Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/437

Rh order to explain thereby the adaptation of organic nature, is no more demonstrated than is the contrary proposition. The aim of the theoretical investigator of nature is to understand nature. If this aim is not to be an absurdity, the man of science must presuppose the intelligibility of nature. Final causes in nature are incompatible with nature's intelligibility. Hence, if there is any way of banishing teleology from nature, the man of science is bound to take it. Such a way is found in the theory of natural selection; and hence we must follow in it. Be it that, in holding this theory, we experience the sensations of a man who as his only hope of rescue from drowning clambers on a plank which can only just keep him above the water: when the choice lies between a plank and drowning, the plank has a decided advantage.

Galiani's apologue does not now puzzle us as once it puzzled the encyclopædists. We should have known how to reply to it, for Mr. Darwin has enabled us to see why it is that nature generally, though not always, throws doubles, and that, too, without cogged dice. And, as in our opinion systematics did not attain its true significance and its full value till now, when it no longer deludes itself with its artificial frame-work of classification, so even in physiology we continue to make use of teleology as an aid in discovery, but with the understanding that the teleology of organs being apparent only, there will also be much that is unteleological, or even antiteleological.

On the other hand, a man is not to be censured who, under the influence of such impressions as we have described, finds it impossible to believe that all nature, the human brain included, was created by the forces of matter out of a chaotic nebulous sphere. What, at the utmost, seems possible when applied to a minute mass of protoplasm, will appear rather hard to believe even to the most uncompromising monist, when he looks at a human blossom, beaming with grace and genius; and yet the difference between such mass of protoplasm and a human being is a difference simply of degree; in fact, the human being was once a mass of protoplasm. In matters of this kind, personal bias, determined by natural constitution, education, and accidental influences, will ever play a great part: Teleology and Vitalism—both in one shape or another as old as mankind—will last as long as the race itself. Hence, let every man take his own course; only, the partisans of Final Causes must not imagine, as they are wont to do, that they offer a better solution of the problem, or any solution at all that is worthy of that name, when they invoke the aid of supernatural conceptions of any sort.

This was well understood by Leibnitz. True, he did indeed suppose that he had discovered a dualistic theory of the universe, but the part he there assigns to final causes proves the correctness of the remark just made. Leibnitz utterly rejected teleology in the material world. Here, for him, reigns mechanical causality, and nothing else. Matter is, according to him, created by God, but at the same time it is so invested once for all with motive force that there is no need of setting