of an organism, which is due to Prof. Wilhelm 



40. 



Natural 

 selection 

 within the 

 organism. 



1 " The main problem which the 

 organic world offers for our solu- 

 tion is the purposefulness seen in 

 organisms. That species are from 

 time to time transformed into new 

 ones might perhaps be understood 

 by means of an internal trans- 

 forming force, but that they are 

 so changed as to become better 

 adapted to the new conditions 

 under which they have to live is 

 left entirely unintelligible " (Weis- 

 mann on Niigeli's " Mechanisch- 

 Physiologische Theorie der Ab- 

 stammungslehre " in ' Essays upon 

 Heredity,' Engl. transl., p. 257). 



2 See Du Bois-Reymond's Ad- 

 dress, " Darwin versus Galiani " 

 ('Reden,' vol. i. p. 211, &c.): 

 " Here is the knot, here the great 

 difficulty that tortures the intellect 

 which would understand the world. 

 Whoever does not place all activity 

 wholesale under the sway of Epi- 

 curean chance, whoever gives only 

 his little finger to teleology, will 

 inevitably arrive at Paley's dis- 



carded ' Natural Theology,' and so 

 much the more necessarily, the more 

 clearly he thinks and the more in- 

 dependent his judgment. . . . The 

 physiologist may define his science 

 as the doctiine of the changes 

 which take place in organisms from 

 internal causes. . . . No sooner has 

 he, so to speak, turned his back on 

 himself than he discovers himself 

 talking again of functions, per- 

 formances, actions, and purposes 

 of the organs. The possibility, 

 ever so distant, of banishing from 

 nature its seeming purpose, and 

 putting a blind necessity everywhere 

 in the place of final causes, appears 

 therefore as one of the greatest 

 advances in the world of thought, 

 from which a new era will be dated 

 in the treatment of these problems. 

 To have somewhat eased the torture 

 of the intellect which ponders over 

 the world-problem will, as long as 

 philosophical naturalists exist, be 

 Charles Darwin's greatest title to 

 glory "(p. 216). 



