KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

10 Theory of the Organism
when he further specified that the entire heterogeneity of the developed
organic body must be completely and materially represented in
the germ. The manner of representation postulated a direct correlation
between part of the body and particle of the germ: 3
If one knew exactly in detail all the parts of the seed of a particular species
of animal, for instance Man, one could deduce from that alone for reasons
entirely mathematical and certain, the whole figure and conformation of each
of its parts, just as the other way around knowing some particulars of this
conformation one can deduce from this what the seed is.
Furthermore, it was generally implicitly presupposed that the
arrangement of the particles in the germ also reflected the arrangement
of the parts in the body, so that the germ contained a miniature
copy of the entire body, somewhat like a reflection in a convex
mirror. The fundamental question to be answered was thus: How
are the germs organized? How do the particles of matter in motion
come to produce such a complicated structure? How does the organism
manage to reproduce its kind and always to produce another
individual of the same species? The first mechanistic attempts at
explanation tended to be eclectic mixtures of traditional, usually
Galenic, theorems and corpuscular philosophical notions; but even
Aristotelian elements could be remodelled mechanistically. For
instance, Nathaniel Highmore (1651) explained generation not
through an Aristotelian cooperation of form and matter but rather
through the interaction of formal and material atoms. 4 A preliminary
synthesis was reached towards the end of the 17th century in
the theory of preformed or pre-existing germs.
The mechanistic theory of the organism was not an autonomous,
isolated or isolatable theorem; it was an integral part of a
comprehensive explanation of the material world. The organism
occupied a particular position within a system of nature that explained
not only the fundamental properties of the smallest (known)
parts of matter but also the shape of the largest (known) systems of
celestial bodies. From Descartes' Principia Philosophiae to Buffon's
Histoire naturelle and even to Lamarck's final synthesis, the great
deistic systems of modern science explained the organism within
the framework of an aggregate theory of nature. But the organism
nonetheless always received a special status within the system and
3 Descartes, La Description du corps humain, AT XI, 277 (emphasis PM); cf.
also Boyle "Forms and Qualities," Works III, 29ff.
4 Highmore, History of Generation, p. 27-8