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L 6 
THE 
AMERICAN NATURALIST. 
VOL. xvi.— ¥A NUARY, 1884.—No. I. 
Cee ne i me 
DISADVANTAGES OF THE UPRIGHT POSITION. 
BY S. V. CLEVENGER, M.D. 
ibe immediate and remote causes of things have been and 
will be sought by thinkers who are not afraid to follow 
wherever facts#lead them. The doctrine that there is no effect 
without an antecedent cause, has met with fierce opposition from 
those who saw that the logical conclusions of correlated facts, 
such as are presented by Darwin, tended to the overthrow of 
puerile legends they believed in, and who were content to imagine 
that everything was causeless, or at best originated in some in- 
scrutable way. The Arab, upon having the sidereal motions 
explained to him, said, “ You trouble yourself greatly about 
things not intended for you to know. Even though what you 
tell me is true, the Koran leads us to believe otherwise. Mo- 
hammed taught us sufficient, and his followers can torture you 
out of your rationalism. Forbear your heretical facts !” 
The mechanical nature of things animate is as old in theory as 
Democritus, 500 B. C.; and Giordano Bruno, in A. D. 1600, for 
having amplified the Democritic idea, was burned at the stake. 
Kant granted a mechanical cosmogony, but in organic nature 
claimed cause finales. The battle of cause eficientes was fully 
won by Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Herschel, Laplace, 
etc., so far as the inanimate universe was concerned, but the me- 
chanical conception of that whick pertains to living things was 
hinted at by Aristotle. Geoffrey de St. Hilaire contended against 
Cuvier for the —_— of species and the monistic theory. 
VOL. XVIII.—No. I. 
