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

~876.] FINAL CAUSES. 307
most recent science, in order to express its last word concerning nature and the signification of organism, returns Unconsciously to the old and imperishable comparison of the
letters of the alphabet, which will never make a poem, nor
even a single verse, unless a hand directs and combines them
The investigation of the material conditions of life does then
not exclude, on the contrary, it implies and demands, final
causes.
II.
The doctrine of M. Claude Bernard, which represents or~anism as a machine, constructed and guided by a creative
idea, meets a decided adversary in M. Charles Robin. Both
of these savants hold that it is the office of science to connect
every phenomenon with its antecedent and determining conditions; but the former claims that this determination by no
means supposes thought in nature, or, at least, in animated
nature, but is only its mode of manifestation; the ]atter, on
the contrary, holds, that beyond the determining conditions
there is nothing to be sought, or even to be thought; and that
the principle of the conditions of existence absolutely excludes
the principle of final causes; moreover, that all the inductions.
<lerived from the companson of organism with a machine are
erroneous, since the organization is not a machine, and the or~anized substance can live and show all the properties of life
without mechanical structure and adaptation.
It matters little from our standpoint-indeed, it matters not
at all-that organization is essentially and by definition a mechanical combination. It is enough to know that, in most cases,
and in proportion as it perfects itself, the organized substance
itself creates mechanical agents for exercising its functions.
Without doubt the organized substance which composes the
eye, or the heart, or the wing, is not in itself a machine, but it
is capable, by an efficacy in itself, of making instruments of
action in which the wisest mechanism is shown; the problem
remains complete, whatever idea we form concerning organiza
tion in itself and in its first state. Let us admit that organiza
tion is in essence a certain chemical combination, it always remains to be known how this chemical combination succeeds in
passing from that amorphous state in which it is said to begin,
20