188 THEORY OF THE CELLS.
and by this second view we are just as little compelled to
conclude that the fundamental powers of organization operate
according to laws of adaptation to a purpose, as we are in
inorganic nature.
The first view of the fundamental powers of organized bodies may be called the teleological, the second the physical view. An example will show at once, how important for physiology is the solution of the question as to which is to be followed. If, for instance, we define inflammation and suppuration to be the effort of the organism to remove a foreign body that has been introduced into it; or fever to be the effort of the or- ganism to eliminate diseased matter, and both as the result of the “autocracy of the organism,” then these explanations accord with the teleological view. For, since by these processes the obnoxious matter is actually removed, the process which effects them is one adapted to an end; and as the fundamental power of the organism operates in accordance with definite purposes, it may either set these processes in action primarily, or may also summon further powers of matter to its aid, always, however, remaining itself the “ primum movens.” On the other hand, according to the physical view, this is just as little an explanation as it would be to say, that the motion of the earth around the sun is an effort of the fundamental power of the planetary system to produce a change of seasons on the planets, or to say, that ebb and flood are the reaction of the organism of the earth upon the moon.
In physics, all those explanations which were suggested by a teleological view of nature, as “ horror vacui,” and the like, have long been discarded. But in animated nature, adaptation —individual adaptation—to a purpose is so prominently marked, that it is difficult to reject all teleological explanations. Meanwhile it must be remembered that those explanations, which explain at once all and nothing, can be but the last resources, when no other view can possibly be adopted; and there is no such necessity for admitting the teleological view in the case of organized bodies. The adaptation to a purpose which is characteristic of organized bodies differs only in degree from what is apparent also in the inorganic part of nature; and the explanation that organized bodies are developed, like all the phenomena of inorganic nature, by the operation of blind laws
