134 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



intermediate forms " vanishes ; for they were but the 

 creation of the brain — not of Nature. 



And we may carry the problem further back, and 

 observe with M. Janet that, " It still remains to explain 

 how a conflict of forces can, at a given moment, have 

 brought about a result so complicated, and requiring so 

 appropriate a mechanism as life".^ " Everything leads to 

 the belief that if Nature had begun by chaos, it would 

 never have come out of it." '^ 



M. Janet does not seem to be a palaeontologist, or 

 probably he would not have misunderstood the expres- 

 sion that "fossils are embryos of actual species," or have 

 said of Aristotle's, remark — "the animal is an unfinished 

 man " — " as a metaphorical and hyperbolical expression, 

 this is an admirable thought ; as an exact theory, it is 

 very disputable."^ Every naturalist will recognise the 

 author's difficulty, which leads him into false inferences ; 

 for he says : " No doubt the inferior species have im- 

 perfect forms in relation to the superior. It is better to 

 have the wings of the bird than the flaps of reptiles ; the 

 brain of man than that of the oyster." Such is, how- 

 ever, not better if taken alone. With the conditions of 

 life required by the oyster or the reptile, brains and wings 

 respectively would be utterly useless and superfluous. He 

 is more accurate when he says : " Every being that lives, 

 being even thereby organised to live, be that life humble 

 or powerful, contains relations of finality and design [?] ; 

 between this being, however humble, and a purely for- 

 tuitous product, a freak of Nature, there is already an 

 abyss, and the latter can never have served as a transition 

 to the former. In the polyp I see finality as well as in 

 the vertebrates, and the tentacles by which it seizes its 



1 P. 207. 2 p_ 206. 3 p 209. 



