ii POTENCY OF GERMS 119 



world is an escape entirely governed by 

 his avowed aim to avoid language having 

 teleological implications. But surely it 

 is bad philosophy to avoid any fitting 

 words because of implications which are 

 manifestly true, and are an essential part 

 of their descriptive power. 



If, therefore, we are to accept the 

 hypothesis that all vertebrate animals, 

 whether living or extinct, have been 

 the offspring, by ordinary generation, of 

 one single germ, originally created, then 

 that original germ must have contained 

 within itself certain innate properties 

 of development along definite lines of 

 growth, the issues of which have been 

 forearranged and predetermined from 

 the first. I have elsewhere 1 shown 

 how this conception permeates, involun- 

 tarily, all the language of descriptive 

 science when specialists take it in hand 



1 Philosophy of Belief, ch. iii. 



