Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/200

he says, at page 39, is whether we can speak of individuals in plants at all, and this coincides with the other question, whether the plant is a mere product of the activity of matter, and so an unsubstantial appearance in the general circulation of nature, the offspring of blind agencies, or whether it possesses a peculiar and independent existence. The views of the physiologists, who reject the vital force and explain the phenomena of life by physical and chemical laws, have robbed life of its mysterious and most directly operative principle, and pulled down the strong wall of separation between organic and inorganic nature. 'Because physical forces appear to be everywhere confined to matter and show in their operation a strict subjection to law, men have ventured to regard the sum total of natural phenomena as the result of original matter working in conjunction with definite powers according to the laws of blind necessity, as a natural mechanism moving in endless circulation.' But he objects that the eternally necessary can only be conceived of as accomplished from all eternity, and thus this physical view would make all eventuality inconceivable. Further, the purpose of the movement of nature must remain an insoluble enigma in this scheme of blind necessity. 'The inadequateness of the so-called physical view of nature as compared with the teleological is therefore most felt in the domain of organic nature, where special purpose in the phenomena of life appears everywhere in greatest distinctness.' The last remark is indisputable so long as we maintain either the constancy of species or a merely internal law of development; the solution of the enigma was discovered a few years later in Darwin's hypothesis, that all adaptations of organisms are to be explained by the maintenance or suppression of varieties, according as they are well or ill provided with the means of sustaining the struggle for existence. No other refutation or rather explanation of teleology in the science of organic life has hitherto been attempted. It has been already pointed out that systematic botany, by establishing the fact of