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the antithesis disappears in the Monistic philosophy, which knows
neither matter without force nor force without matter. It is only
necessary to reflect for some time over the question from the strictly
scientific point of view to see that it is impossible to form a clear
idea of either hypothesis. As Goethe said, "Matter can never exist or
act without spirit, nor spirit without matter."
The human "spirit" or "soul" is merely a force or form of energy,
inseparably bound up with the material sub-stratum of the body. The
thinking force of the mind is just as much connected with the
structural elements of the brain as the motor force of the muscles
with their structural elements. Our mental powers are functions of the
brain as much as any other force is a function of a material body. We
know of no matter that is devoid of force, and no forces that are not
bound up with matter. When the forces enter into the phenomenon as
movements we call them living or active forces; when they are in a
state of rest or equilibrium we call them latent or potential. This
applies equally to inorganic and organic bodies. The magnet that
attracts iron filings, the powder that explodes, the steam that drives
the locomotive, are living inorganics; they act by living force as
much as the sensitive Mimosa does when it contracts its leaves at
touch, or the venerable Amphioxus that buries itself in the sand of
the sea, or man when he thinks. Only in the latter cases the
combinations of the different forces that appear as "movement" in the
phenomenon are much more intricate and difficult to analyse than in
the former.
Our study has led us to the conclusion that in the whole evolution of
man, in his embryology and in his phylogeny, there are no living
forces at work other than those of the rest of organic and inorganic
nature. All the forces that are operative in it could be reduced in
the ultimate analysis to growth, the fundamental evolutionary function
that brings about the forms of both the organic and the inorganic. But
growth itself depends on the attraction and repulsion of homogeneous
and heterogeneous particles. Seventy-five years ago Carl Ernst von
Baer summed up the general result of his classic studies of animal
development in the sentence: "The evolution of the individual is the
history of the growth of individuality in every respect." And if we go
deeper to the root of this law of growth, we find that in the long run
it can always be reduced to that attraction and repulsion of animated
atoms which Empedocles called the "love and hatred" of the elements.
Thus the evolution of man is directed by the same "eternal, iron laws"
as the development of any other body. These laws always lead us back
to the same simple principles, the elementary principles of physics
and chemistry. The various phenomena of nature only differ in the
degree of complexity in which the different forces work together. Each
single process of adaptation and heredity in the stem-history of our
ancestors is in itself a very complex physiological phenomenon. Far
more intricate are the processes of human embryology; in these are
condensed and comprised thousands of the phylogenetic processes.
In my General Morphology, which appeared in 1866, I made the first
attempt to apply the theory of evolution, as reformed by Darwin, to
the whole province of biology, and especially to provide with its
assistance a mechanical foundation for the science of organic forms.
The intimate relations that exist between all parts of organic
science, especially the direct causal nexus between the two sections
of evolution--ontogeny and phylogeny--were explained in that work for
the first time by transformism, and were interpreted philosophically
in the light of the theory of descent. The anthropological part of the
General Morphology (Book 7) contains the first attempt to determine
the series of man's ancestors (volume 2 page 428). However imperfect
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