The Struggle of Parts in the Organism

Abstract

I AM very glad to learn that Mr. Romanes fully accepts as “well-known and unquestionable” the definition of the term law of nature which I propounded as expressing its true scientific sense; but I would suggest to him, as to other writers who are accustomed to speak of such laws as “governing” phenomena¹, whether the use of such “metaphorical” language is not objectionable, as tending to keep up in the unscientific mind the nation of the “coercive” and “self-sufficient” agency of natural laws. I am glad also to be able to express my entire accordance with Mr. Romanes in regard to the inferiority of the teleological argument based on special instances of adaptation of means to ends, to that which is based on the general order which we designate by the term law. For I maintained this view even in that remote pre Darwinian age in which my scientific life commenced, urging to the best of my young ability, forty-three years ago², that the principles admirably laid down by Whewell in regard to physical inquiry, viz. that final causes should be excluded, because “we are not to assume that we know the objects of the Creator's design, and put the assumed purpose in the place of a physical cause,” and that “the notion of design and end is transferred by the researches of science from the region of facts to that of laws,” are no less applicable to physiology than to physics; although Whewell himself (in his “History of the Inductive Sciences”) had maintained the contrary. The full acceptance of the doctrine of evolution as our highest expression of the order of creation seems to me to lead to a much nobler conception of the Intelligent Cause of that order than any accumulation of such individual adaptations as might be made by the “mechanic-god” of Paley.