Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/429

Rh nevertheless presently he finds himself speaking of the use, functions, and purposes of the organs.

The possibility, however remote, of banishing out of nature this apparent adaptation to ends (teleology), and of everywhere setting up blind necessity in the place of final causes, is to be regarded as one of the greatest advances ever made in the world of thought, as a step from which will be dated a new epoch in the treatment of these problems. That he has in some measure diminished that torture of the mind which tries to understand the universe, will be Charles Darwin's highest title to fame so long as there exists a philosophic student of nature.

Mr. Darwin's "Origin of Species" undoubtedly found zoölogy, botany, and paleontology in a state bordering on doctrinaire lethargy. The knowledge of organic forms was daily increasing in an overwhelming proportion. The sole concernment of scientific men was, as far as possible, to classify the superabundant harvest in the existing systematic frame-work; and where this could not be done, to extend the latter and add to it on this side and on that, as need was. Natural history in its narrower sense, i. e., the study of the modes of life and the instincts of animals, was hardly to be found anywhere save in books for children. As for ascertaining the meaning of the facts gathered up by naturalists, as for any theory of organic beings, such things were hardly so much as thought of. The ancient dogmas of the immutability of species—a conception which, however, no one was able to define—of the infertility of hybrids, of successive acts of creation, of the impossibility of spontaneous generation, of the recent origin of the human race—these dogmas precluded all effort in that direction. The earlier attempts, in our own time brought to light again, of Lamarck and others, at solving this problem with the aid of insufficient data, and in part from the point of view of nature-philosophy, had fallen into oblivion, and long since it was the custom to regard it as irresolvable by natural science. Independent thinkers who would not bow down before the infallibility of the school were solemnly admonished of the error of their ways. For there existed a hidden community, composed for the most part of people who were unconnected with the zoölogical school, but to which many also within the school now profess to have belonged, though at the time they showed no symptom of it: this party already entertained secret doubts concerning the inerrancy of the received dogmas. Johannes Müller himself, who in other respects clung to these dogmas with strict orthodoxy, who as a professor inculcated them on his pupils, and who labored with indefatigable industry in building up the orthodox system, betrayed, on the occasion of his discovery of the development of Mollusca in holothurians, heretical tendencies which brought him into no little trouble with the school.

It is a pity that he did not live to witness the catastrophe which only one year after his death overtook this very self-assured school.