Final Causes and Contemponeous Physiology (translated from the Revue des duex Mondes) [pp. 291-321]

296 FINAL CAUSES. [April,
ter, by no means excludes the idea of an intelligent mechanism
in the construction of the organism. For M. Robin, on the
contrary, it is a superannuated and entirely false idea to represent the organization as a machine. This opinion, diffused
and brought into favor by the school of Descartes, has been
expressed in these terms by a celebrated English physician,
Hunter: "Organism," said he, "resolves itself into the idea
of the mechanical association of parts." This can not be sustained in the present state of science. Such ~ statement
might lead us to think that there can be organism without
life. Thus, according to Hunter, a corpse, so long as the elements are not disassociated, would be just as much organized
as a living body. This is a grave error. Organization can not
exist without its essential properties, and it is the whole of
these properties in action which we call life. The instance of
fossils proves sufficiently that mechanical structure is only one
of the consequences of organization, and not organization itself. Indeed, in fossils, the form and structure remain indefinitely, although the immediate pnnciples which constituted
them may have been destroyed and replaced, molecule after
molecule, by fossilization; no trace remains of the matter of
the animal or plant, although its structure may be mathematically preserved, down to the least details. We seem to handle
a being which has lived, which is still organized, and we behold only brute matter. Not only can struct~re or mechanical combination subsist without organism, but, reciprocally, organization can exist without any mechanical arrangement.
To make this well understood, the physiologist refers the
growing complication of the parts of an organism to a graduated scale; at the lowest degrees are the anaThrnfral Jcmcnts,
or cells; next above are the tissues, then the or~ans, then the
apparatuses finally, the complete or~a;~ism. An organism, for
instance, an animal of the higher order, is composed of different apparatuses, whose actions are called fu~zetions; these apparatuses are made up of different organs, which, by virtue of
their conformation, have this or that use; these organs, in their
turn, are composed of tissues, whose arrangement is called texture, or structure; these tissues, finally, are themselves made of
elements, or cells, which sometimes appear with a certain structure and a determined configuration (such as the body of the