FINAL CAUSES 121 



No doubt existing species could not exist without 

 their full amount of correlative structures ; but it is just 

 because the sexes have been, as it is believed, differenti- 

 ated in course of time, that the supposed finality becomes, 

 like that of the eye, attenuated by being prolonged back- 

 wards into history ; for by travelling historically backwards 

 we can theoretically, if not always practically, see species 

 getting simpler and simpler, and more and more general- 

 ised, till in every organism the sexual process would be 

 represented by a mere accidental fusion of two identically 

 similar protoplasmic masses ; while one stage further 

 brings us to an entire independence of such conjugations, 

 and the being propagates by fission of its vegetative 

 system only. 



Instead, however, of thus eliminating by degrees every 

 trace of finality in sexuality till we merge into merely 

 mechanical results ; is it not just as logical to say that 

 the sexuality of mammalia and flowering plants was 

 potentially visible in the conjugation of monera and 

 Plasmodia ? and that the " sexual idea " has reigned 

 throughout, function ever dominating structure till the 

 latter had conformed to the more complete function by 

 becoming specialised more and more ; or, in the words 

 of M, Janet, " The agreement of several phenomena, 

 bound together with a future determinate phenomenon, 

 supposes a cause in which that future phenomenon is 

 ideally represented, and the probability of this presump- 

 tion increases with the complexity of the concordant 

 phenomena, and the number of the relations which unite 

 them to the final phenomenon." ^ 



M. Janet devotes the second chapter to an elaborate 

 investigation of the structure of the eye, ear, tooth, etc, 



^P. 55- 



