Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/305

 ANATOMY. 273

race multiplies and the length of his childhood and life, which demand secure preservation of the individual. All these great requirements had to be satisfied by means of intellectual powers, which, for this reason, predominate in him. But we find the intellect secondary and subordinate everywhere, and destined exclusively to serve the purposes of the will. As a rule too, it always remains true to its destiny and subservient to the will. How nevertheless, it frees itself in particular instances from this bondage through an abnormal preponderance of cerebral life, whereby purely objective cognition becomes possible which may be enhanced to genius, I have shown at length in the aesthetic part of my chief work. 1

Now, after all these reflections upon the precise agreement between the will and the organisation of each animal, if we inspect a well-arranged osteological collection from this point of view, it will certainly seem to us as if we saw one and the same being (De Lamarck's primary animal, or, more properly, the will to live) changing its shape according to circumstances, and thus producing all this multiplicity of forms out of the same number and arrangement of its bones, by prolonging and curtailing, strengthening and weakening them. This number and arrangement of the bones, which Geoffrey de St. Hilaire 2 called the anatomical element, continues, as he has thoroughly shown, in all essential points unchanged: it is a constant magnitude, something which is absolutely given beforehand, irrevocably fixed by an unfathomable necessity, an immutability which I should compare with the permanence of matter in all physical and chemical

1 [See Third Book of the W. a. W. u. V. [World as Will and Representation]; later also, in my Parerga, vol. ii., §§ 50-57 and § 206. (§§ 51-58, and § 210 of the 2nd edition.)

2 Principes de Philosophie Zoologique, 1830.

274