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

298 FINAL CAUSES. [April7.
Organized bodies, the apparatus which composes these bodies,.
and the organs which compose the apparatus, are no more'
than resultants and complications of certain simple elements,.
or cells, whose fundamental properties must be investigated,
as chemists study the properties of simple bodies. The
physiological problem will then no. longer be, as in the time 0~
Galen, the use or the usefulness of parts, but the mode of ac
tion of each element, as well as the physical and chemical conditions which determine this mode of action. According to
the old ideas, the object which the savant pursued in his researches was the animal, or the man, or the plant; to-day it is
the nervous cell, the motive cell, or the glandular cell, each.
one beirtg considered as endowed with its own individual, independent life. The animal is no longer a living being it is an
assemblage of living beings, a colony; when the animal dies,.
the elements die, one after another. It is an assemblage of little
existences, to which some physiologists go so far as to ascribe'
a sort of dull consciousness, analogous to the obscure percep-.
tions of the Leibnitzian monads. From this standpoint it appears, that the old comparison of the philosophers, between the
organs and the instruments of human workmanship is but a
superficial and superannuated idea, worth nothing in the present
state of the science. It appears that final causes, so long abandoned in the physical and chemical method, are destined to
become also, in physiology, a secondary phenomenon, without
weight. If, indeed, an amorphous substance is capable of
noubshment, reproduction, motion; if, on the other hand, we
cannot divine any possible relation between structure and function (as in the nerves), what remains but the fact, that, in a
certain condition, one substance has the property of nourishment, another that of feeling, just as it has been established
in chemistry, that oxygen has the property of burning, and
chlorine the property of disinfecting? In one word, there'
remain nothing but causes and effects, and resembling means.
and ends.
~Vhile modern physiology, following Bichat, has neglected..
the structure and use of parts, to consider the organic elements,
anatomy, following Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire, has equally neglected the' superficial form of the organs, to consider chiefly
the anatonomical elements and their connections. The law of