Frans Cornelis Donders, 1818-1889 : with a portrait from an unfinished work of G.F. Watts.

  • Bowman, William, Sir, 1816-1892.
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Frans Cornelis Donders, 1818-1889 : with a portrait from an unfinished work of G.F. Watts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    great and all-encompassing, fertile for the future development of science, it is the Permanence of Forces. No one molecule of matter can be destroyed, but neither can a minimum of Energy. Thus runs tbe important hypothesis which may come to be the soul of natural science. The forces change and join, they appear under different forms, but no force is annihilated. Determinate quantities of move- ment, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, and nervous force respond to each, other, and can pass from one into the other. There is therefore a sum of energy, just as much as there is a sum of matter; both are proportionate to each other, both remain always the same. And Donders was hardly less prescient as he stood on the threshold of that other great achievement of our era, the doctrine of the Evolution of Organisms on our planet. The knowledge of the elements and of the elemental forces, then rapidly extending, was being more and more applied to the elucidation of certain vital problems, on which the greatest minds had long speculated in vain. Standing as we now do in the fuller light of those crowning dis- closures of the progression of living nature through past ages which we owe chiefly to the genius of Darwin and of Wallace, dealing with an opulence of new materials for thought, it is very interesting to notice how Donders, in that nascent period, regarded this momentous subject. Already, in 1846,* he had briefly contested the then all but universally accepted teleological notion of the origination of organic forms by separate creative interpositions, accounting it to be arbitrary and unscientific; and soon after, on being called to the Professoriate of the University, he deemed the topic weighty enough for a wider treatment, and because of its general bearing, well suited to an inaugural discourse.f Herein, after passing in review the grander features of the material universe and of the earth, as then known, he strives to show that the harmony everywhere pervading living nature, then usually explained by the principle of design (conformity to an end), is simply a necessary result of the condi- tions under wbich all organisms have come to be what they have been, or are. Though by no means denying the existence of a purpose in the phenomena of nature, he insists that a doctrine of the purpose can never become science, and can indeed only tend to obstruct the progress of science by lulling to sleep the spirit of enquiry into the laws governing the phenomena. These remain open to investigation in the field of life, just as in that of inanimate matter. It is remarkable how firmly Donders here grasps the certainty that all life has been ever in process of being moulded into its specific forms by the continuous operation, through long ages, of laws * Vide Gids, 1846, pp. 893 et seq. f The Harmony of Animal Life, a Manifestation of Laws. By P. C. Donders, 28th Jan., 1848. [Also in Dutch, never translated.]