276 LESSONS FROM NATURE. [CHAP. VIII. 



then who admit that the natural world is the product of a 

 divine mind must also admit, since such mind is infinitely 

 above all human minds, that it possesses in perfection what 

 the most perfectly developed human minds possess, as it 

 were, in germ. 



Thus viewed, the questions of philosophical anatomy acquire 

 a fresh value, and it becomes plain that we owe a debt of 

 gratitude to those who, years ago, forced questions such as 

 these upon willing and unwilling ears. Not less plain is 

 the justification which the most modern views afford them. 

 Platonic and Peripatetic conceptions are far indeed from 

 having been overthrown by the rising tide of a revived 

 Ionian philosophy a flood of which has slightly covered part 

 of our land, and deeply submerged Germany. Philosophical 

 anatomy, types, divine prototypal ideas are one by one 

 emerging and reappearing, refreshed and invigorated by the 

 bath of Darwinian Evolutionism through which they have 

 been made to pass. It is again becoming manifest that 

 nature, when broadly surveyed, confirms and accords with 

 the speculations of philosophy, though never without a 

 certain want of minute agreement ; so opening fresh vistas 

 which invite the intellect to further advance and to the 

 solution of more and more recondite problems which it is the 

 task of philosophical anatomy perpetually to strive after, to 

 elucidate in part, but never, in this life, exhaustively to solve. 



The existence, then, of these various homologies, serial, 

 Homoiogy lateral, &c., render it plain to any one who ponders 

 nai forces, over them that there is in each individual animal 

 a peculiar form or energy which actually results in the 

 complex phenomena above described. And just as species 

 and genera do not exist as species and genera except men 

 tally, and yet really exist objectively in those individual 

 characteristics which furnish specific and generic characters ; 

 just so the peculiar force referred to may be spoken of as 

 that of the species, though of course it has no existence really 

 except in the organic activities of the individuals which 

 compose such species. To adopt, for illustration, the mode 



