14 FINAL CAUSES. 



ever wide may be the field of his exertions, they 

 still are insufficient to satisfy the more enlarged 

 curiosity of a philosophic mind. The passive emo- 

 tion of astonishment, in which inferior intellects 

 are content to rest, serves but to awaken, in him 

 who has learned to think, a desire of further know- 

 ledge. Filled with an ardent spirit of inquiry, he 

 cannot but be impatient under the feeling that, 

 while Nature has placed before his eyes this 

 splendid spectacle of animation, she has thrown a 

 dense veil over the interior machinery of life, and 

 has concealed from his view the springs by which 

 she sets the whole in motion. With the hope of 

 discovering her proceedings, he hastens to explore 

 the several parts which compose the organized 

 fabric, to examine in minute detail the anatomy of 

 its structure, and to ascertain the nature of the se- 

 veral actions that take place within it. But, over- 

 whelmed by the multiplicity of objects, and lost 

 amidst the complication of phenomena, he soon 

 becomes dismayed by the magnitude and arduous 

 nature of the investigation. He finds that his la- 

 bours wdll be fruitless, unless, previously to any 

 attempt at theory, he takes a careful and accurate 

 account of all the circumstances attending the his- 

 tory and conditions of life, from the dawn of its 

 existence to its appointed close. On tracing living 

 beings to their origin, he learns that every indi- 

 vidual vegetable and animal takes its rise from an 

 atom of imperceptible minuteness, and gradually 

 increases in bulk by successive accretions of new 

 matter, derived from foreign sources, and, by some 

 refined, but unknown process, transmuted into its 

 own substance. Then, following the progressive 



