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

I876.~ FINAL CAUSES. 311
absolutely exclude all idea of plan, of art, of industry, and let
nothing subsist but the principle of "the conditions of existence." According to him, adaptation is one of the general
phenomena of organized matter which we may call, with
Blainville, resitltanl p/~cnomcna. Of this sort are, for instance,
animal and vegetable calorification, hereditability, the conservation of species, etc. These phenomena are not the acts of
a determined and isolated apparatus; they are the resultants
which sum up the whole of the phenomena of living nature,
and which belong to the totality of the conditions of organized
being. According to M. Robin, physiology has reached a point
where it can strictly determine the conditions of this adapatation, which has thereby become a positive fact, and every hypothesis of the design of the organs is absolutely useless.
He discards at first a doctrine which he calls "Aristotelian,"
and which is that of the contemporaneous Gen~an physiology
of Burdach and Mu~ller, and which M. Claude Bernard would
probably not repudiate, namely, that "the egg or the germ is
the potential organism." This doctrine does not differ sensibly,
according to him, from that of the ~rcforrnc7tion of the organs,
or the inclosure of the germs, developed in the i8th century by
Bonnet. According to this philosopher, the germ would contain the entire animal in miniature, and development would be
only growth and enlargement. Is not this almost the same as
saying that the egg is the animal ~J2 potcntia? And how could
it virtually be the entire animal if it did not already contain a
certain preformation of it? But experience, according to M.
Robin, is contrary to all these hypotheses. The germ seen
under the most powerful microscope does not show any app~arance of a formed organism; much rather, at the first step of
their evolution all germs are absolutely identical, and there is
not any difference between that of man and that of the animals
lowest in the scale. Finally, under the hypothesis of preformation, or under that of the organism in potency, all the organs ought to appear at the same time, while experience shows
us that the organs are formed one after the other by extenor
additions coming into life in succession. Such is the doctrine
of epzgcnesis accepted by the embryology of to-day, which has
definitively superseded the doctrine of preformation. If this is
true, the whole does not precede the parts, but the parts pre