No. 552] 



M TO.XOMY OF BIOLOGICAL SCIEXCE 



721 



teleology in the realm of the living, but have made the 

 principle scientifically impossible. 



(b) Were every organic event final or purposeful, 

 functional adjustment, training and education would be 

 unnecessary and impossible. Jennings 5 tells us : 



How the relations that impress us as teleological were brought about, 

 constitutes undoubtedly a set of most difficult problems. But to keep 

 us from despairing, we find this process taking place in the lives of 

 individuals in a manner that can readily be studied. This is in the for- 

 mation of habits. In the formation of habits, we see that the organism 

 at first does not react in a way that impresses us as teleological, while 

 later it does, and we can watch the process change from one condition 

 to the other, and discover how it is causally determined. Since then a 

 method of action that appears to us teleological is produced in an 

 intelligible way under our very eyes, in the lifetime of the individual, 

 there is no reason why we may riot expect to find out how teleological 

 relations have been brought about in the life of the race when we have 

 actually made a start in the study of the physiology of racial processes. 

 It seems clear that the apparent relation of a present process or struc- 

 ture to something that comes later in time is always due to the fact 

 that this future something has in fact aeled upon the organism in the 

 past. The present condition fits the future condition only because of 

 a certain constancy in the universe, through which the " something 



The ability to make functional adjustments of this 

 character is only a special case of automatic self-preser- 

 vation, and is found in all organisms because those de- 

 void of it are for this very reason eliminated and conse- 

 quents remain largely unknown. Paleontology is the 

 science that deals chiefly with these failures. How many 

 organisms have been unable to make the necessary ad- 

 justments is attested by the great number of extinct ani- 

 mals and plants; how many are failing to-day is shown 



by every rapidly vanishing species, as 



well as by many 



experiments and special observations. Several of the 

 mutants of de Vries have for one reason or another 



' American Journal Psychol- 



5 Jennings, Herb 

 Study of Behav 

 , Vol. XXI. 



. LXXX. 



