52 AMONG THE GREEKS. 



Nature, towards which all had been tending, the 

 crowning end, purpose, or final cause. His theory 

 was then anthropocentric : " plants are evidently 

 for the sake of animals and animals for the sake 

 of man ; thus Nature, which does nothing in vain, 

 has done all things for the sake of man." ^ 



Aristotle's view is brought out clearly and emphat- 

 ically in the most striking passage of all his writings 

 where he undertakes to refute Empedocles. This 

 is of the greatest interest to-day, because Aristotle 

 clearly states and rejects a theory of the origin or 

 adaptive structures in animals altogether similar to 

 that of Darwin. Aristotle perceived in Emped- 

 ocles' crude suggestion of the survival of adapted 

 and extinction of inadapted beings, the gist of an 

 argument which might be applied not only to entire 

 organisms but to parts of organisms, to explain pur- 

 posive structures, and which might thus become a 

 dangerous rival to his own theory of the origin of 

 purposive structures by the direct operation of his 

 'perfecting principle.' In the following passages, 

 selected from the early books of his Physics, we 

 seem to gain a clear insight into Aristotle's whole 

 chain of reasoning, in a manner which enables us 

 to compare it with modern lines of thought. The 

 headings and parentheses are my own ; the pas- 

 sages are selected and adapted from Taylor's trans- 

 lation of the Physics and brought together to give 

 a clear idea of Aristotle's meaning in his own 

 language. 



