Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/92

88 Organic types might change, but in accordance with a perfecting principle that should lead finally to the crowning glory of the evolutionary series, the human species. Perfecting principles are not unknown—witness Lamarck and Nägeli—in the speculative biology of the last century. In the hands of no one, however, have they proved to be instruments by means of which discoveries are made. Their influence has been conspicuously negative.

It was essentially Aristotle's teleology that Darwin, as late as 1859, overmastered with the doctrine of natural selection. It was Aristotle's evolutionary series, ending with man, that, fashioned into the semblance of a pine tree by Lamarck, was finally displaced by Darwin's conception of a genealogical tree without a central axial trunk flowering at the tip in man, but branching polychotomously in all directions from a common center. This modern conception harmonizes with the fact that there is no evidence that man has been fashioned, whether by special act of an external creator as in the old Hebrew account, or by the less direct process of evolution under the guidance of a final principle inherent in nature, as in the Aristotelian tradition, to be the lord and highest product of organic creation.

The Hebrew tradition embodies too naïve a conception of final causes for the philosophic as for the scientific minds of to-day, although it still lingers in various forms of religious doctrines that typically compose themselves, as President Jordan has somewhere aptly remarked, out of the debris of our grandfathers' science. Aristotelian evolution still lingers, though negative and barren on the fertile soil of modern experience, in the minds of those who admit with Aristotle the evolution of the physical man, but view, with him, the mind as a thing apart. It is characteristic of a faith in final causes that it permits distinctions of this sort. To the average biologist, however, to admit the validity of the distinction would be to question the validity of organic evolution itself. For the evolution of the body is neither more nor less certain than the evolution of consciousness. Both, for the student of objective science, rest upon evidence of the same order.

It was to be expected that Aristotle, a pioneer in science, would overestimate the simplicity of his problem of creating order where order had not reigned before, that he would seek for final causes with a suggestion of the simple confidence of the woodsman who traces smoke to fire or hunts his quarry to its lair. He was, scientifically, of necessity unsophisticated.

It is on other grounds that we must seek an interpretation of the persistence of this phase of his influence in contemporary thought; a phase which I suspect he would now agree was the portion of his legacy least worthy of our regard. There is something foreign to the spirit of Aristotle, something savoring of a sophistication born of conflict he