Aristotle : On the parts of animals / translated, with introduction and notes by W. Ogle.
- Aristotle
- Date:
- 1882
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Aristotle : On the parts of animals / translated, with introduction and notes by W. Ogle. Source: Wellcome Collection.
14/316
![making channels for itself where it can most easily escape. The hand, again, was not given to man because he was already intelligent; but an animal among the millions of possibilities chanced to develop a hand, and, having it, made use of it, and by its means became intelligent.* But, said the teleologist, if this be so, if all be due to chance combina- tions which the multiform play of the laws of matter brings about, how comes it that we everywhere see adaptations ? Combinations there should be without adaptations ; combinations, even, where the organs and the life are ill suited for each other. And are there not such, said the materialist, partly anticipating Darwin, as before he had partly anticipated Herbert Spencer; are there not such about you on every side.? You have but to open your eyes and you will see them every- where. When the rain falls in seed-time you say the gods send it that the crops may grow; but you shut your eyes to the storms that come in harvest and wreck the farmers’ hopes. The rain, whether it do good or harm, is alike the result of necessity. So also is it with things that live. All kinds of combinations are produced, but those alone survive that have the necessary conditions of survival; the rest perish.* Even of such as are able to survive, is it true that all are suited for their life, in the sense that your hypothesis of an intelligent creative power would require ? Do we not see on all sides living monstrosities and deformi- ties, whose existence is incompatible with design, and only explicable if referred to blind necessity ? These, if such there be, are no more, said the teleologist, much as Paley * said after him, than the blunders of an artist. You will find errors in the composition of the best writer; faults 2 Cf Phvs. where is a remarkable passage in which A. thus states the material- istic view. ^ “Why, however, it must be asked, should we look on the operations of Nature as dictated by a final cause, and intended to realise some desirable end? y may they not be merely the results of necessity, just as the ram falls of nec^ity, and not that the corn may grow? For the uprising of the watery- vapour, raised, and its fall as rain when cooled, are all matters of necessity ; and makes the corn grow, it no more occurs morder to cause that growth, than a shower whici spoils the farmer’s crop at harvest-time occurs in order to do that inischief. m^ay not this, which is true of the rain, he true also of the parts of the body? ]lShy, for instance, may not the teeth grow to be such as they are merely of necessity, and the fitn^ of the front ones with their sharp edge for the comminution of the food, and of the hind ones with their flat surface for its mastication, be no more than an accidental coincidenc^ and not the cause that has determined their development ? And so with all the other parts, wherever there is an appearance of final causes? In short, \vheneyer accidcn caused all the parts of the body to be developed spontaneously in this suitaWe to be developed, that is, just as they would have been had design presided * formation, the resulting wholes survived ; but when this was not the case they pens , and still do perish, as Empedocles insists when speaking of certain monstrosiues. The explanation suggested in this passage will be found recurring ' similar hypothesis, for instance, is started in Diderot’s “ Letter on the Blmd for the use of those who can See,” where it is put in the mouth of the blind Sanderson. ^ela^ which the hypothesis stands to that of Darwin may thus be expressed insists on the survival of the fit, Darwin on the survival of the fittes . '' “a* ^ difference underlies the apparent similarity in the introduction of a single short sy scarcely needs to be pointed out. 3 Nat. Theol. i. 2.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b24864249_0014.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
