Page:The World as Will and Idea - Schopenhauer, tr. Haldane and Kemp - Volume 3.djvu/107

Rh, and had committed an error which she tries to correct to-day through the insect; it is rather a deep-lying sympathy between the plant and the animal worlds. It ought to reveal the identity of the two. Both, children of one mother, ought to subsist with each other and through each other." And further on: "But the organised world stands in such a sympathy with the unorganised world also," &c. A proof of this consensus naturæ is also afforded by the observation communicated in the second volume of the "Introduction into Entomology" by Kirby and Spence, that the insect eggs that pass the winter attached to the twigs of the trees, which serve as nourishment for their larvæ, are hatched exactly at the time at which the twig buds; thus, for example, the aphis of the birch a month earlier than that of the ash. Similarly, that the insects of perennial plants pass the winter upon these as eggs; but those of mere annuals, since they cannot do this, in the state of pupæ.

Three great men have entirely rejected teleology, or the explanation from final causes, and many small men have echoed them. These three are, Lucretius, Bacon of Verulam, and Spinoza. But in the case of all three we know clearly enough the source of this aversion, namely, that they regarded it as inseparable from speculative theology, of which, however, they entertained so great a distrust (which Bacon indeed prudently sought to conceal) that they wanted to give it a wide berth. We find Leibnitz also entirely involved in this prejudice, for, with characteristic naïveté, he expresses it as something self-evident in his Lettre à M. Nicaise (Spinozæ op. ed Paulus, vol. ii. p. 672): "Les causes finales, ou ce qui est la même chose, la consideration de la sagesse divine dans l'ordre des choses." (The devil also même chose!) At the same point of view we find, indeed, Englishmen even at the present day. The Bridge water-Treatise-men – Lord Brougham, &c. – nay, even Richard Owen also, in his "Ostéologie Compareé," thinks precisely as Leibnitz, which I have already found