Lamarck was one of those men of whom I believe it has
been said that they have brain upon the brain. He had his theory that an
animal could not feel unless it had a nervous system, and at least a
spinal marrow--and that it could not think at all without a brain--all
his facts, therefore, have to be made to square with this. With Buffon
and Dr. Darwin we feel safe that however wrong they may sometimes be,
their conclusions have always been arrived at on that fairly superficial
view of things in which, as I have elsewhere said, our nature alone
permits us to be comforted.
To these writers, then, the doctrine of final causes for rudimentary
organs was a piece of mystification and an absurdity; no less fatal to
any such doctrine were the processes of embryological development. It
was plain that the commonly received teleology must be given up; but the
idea of design or purpose was so associated in their minds with
theological design that they avoided it altogether. They seem to have
forgotten that an internal purpose is as much purpose as an external one;
hence, unfortunately, though their whole theory of development is
intensely purposive, it is the fact rather than the name of teleology
which has hitherto been insisted upon, even by the greatest writers on
evolution--the name having been most persistently denied even by those
who were most insisting on the thing itself.
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