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-determined 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, we 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 
