112 THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 



found no pleasure. Nature and natural objects, as ex- 

 istent and complete, merely inspired the wish forthwith 

 to examine their origin and its cause. To judge of 

 things by their final causes, according to an assumed 

 purpose pre-determincd by Providence, he deemed " a 

 melancholy expedient " which must be entirely set aside. 

 For this method of contemplating Nature, as pursued 

 by him, in which all living things are to be conceived 

 as intrinsically connected, the external as an indication 

 of the internal form, he created the name of Morpho- 

 logy, the doctrine of form. He examined " how Nature 

 lives by creating ;" and from amazement at the eternal 

 formation and transformation, from the perplexity into 

 which he was plunged by the manifold variety of forms, 

 we see him emerge by seeking and finding primordial 

 forms. 



Even before the realization of the metamorphoses of 

 plants, we find him surrounded by bones and complete 

 skeletons in his scientific ossuary at Jena ; he thought 

 he had found a lodestar in the erection of an anatomical 

 Type, an universal symbol, " in which the forms of all 

 (vertebrate) animals were potentially contained, and by 

 which each animal may be described according to a 

 certain arrangement." " Experience must first teach us 

 which are the parts common to all animals, and wherein 

 these parts differ. The idea must control the whole, 

 and in a genetic manner deduce the universal model." 

 Thus by an abstract of the individual, w^e are to possess 

 ourselves of a certain archetype. As man could not be 

 taken as a standard for animals, and conversely, the in- 

 finite complexity of man could not be fully explained 

 by animal organization, something fluctuating between 



