Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/297

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know the circumstances in which it has to live and from that knowledge arise its desires, i.e. its will, from which again spring its organs or definite embodiment; this last indeed with the help of generation and therefore in bound less Time. If De Lamarck had had the courage to carry out his theory fully, he ought to have assumed a primary animal l which, to be consistent, must have originally had neither shape nor organs, and then proceeded to transform itself according to climate and local conditions into myriads of animal shapes of all sorts, from the gnat to the elephant. But this primary animal is in truth the will to live; as such however, it is metaphysical, not physical. Most certainly the shape and organisation of each animal species has been determined by its own will accord ing to the circumstances in which it wished to live; not however as a thing physical in Time, but on the contrary as a thing metaphysical outside Time. The will did not proceed from the intellect, nor did the intellect exist, together with the animal, before the will made its appearance as a mere accident, a secondary, or rather tertiary, thing. It is, on the contrary, the will which is the prius [earlier], the thing–in–itself: its phenomenon (mere representation in the cognitive intellect and its forms of Space and Time) is the animal, fully equipped with all its organs which represent the will to live in those particular circumstances. Among these organs is the intellect, also knowledge itself, which, like the rest of those organs, is exactly adapted to the mode of life of each animal; whereas, according to De Lamarck, it is the will which arises out of knowledge. Behold the countless varieties of animal shapes; how entirely is each of them the mere image of its volition, the evident expression of the strivings of the will which constitute its character Their difference in shape is only the portrait of their difference in character. Ferocious animals,

1 Urthier [Urtier, or original animal].

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