Page:On the Fourfold Root, and On the Will in Nature.djvu/308

 THE WILL IN NATURE.

purposes he calls την κατα λογον φυσις [character and quality of nature corresponding to the aim and purpose] 1 and explains by it how the material for upper incisors has been employed for horns in horned cattle. Quite rightly: since the only ruminants which have no horns, the camel and the musk-ox, have upper incisors, and these are wanting in all horned ruminants.

No other explanation or assumption enables us nearly as well to understand either the complete suitableness to purpose and to the external conditions of existence I have here shown in the skeleton, or the admirable harmony and fitness of internal mechanism in the structure of each animal, as the truth I have elsewhere firmly established: that the body of an animal is precisely nothing but the will itself of that animal brought to cerebral perception as representation through the forms of Space, Time and Causality, in other words, the mere visibility, objectivity of the Will. For, if this is once pre-supposed, everything in and belonging to that body must conspire towards the final end: the life of this animal. Nothing superfluous, nothing deficient, nothing inappropriate, nothing insufficient or incomplete of its kind, can therefore be found in it; on the contrary, all that is required must be there, and just in the proportion needed, never more. For here artist, work and materials are one and the same. Each organism is therefore a consummate master-piece of exceeding perfection. Here the will did not first cherish the intention, first recognise the end and then adapt the means to it and conquer the material; its willing was rather immediately the aim and immediately the attainment of that aim; no foreign appliances needing to be overcome were wanted; willing, doing and attaining were here one and the same. Thus the organism presents itself as a miracle which admits of no comparison with any work

1 See Aristotle, De partibus animalium, III, c. 2, sub finem: πως δε αναγκαιας φυσεως κ. τ. λ.

COMPARATIVE